I get a “how do I get started with network automation” question every other week, and when I wrote a lengthy reply to one about configuration templating of existing snowflake network on networktocode Slack channel I decided it’s time to turn my replies into a blog post.

Here’s the question I got from one of my readers:

Do you have any data available to show the benefits of jumbo frames in 40GE/100GE networks?

In case you’re wondering why he went down this path, here’s the underlying problem:

Johannes Weber published the solutions to his Wireshark challenges. How many did you solve?

I developed over a dozen different Ansible-based network automation solutions in the last two years for my network automation workshops and online course, and always published them on GitHub… but never built an index, or explained what they do, and why I decided to do things that way.

With the new my.ipSpace.net functionality I added for online courses I got the hooks I needed to make the first part happen:

One of my readers sent me a list of questions on asymmetrical traffic flows in IP networks, particularly in heavily meshed environments (where it’s really hard to ensure both directions use the same path) and in combination with stateful devices (firewalls in particular) in the forwarding path.

Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet (and the more I think about this problem, the more I feel it’s not worth solving).

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 ;)