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After publishing the Manual Work Is a Bug blog post, I got this feedback from Michele Chubirka explaining why automating changes in your network also increases network security:

After explaining the basics of SD-WAN, Pradosh Mohapatra, the author of SD-WAN Overview webinar focused on SDWAN reference network design.

The “everyone should be a programmer” crowd did a really good job of scaring network engineers (congratulations, just what we need!). Here’s a typical question I’m getting:

Do I need to be good in scripting to attend your automation course.

TL&DR: Absolutely not.

Here’s a question I got from someone attending the Building Next-Generation Data Center online course:

Cisco NCS5000 is positioned as a building block for a data center MPLS fabric – a leaf-and-spine fabric with MPLS and EVPN control plane. This raised a question regarding MPLS vs VXLAN: why would one choose to build an MPLS-based fabric instead of a VXLAN-based one assuming hardware costs are similar?

There’s a fundamental difference between MPLS- and VXLAN-based transport: the amount of coupling between edge and core devices.

The last two months of 2018 will be jam-packed with webinars and on-site events:

• Dinesh Dutt will talk about network observability, how it’s different from monitoring and why it matters on November 8^th;
• I’ll continue the Amazon Web Services networking saga with the third live session on November 15^th. We already covered VPCs, interfaces and addresses, network security, route tables, and Internet connectivity. Now it’s time for VPNs, Direct Connect and VPC peering;
• The annual Data Center Fabric Architectures update will take place on November 22^nd. I’ll cover the changes in data center switching market, and new hardware launched by major vendors;
• The Network Connectivity and Graph Theory webinar was a huge hit, so we agreed with Rachel Traylor to do a whole series of similar webinars. On November 29^th she’ll cover Reliability Theory: Networking through a Systems Analysis Lens;

December will be a storage, EVPN and SDN month:

Yves Haemmerli, Consulting IT Architect at IBM Switzerland, sent me a thoughtful response to my we need product documentation rant. Hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

Yes, whatever the project is, the real added value of an IT/network architect consultant is definitely his/her ability to create models (sometimes meta-models) of what exists, and what the customer is really looking for.

I long while ago I stumbled upon an excellent resource describing why distributed systems are hard (what I happened to be claiming years ago when OpenFlow was at the peak of the hype cycle ;)… lost it and found it again a few weeks ago.

If you want to understand why networking is hard (apart from the obvious MacGyver reasons) read it several times; here are just a few points:

A few years ago I got cornered by an enthusiastic academic praising the beauties of his cryptography-based system that would (after replacing the whole Internet) solve all the supposed woes we’re facing with BGP today.

His ideas were technically sound, but probably won’t ever see widespread adoption – it doesn’t matter if you have great ideas if there’s not enough motivation to implementing them (The Myths of Innovation is a mandatory reading if you’re interested in these topics).

In early October I had a chat with Dinesh Dutt discussing the outline of the webinar he’ll do in November. A few days later Fastly published a blog post on almost exactly the same topic. Coincidence? Probably… but it does seem like observability is the next emerging buzzword, and Dinesh will try to put it into perspective answering these questions:

In recent years Linux networking started evolving at an amazing pace. You can hear about all the cool new stuff at netdev conference… or listen to Episode 94 of Software Gone Wild to get a CliffsNotes version.

Roopa Prabhu, Jamal Hadi Salim, and Tom Herbert joined Nick Buraglio and myself and we couldn’t help diverging into the beauties of tc, and the intricacies of low-latency forwarding before coming back on track and started discussing cool stuff like: