One of the attendees of our Building Network Automation Solutions online course asked an interesting question in the course Slack team:

Has anyone wrote a playbook for putting a circuit into maintenance mode — i.e. adjusting metrics to drain traffic away from a circuit that is going to be taken down for maintenance?

As always, you have to figure out what you want to do before you can start to automating stuff.

After decades of riding the Moore’s law curve the networking bandwidth should be (almost) infinite and (almost) free, right? WRONG, as I explained in the Bandwidth Is (Not) Infinite and Free video (part of How Networks Really Work webinar).

There are still pockets of Internet desert where mobile- or residential users have to deal with traffic caps, and if you decide to move your applications into any public cloud you better check how much bandwidth those applications consume or you’ll be the next victim of the Great Bandwidth Swindle. For more details, watch the video.

After the “shocking” revelation that a network can never be totally reliable, I addressed another widespread lack of common sense: due to laws of physics, the client-server latency is never zero (and never even close to what a developer gets from the laptop’s loopback interface).

Unless you’re working for a cloud-only startup, you’ll always have to connect applications running in a public cloud with existing systems or databases running in a more traditional environment, or connect your users to public cloud workloads.

Public cloud providers love stable and robust solutions, and they took the same approach when implementing their legacy connectivity solutions: you could use routed Ethernet connections or IPsec VPN, and run BGP across them, turning the problem into a well-understood routing problem.

Listening to public cloud evangelists and marketing departments of vendors selling over-the-cloud networking solutions or multi-cloud orchestration systems, you could start to believe that migrating your workload to a public cloud would solve all your problems… and if you’re gullible enough to listen to them, you’ll get the results you deserve.

Unfortunately, nothing can change the fundamental laws of physics, networking, or application architectures:

A long while ago I got into an hilarious Tweetfest (note to self: don’t… not that I would ever listen) starting with:

Which feature and which Cisco router for layer2 extension over internet 100Mbps with 1500 Bytes MTU

The knee-jerk reaction was obvious: OMG, not again. The ugly ghost of BRouters (or is it RBridges or WAN Extenders?) has awoken. The best reply in this category was definitely:

I cannot fathom the conversation where this was a legitimate design option. May the odds forever be in your favor.

A dozen “this is a dumpster fire” tweets later the problem was rephrased as:

This is a common objection I get when trying to persuade network architects they don’t need stretched VLANs (and IP subnets) to implement data center disaster recovery:

Changing IP addresses when activating DR is hard. You’d have to weigh the manageability of stretching L2 and protecting it, with the added complexity of breaking the two sites into separate domains [and subnets]. We all have apps with hardcoded IP’s, outdated IPAM’s, Firewall rules that need updating, etc.

Let’s get one thing straight: when you’re doing disaster recovery there are no live subnets, IP addresses or anything else along those lines. The disaster has struck, and your data center infrastructure is gone.

One of the responses to my Disaster Recovery Faking blog post focused on failure domains:

What is the difference between supporting L2 stretched between two pods in your DC (which everyone does for seamless vMotion), and having a 30ms link between these two pods because they happen to be in different buildings?

I hope you agree that a single broadcast domain is a single failure domain. If not, let agree to disagree and move on - my life is too short to argue about obvious stuff.

Starting with my faking disaster recovery tests blog post Terry Slattery wrote a great article delving into the intricacies of DR testing, types of expected disasters, and resilience engineering. As always, a fantastic read from Terry.

Got an interesting set of questions from a networking engineer who got stuck with the infamous “let’s push the **** down the stack” challenge:

So I am a rather green network engineer trying to solve the typical layer two stretch problem.

I could start the usual “friends don’t let friends stretch layer-2” or “your business doesn’t really need that” windmill fight, but let’s focus on how the vendors are trying to sell him the “perfect” solution:

Last Thursday morning I found this gem in my Twitter feed (courtesy of Stefan de Kooter)

Greg Cusanza in #BRK3192 just announced #Azure Extended Network, for stretching Layer 2 subnets into Azure!

As I know a little bit about how networking works within Azure, and I’ve seen something very similar a few times in the past, I was able to figure out what’s really going on behind the scenes in a few seconds… and got reminded of an old Russian joke I found somewhere on Quora:

Christoph Jaggi sent me this observation during one of our SD-WAN discussions:

The centralized controller is another shortcoming of SD-WAN that hasn’t been really addressed yet. In a global WAN it can and does happen that a region might be cut off due to a cut cable or an attack. Without connection to the central SD-WAN controller the part that is cut off cannot even communicate within itself as there is no control plane…

A controller (or management/provisioning) system is obviously the central point of failure in any network, but we have to go beyond that and ask a simple question: “What happens when the controller cluster fails and/or when nodes lose connectivity to the controller?”

SD-WAN is the best thing that could have happened to networking according to some industry “thought leaders” and $vendor marketers… but it seems there might be a tiny little gap between their rosy picture and reality.

This is what I got from someone blessed with hands-on SD-WAN experience:

Approximately two years ago I tried to figure out whether aggressive marketing of deep buffer data center switches makes sense, recorded a few podcasts on the topic and organized a webinar with JR Rivers.

Not surprisingly, the question keeps popping up, so it seems it’s time for another series of TL&DR articles. Let’s start with the basics:

A while ago I had an interesting consulting engagement: a multinational organization wanted to migrate off global Carrier Ethernet VPN (with routers at the edges) to MPLS/VPN.

While that sounds like the right thing to do (after all, L3 must be better than L2, right?) in that particular case they wanted to combine the provider VPN with Internet-based IPsec VPN… and doing that in parallel with MPLS/VPN tends to become an interesting exercise in “how convoluted can I make my design before I give up and migrate to BGP”.