Have you ever wondered what the Kubernetes fuss is all about? Why would you ever want to use it? Stuart Charlton tried to answer that question in the introduction part of his fantastic Kubernetes Networking Deep Dive webinar.

In the second half of my chat with David Bombal we focused on automation and AI in networking. Even though we discussed many things, including the dangers of doing a repeatable job, and how to make yourself unique, David chose a nice click-bait headline Will AI Replace the Networking Engineers?. According to Betteridge’s law of headlines the answer is still NO, but it’s obvious AI will replace the low-level easy-to-automate jobs (as textile workers found out almost 200 years ago).

While pondering that statement, keep in mind that AI is more than just machine learning (the overhyped stuff). According to one loose definition, “Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions”

A few weeks ago I enjoyed a long-overdue chat with David Bombal. David published the first part of it under the click-bait headline Is Networking Dead (he renamed it Is There any Future for Networking Engineers in the meantime).

According to Betteridge’s law of headlines the answer to his original headline is NO (and the second headline violates that law – there you go 🤷‍♂️). If you’re still interested in the details, watch the interview.

After reviewing Cisco SD-WAN policies, it’s time to dig into the routing design. In this section, David Penaloza enumerated several possible topologies, types of transport, their advantages and drawbacks, considerations for tunnel count and regional presence, and what you should consider beforehand when designing the solution from the control plane’s perspective.

In the previous video in this series, I described how path discovery works in source routing and virtual circuit environments. I couldn’t squeeze the discussion of hop-by-hop forwarding into the same video (it would make the video way too long); you’ll find it in the next video in the same section.

I concluded the Focus on Business Challenges First presentation (part of Business Aspects of Networking Technologies webinar) with a few technology guidelines starting with:

• Be vendor-agnostic (always look around to see what others are doing);
• Try to understand how the technology you’re evaluating really works (it will help you spot the potential problems before they crash your network);
• Always select what’s best for your business, not for the sales quota of your friendly $vendor account manager.

For more guidelines, watch the video (available with Free ipSpace.net Subscription).

The second part of the Cisco SD-WAN webinar focused on design considerations and trade-offs in several scenarios. David Penaloza briefly reviewed the types of policies and their capabilities before discussing what to keep in mind when designing the solution.

Regardless of the technology used to get packets across the network, someone has to know how to get from sender to receiver(s), and as always you have multiple options:

• Almighty controller
• On-demand dynamic path discovery (example: probing)
• Participation in a routing protocol

For more details, watch Finding Paths Across the Network video.

Right after Cisco SD-WAN devices are onboarded, how are the control and data plane tasks started? In this section, David Penaloza covers how Cisco SD-WAN solution makes the most of its SDN nature: single point of policy application and centralized management platform. The types of policies, the plane on which they act, their application and the actions that can performed are the main focus in this part of the series.

After figuring out what business problem you’re trying to solve and what the users expect to get from you it’s time for the next crucial question: should you buy a shrink-wrapped product/solution or build your own? I addressed that question in the third part of Focus on Business Challenges First presentation.

Not surprisingly, the same dilemma applies to network automation solutions, and is often the source of endless time-wasting discussions that I really should have stopped engaging in, but sometimes duty calls ;)

After explaining why you should focus on defining the problem before searching for a magic technology that will solve it, I continued the Focus on Business Challenges First presentation with another set of seemingly simple questions:

• Who are your users/customers?
• What do they really need?
• Assuming you’re a service provider, what are you able to sell to your customers… and how are you different from your competitors?

After (hopefully) agreeing on what routing, bridging, and switching are, let’s focus on the first important topic in this area: how do we get a packet across the network? Yet again, there are three fundamentally different technologies:

• Source node knows the full path (source routing)
• Source node opened a path (virtual circuit) to the destination node and uses that path to send traffic
• The network performs hop-by-hop destination-address-based packet forwarding.

More details in the Getting Packets Across the Network video.

In the last part of his Cumulus Linux 4.0 Update Pete Lumbis talked about using NetQ to capture streaming telemetry and increase network observability, and the new model-driven configuration approach (including all the usual buzzwords like NETCONF, RPC, YAML, JSON, and OpenConfig) coming in 2020.

After describing Cisco SD-WAN architecture and routing capabilities, David Penaloza focused on the onboarding process and tasks performed by the Cisco SD-WAN solution (encryption, tunnel establishment, and device onboarding) in it’s so-called Orchestration Plane.

After a bit more than a year we ran another math-focused webinar last week: Rachel Traylor came back to talk about graph algorithms, focusing on tree-, path- and center problems.

In her lecture you’ll find:

• maximum branching algorithms (and I couldn’t stop wondering why we don’t use them for OSPF- or IS-IS flooding)
• path algorithms including the ones used in OSPF, IS-IS, or BGP, as well as algorithms that find K shortest paths
• center problems (for example: where do I put my streaming server or my BGP route reflector)

You’ll need Standard or Expert ipSpace.net subscription to watch the videos.