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.

A few weeks ago we published an interesting discussion on network operating system details based on an excellent set of questions by James Miles.

Unfortunately we got so far into the weeds at that time that we answered only half of James' questions. In the second Q&A session Dinesh Dutt and myself addressed the rest of them including:

• How hard is it to virtualize network devices?
• What is the expected performance degradation?
• Does it make sense to use containers to do that?
• What are the operational implications of running virtual network devices?
• What will be the impact on hardware vendors and networking engineers?

And of course we couldn’t avoid the famous last question: “Should network engineers program network devices?”

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

The designers of Cumulus Linux CLI were always focused on simplifying network device configurations. One of the first features along these lines was BGP across unnumbered interfaces, then they introduced simplified EVPN configurations, and recently auto-MLAG and auto-BGP.

You can watch a short description of these features by Dinesh Dutt and Pete Lumbis in Simplify Network Configuration with Cumulus Linux and Smart Datacenter Defaults videos (part of Cumulus Linux section of Data Center Fabrics webinar).

James Miles got tons of really interesting questions while watching the Network Operating System Models webinar by Dinesh Dutt, and the only reasonable thing to do when he sent them over was to schedule a Q&A session with Dinesh to discuss them.

We got together last week and planned to spend an hour or two discussing the questions, but (not exactly unexpectedly) we got only halfway through the list in the time we had, so we’re continuing next week.

This is how far we’ve got:

If you’re working solely with IP-based networks, you’re probably quick to assume that hop-by-hop destination-only forwarding is the only packet forwarding paradigm that makes sense. Not true, even today’s networks use a variety of forwarding mechanisms, most of them called some variant of routing or switching.

What exactly is the difference between the two, and what is bridging? I’m answering these questions (and a few others like what’s the difference between data-, control- and management planes) in the Bridging, Routing and Switching Terminology video.

After covering the Cisco SD-WAN components and its architecture in the Cisco SD-WAN Foundations and Design Aspects webinar, David Penaloza focused on the routing capabilities it offers and its control plane characteristics, including types of routes and some scalability recommendations.

Earlier this year, Pete Lumbis returned as an ipSpace.net webinar guest speaker with a great presentation describing data center switching ASICs from the perspective of networking engineers. After a brief intro, he started with ASIC Basics… a topic which generated a 25-minute Q&A session.

In December 2019 I finally turned my focus on business challenges first presentation into a short webinar session (part of Business Aspects of Networking Technologies webinar) starting with defining the problem before searching for a solution including three simple questions:

• What BUSINESS problem are you trying to solve?
• Are there good-enough alternatives or should you really invest into new technology and/or equipment?
• Is the problem worth solving?

The last Fallacy of Distributed Computing I addressed in the introductory part of How Networks Really Work webinar was The Network Is Homogenous. No, it’s not and it never was… for more details watch this video.