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.

Mitja Robas started his PowerShell for Networking Engineers presentation with a brief introduction to PowerShell and a few simple hands-on examples. Enjoy the videos ;)

Neil Anderson collected career advice from 111 IT industry gurus (just getting all of them to respond must have been monumental effort). Well worth reading ;)

One of my readers sent me a lengthy email describing his NSX-versus-ACI views. He started with [slightly reworded]:

What I want to do is to create customer templates to speed up deployment of application environments, as it takes too long at the moment to set up a new application environment.

That’s what we all want. How you get there is the interesting part.

The first half of 2017 is almost gone, so it’s time to check how far I got with the plans I made in January.

Delivered:

• Total refresh of Networking in Private and Public Clouds;
• Right-sizing the network;
• Open Networking (and single-SKU data center networks);
• Two additional network automation use cases;
• Ansible deep dive material (delivered)

A while ago I sent out an email to my SDN and network automation mailing list (join here) asking whether anyone uses Open Daylight in anything close to a production environment (because I haven’t ever seen one).

Among many responses saying “not here” I got a polite email from VP of Marketing working for a company that sells OpenDaylight-related services listing tons of customer deployments (no surprise there).