In the previous video in the Switching, Routing and Bridging section of How Networks Really Work webinar we compared transparent bridging with IP routing. Not surprisingly (given my well-known bias toward stable solutions) I recommended using IP routing as much as possible, but there are still people out there pushing large-scale transparent bridging solutions.

In today’s video we’ll look at some of the supposed use cases and stable solutions you could use instead of stretching a virtual thick yellow cable halfway across a continent.

After covering the basics of transparent Ethernet bridging and IP routing, we’re finally ready to compare the two. Enjoy the ride ;)

In June 2020, a friend of mine asked me to do a short presentation on lessons learned during my 35 years of being a networking engineer. It went reasonably well, so I decided to turn it into a webinar, starting with regardless of what the disruptive marketers tell you, technology still matters.

In the final video in his Cisco SD-WAN webinar, David Penaloza discusses site ID assignments and policy processing order.

A carefully planned site scheme and ordered list of policy entries will save you complications and headaches when deploying the SD-WAN solution.

After answering the “why should I care about Kubernetes?” question, Stuart Charlton explained the Kubernetes principles you should keep in mind if you want to have a chance of understanding what’s going on.

Whenever someone starts mansplaining that we need no networking when we move the workloads into a public cloud, please walk away – he has just proved how clueless he is.

He might be a tiny bit correct when talking about software-as-a-service (after all, it’s just someone else’s web site), but when it comes to complex infrastructure virtual networks, there’s plenty of networking involved, from packet filters and subnets to NAT, load balancers, firewalls, BGP and IPsec.

For more details, watch the We Still Need Networking in Public Clouds video (part of Introduction to Cloud Computing webinar).

In the Site Design part of Cisco SD-WAN webinar, David Penaloza described capabilities you can use when designing complex sites, like extending SD-WAN transport between SD-WAN edge nodes, or implementing high availability between them. He also explained how to track an Internet-facing interface and a service beyond its next hop.

A few weeks ago we covered transparent bridging fundamentals, now it’s time to recap IP routing fundamentals… and then we’ll be ready to compare the two.

Years ago I wrote a series of blog posts comparing transparent bridging and IP routing, and creating How Networks Really Work materials seemed like a perfect opportunity to make that information more structured, starting with Transparent Bridging Fundamentals.

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).