The inevitable summer decline of visitors has started, so I'm switching (like every summer) to a lower publishing frequency. Given my current focus (here and here) expect one network automation post and one other in-depth post every week… and maybe an occasional this-is-worth-reading link.

Working in the summer office ;)

Take some time off, enjoy the vacations, and I hope to meet you in the September online course ;)

Monitoring SDN Networks is the featured webinar of June 2017, and in the featured video Terry Slattery (CCIE#1026) talks about network analysis of SDN.

If you’re a trial subscriber, log into my.ipspace.net, select the webinar from the first page, and watch the video marked with star… and if you’d like to try the ipSpace.net subscription register here.

Trial subscribers can also use this month's featured webinar discount to get a 25% discount (and get closer to the full subscription).

Another part of my data center infrastructure optimization presentation is transcribed, edited and published: use distributed file system (at least for VM disk images).

Today I can tell you who the first speakers in the autumn 2017 network automation online course will be.

• Patrick Ogenstad (author of numerous open-source network automation modules and libraries) will talk about his journey to network automation, and lessons learned on the way.
• David Barroso will talk about his newest project: support of OpenConfig in NAPALM and Ansible (also discussed on a recent podcast).

Sounds promising? Why don’t you register before we run out of early-bird tickets?

If you'd come to me as a networking engineer and say “there's one new thing I want to learn that's outside of my $dayjob” I'd probably say “invest some serious time into learning Git (beyond memorizing the quick recipes) if you haven’t done that already”

Full disclosure: not so long ago I tried to avoid Git as much as possible… and then it suddenly clicked ;)

Imagine a service provider that allows you to provision 100GE point-to-point circuit between any two of their POPs through a web site and delivers in seconds (assuming you’ve already solved the physical connectivity problem). That’s the whole idea of SDN, right? Only not so many providers got there yet.

Long story short: I’m launching Ansible for Networking Engineers self-paced course today. It’s already online and you can start whenever you wish.

Now for the details…

Isn’t there already an Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar? Yes.

So what’s the difference? Glad you asked ;)

During Shawn Zandi’s presentation describing large-scale leaf-and-spine fabrics I got into an interesting conversation with an attendee that claimed it might be simpler to replace parts of a large fabric with large chassis switches (largest boxes offered by multiple vendors support up to 576 40GE or even 100GE ports).

As always, you have to decide between implicit and explicit complexity.

Last week I published self-study exercises for the YAML and Jinja2 modules in the Ansible for Networking Engineers webinars, and a long list of review questions for the Using Ansible and Ansible Deeper Dive sections.

I also reformatted the webinar materials page. Hope you’ll find the new format easier to read than the old one (it’s hard to squeeze over 70 videos and links on a single page ;).

Oh, and you do know you get Ansible webinar (and over 50 other webinars) with ipSpace.net subscription, right?

Michael Klose left an interesting remark on my Regional Internet Exits in Large DMVPN Deployment blog post saying…

Would BGP communities work? Each regional Internet Exit announce Default Route with a Region Community and all spokes only import default route for their specific region community.

That approach would definitely work. However, you have to decide where to move the complexity.