You’ve probably heard cloudy evangelists telling CIOs how they won’t need the infrastructure engineers once they move their workloads into a public cloud. As always, whatever sounds too good to be true usually is. Compute resources in public clouds still need to be managed, someone still needs to measure application performance, and backups won’t happen by themselves.

Even more important (for networking engineers), network requirements don’t change just because you decided to use someone else’s computers:

I stumbled upon a great MIT Technology Review article (warning: regwall ahead) with a checklist you SHOULD use whenever considering a machine-learning-based product.

While the article focuses on machine learning at least some of the steps in that list apply to any new product that claims to use a brand new technology in a particular problem domain like overlay virtual networking with blockchain:

Starting with my faking disaster recovery tests blog post Terry Slattery wrote a great article delving into the intricacies of DR testing, types of expected disasters, and resilience engineering. As always, a fantastic read from Terry.

No, we were not talking about IP fabrics in general - IP Fabric is a network management software (oops, network assurance platform) Gian Paolo discovered a while ago and thoroughly tested in the meantime.

He was kind enough to share what he found in Episode 107 of Software Gone Wild, and as Chris Young succinctly summarized: “it’s really sad what we still get excited about something 30 years after it was first promised”… but maybe this time it really works ;)

The registration is still open for the Using VXLAN to Build Active-Active Data Centers workshop on December 3rd, but if you can’t make it to Zurich you might enjoy these live sessions we’ll run in December 2019:

• In the last session of autumn 2019 network automation course (December 5th) we’ll have Jeremy Schulman talking about ChatOps and Slack integration;
• On December 10th Matthias Luft will continue the Cloud Security series with a session focused on identity and access management (IAM);
• Remember the Business Aspects of Networking Technologies idea I started in April? Finally I found time for the second session (on December 12th), this time focused on addressing the business challenges instead of getting excited about technology;
• We’ll conclude the Autumn 2019 webinar season with another session in the EVPN Deep Dive saga on December 17th. This time we’ll have Krzysztof Szarkowicz, the author of MPLS in the SDN Era talk about MPLS-based EVPN.

All webinars I mentioned above are accessible with Standard ipSpace.net Subscription, and you’ll need Expert Subscription to enjoy the automation course contents.

Someone sent me this observation after reading my You Cannot Have Public Cloud without Networking blog post:

As much as I sympathize with your view, scales matter. And if you make ATMs that deal with all the massive client population, the number of bank tellers needed will go down. A lot.

Based on what I read a while ago a really interesting thing happened in financial industry: while the number of tellers went down, number of front-end bank employees did not go down nearly as dramatically, they just turned into “consultants”.

I got an interesting set of questions from a networking engineer who got stuck with the infamous “let’s push the **** down the stack” challenge:

So, I am a rather green network engineer trying to solve the typical layer two stretch problem.

I could start the usual “friends don’t let friends stretch layer-2” or “your business doesn’t need that” windmill fight, but let’s focus on how the vendors are trying to sell him the “perfect” solution:

Steve Bellovin wrote a great series of articles describing the early history of Usenet. The most interesting part in the “security and authentication” part was probably this gem:

That left us with no good choices. The infrastructure for a cryptographic solution was lacking. The uux command rendered illusory any attempts at security via the Usenet programs themselves. We chose to do nothing. That is, we did not implement fake security that would give people the illusion of protection but not the reality.

A lot of other early implementers chose the same route, resulting in SMTP, BGP… which wouldn’t be a problem if someone kept track of that and implemented security a few years later. Unfortunately we considered those problems solved and moved on to chase other squirrels. We’re still paying the interest on that technical debt.

Another great advice from Charity Majors: does it make sense to go back to being an engineer after being a manager for a few years?

Personal note: finding a great replacement for my CTO role was probably the best professional decision I ever made ;)

Original TCP/IP and OSI network stacks had relatively clean layered architecture (forgetting the battle scars for the moment) and relied on end-to-end principle to keep the network core simple.

As always, no good deed goes unpunished - “creative” individuals trying to force-fit their misdesigned star-shaped pegs into round holes, and networking vendors looking for competitive advantage quickly destroyed the idea with tons of middlebox devices, ranging from firewalls and load balancers to NAT, WAN optimization, and DPI monstrosities.

We are proud to announce a great lineup of guest speakers for the first Networking in Public Cloud Deployments course that will run in Spring 2020:

• Joep Piscaer will dive into what changes public clouds bring and what these changes mean for you, as well as what developers and other consumers of cloud resources expect from you in the new public cloud, DevOps and Infrastructure-as-Code world.
  
• Ned Bellavance will review the principles of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and how they apply to public cloud solutions. Then he will take a look at the landscape of IaC tools that exist and examine their pros and cons.
  
• Howard Marks will review the types of storage available across public clouds, how they differ between cloud providers and the applications and pitfalls associated with each of them.
  
• Connecting on-premises data centers or office locations to a public cloud has some unique challenges. Ed Horley will help you create a framework and a checklist to make sure you have the required redundancy, throughput, routing, and security all baked in from day one.
  
• Matthias Luft will cover the aspects of securing your public cloud deployments.
  
• Justin Warren will explain how to make good tradeoffs between resilient hardware and resilient software.

Sounds interesting? The first Networking in Public Cloud Deployments course will start on February 11th, 2020, but the minute you register you'll be able to start studying the materials (over 100 hours of content). There’s just one thing you have to do: click the Register button.

Here’s another “let’s use network automation tools to create reports we couldn’t get in the past” (like IP multicast trees) solution coming from an attendee in our network automation course: Paddy Kelly created L3VPN graphs detailing PE-to-CE connectivity using Cisco’s pyATS to parse the Cisco IOS printouts.

You’ll find dozens of other interesting solutions on our Sample Network Automation Solutions page - all of them were created by networking engineers who knew almost nothing about network automation or open-source automation tools when they started our automation course.

Remember the “BGP as High Availability Protocol” article Nicola Modena wrote a few months ago? He finally found time to extend it with BGP design considerations and a description of a seamless-and-safe firewall software upgrade procedure.

Every now and then a smart person decides to walk away from their competence zone, and start spreading pointless clickbait opinions like BGP is a hot mess.

Like any other technology, BGP is just a tool with its advantages and limitations. And like any other tool, BGP can be used sloppily… and that’s what’s causing the various problems and shenanigans everyone is talking about.

Just in case you might be interested in facts instead of easy-to-digest fiction:

I’ve seen successful public (infrastructure) cloud deployments… but also spectacular failures. The difference between the two usually comes down to whether the team deploying into a public cloud environment realizes they’re dealing with an unfamiliar environment and acts accordingly.

Please note that I’m not talking about organizations migrating their email to Office 365. While that counts as public cloud deployment when an industry analyst tries to paint a rosy picture of public cloud acceptance, I’m more interested in organizations using compute, storage, security and networking public cloud infrastructure.