Years ago, I compared EVPN to SIP – it has a gazillion options, and every vendor implements a different subset of them, making interoperability a nightmare.

According to Andrew Alston, SRv6 is no better (while being a security nightmare). No surprise there.

I tried to wrap up my Lessons Learned presentation on a positive note: what are some of the things you can do to avoid all the traps and pitfalls I encountered in the almost four decades of working in networking industry:

• Get invited to architecture and design meetings when a new application project starts.
• Always try to figure out what the underlying actual business needs are.
• Just because you can doesn’t mean that you should.
• Keep it as simple as possible, but no simpler.
• Work with your peers and explain how networking works and why you face certain limitations.
• Humans are not perfect – automate as much as it makes sense, but no more.

Remington Loose sent me an interesting email describing his views on the right approach to network automation after reading my Network Reliability Engineering Should Be More than Software or Automation rant – he’s advocating standardizing network services and cleaning up your network before trying to deploy full-scale automation.

I think you are 100% right to start with a thorough cleanup before automation. Garbage in, garbage out. It is also the case that all that inconsistency and differentiation makes for complexity in automation (as well as general operations) that makes it harder to gain traction.

Every time I’m writing netsim-tools release notes I’m amazed at the number of features we managed to put together in just a few weeks.

Here are the goodies from netsim-tools releases 1.1.1 and 1.1.2:

New networking myths are continuously popping up. Here’s a BGP one I encountered a few days ago:

You don’t need IBGP sessions between BGP route reflectors

In general, that’s clearly wrong, as illustrated by this setup:

Last week I published a link to Pete Crocker’s RSVP-TE lab, but there’s more: he created another lab using the same topology that uses SR-MPLS with IS-IS to get the job done.

Jeroen Van Bemmel did something similar for SR Linux: his lab topology has fewer devices (plus SR Linux runs in containers), so it’s easily deployable on machines without humongous amount of memory.

Tom Hollingsworth published a more eloquent version of what I’ve been saying for ages:

• Complexity belongs to the end nodes;
• Network should provide end-to-end packet transport, not a fix for every stupidity someone managed to push down the stack;
• There’s nothing wrong with being a well-performing utility instead of pretending your stuff is working on unicorn farts and fairy dust.

Obviously it’s totally against the vested interest of any networking vendor out there to admit it.

Christoph Jaggi, the author of Ethernet Encryption webinar and ethernet encryptor market overviews launched a new site in which he collected tons material he created in the past – the network security and news and articles sections are definitely worth exploring.

Yesterday I mentioned the giant glob of complexity called Kubernetes (see also more nuanced take on the topic). If you want to slowly unravel it, Kubernetes Architecture video from the excellent Kubernetes Networking Deep Dive webinar by Stuart Charlton is a pretty good starting point.

When I finally¹ managed to get SR Linux running with netlab, I wanted to test how it interacts with Cumulus VX and FRR in an OSPF+BGP lab… and failed. Jeroen Van Bemmel quickly identified the culprit: MTU. Yeah, it’s always the MTU (or DNS, or BGP).

I never experienced a similar problem, so of course I had to identify the root cause: