Category: cloud

One of my friends reviewing the material of my AWS Networking webinar sent me this remark:

I'm always interested in hearing more about how AWS network works under the hood – it’s difficult to gain that knowledge.

As always, it’s almost impossible to find out the behind-the-scenes details, and whatever Amazon is telling you at their re:Invent conference should be taken with a truckload of salt… but it’s relatively easy to figure out a lot of things just by observing them and performing controlled experiments.

As anyone starting their journey into AWS quickly discovers, cloud is different (or as I wrote in the description of my AWS workshop you feel like Alice in Wonderland). One of the gotchas: when you link multiple routing domains (Virtual Private Clouds – the other VPC) you have to create static routing table entries on both ends. Even worse, there’s no transit VPC – you have to build a full mesh of relationships.

The correct solution to this challenge is automation:

Tom Hollingsworth published a great blog post summarizing Cloud Field Day presentation by Ben Sigelman.

TL&DR: You’re not Google, you don’t have their problems, and so you’re probably not a good match for their tools.

While this shouldn’t come as a surprise to regular readers of my blog (here’s what I wrote on the topic in 2016), it’s refreshing to see it spelled out so eloquently (and by an ex-Googler).

After figuring out how packet forwarding really works within AWS VPC (here’s an overview, the slide deck is already available to ipSpace.net subscribers) the next obvious question should be: “and how do I integrate a network services device like a next-generation firewall I have to use because $securityPolicy into that environment?”

Please don’t get me started on whether that makes sense, that’s a different discussion.

Christer Swartz, an old-time CCIE and occasional guest on Software Gone Wild podcast will show you how to do it with a Palo Alto firewall during my Amazon Web Services Networking Deep Dive workshop on June 13^th in Zurich, Switzerland (register here).

Traditional networking engineers, or virtualization engineers familiar with vSphere or VMware NSX, often feel like Alice in Wonderland when entering the world of Amazon Web Services. Everything looks and sounds familiar, and yet it all feels a bit different

I decided to create a half-day workshop (first delivery: June 13^th in Zurich, Switzerland) to make it easier to grasp the fundamentals of AWS networking, and will publish high-level summaries as a series of blog posts. Let’s start with an overview of what’s different:

One of the beauties of VMware NSX is that it’s fully API-based – you can automate any aspect of it by writing a script (or using any of the network automation tools) that executes a series of well-defined (and well-documented) API calls.

To make that task even easier, VMware released PowerNSX, an open-source library of PowerShell commandlets that abstract the internal details of NSX API and give you an easy-to-use interface (assuming you use PowerShell as your automation tool).

I don’t think I’ve ever been at a Tech Field Day event that’s been as intense as what we went through in the last few days at Cisco Live Europe – at least 17 different presentations in two days. It’s still all a blur and will take a long while to sort out.

First impressions:

I published the last part of my Optimize Data Center Infrastructure series: build an optimized data center fabric.

To learn more about data center fabric designs, check the new online course or enroll into the Spring 2018 session of Building Next-Generation Data Center course.

Everyone knows that Service Providers and Enterprise networks diverged decades ago. More precisely, organizations that offer network connectivity as their core business usually (but not always) behave differently from organizations that use networking to support their core business.

Obviously, there are grey areas: from people claiming to be service providers who can’t get their act together, to departments (or whole organizations) who run enterprise networks that look a lot like traditional service provider networks because they’re effectively an internal service provider.

VMware started talking about VMware Cloud on AWS a while ago, and my first response was “yeah, it’s just vCloud Air but they wanted to get rid of CapEx, so it’s running on someone else’s servers”

Last week Frank Denneman published a technical overview of the solution and I was mostly correct.

One of the more interesting presentations we had during Tech Field Day Extra @ Cisco Live Berlin was coming from Paessler, a company developing PRTG, a little-known network monitoring software.

More about PRTG in TFD videos and here, here, here and here.

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.

Here’s an interesting blog post (particularly as it’s coming from a well-known cloud evangelist): at the infrastructure level stability matters more than agility or speed-of-deployment. Welcome to real world ;)

Remember the All You Need Are Two Switches saga? Several readers told me they’d like to have in text (article) format, so I found a transcription service, and started editing what they produced and publishing it. The first two installments are already online.

On a related topic: we’ll discuss the viability of this approach in April DIGS event in Zurich, Switzerland.

It’s uncommon to find an organization that succeeds in building a private OpenStack-based cloud. It’s extremely rare to find one that documented and published the whole process like Paddy Power Betfair did with their OpenStack Reference Architecture whitepaper.

I was delighted to see they decided to do a lot of things I was preaching for ages in blog posts, webinars, and lately in my Next Generation Data Center online course.

Highlights include: