Apstra is no stranger to Networking Field Day, and it was great to see the company present at our most recent event in November. Tom Hollingsworth organized the event, and got a first hand look at the latest from this innovative company. What stood out for Tom this time was the key work Apstra is doing in network visualization. The advent of intent-based networking means that operators now have direct visibility into all devices in their control zones. Apstra not only innovates in their area of intent, but finding ways to visualize and break down this information into meaningful insights.
Apstra in a whiteboard
Marina Ferreira got to hear from Apstra at Networking Field Day late last year. But what impressed her the most wasn’t what she heard, but what she saw, specifically the excellent whiteboard session by Carly Stoughton. She outlined how Apstra went from their reference AOS architecture and have expanded it to provide intent-based networking, analytics and more. Check out the whiteboard and the full presentation video to catch up yourself.
Operating your Network with Intent-Based Networking
Apstra has done a series of blog posts following up on their recent Networking Field Day presentation, digging in a little deeper and providing some further context. In this post, Raghavendra Rachamadugu focuses on the importance of intent-based analytics that Apstra offers through AOS. While getting shiny charts of your network are nice, as the sheer amount of data grows, having a general analytic view will often obscure small but critical problems. Raghavendra gives a very precise definition of intent-based analytics, and explains how Apstra implements it.
Apstra’s NFD19 Experience: Part 2
Carly Stoughton reviews what she presented on for Apstra at Networking Field Day last month. This presentation started with a architectural overview of Apstra Operating System. She then went on to show how AOS Server provides pre-built building blocks, allowing you to build out a data center is AOS in under six minutes. All of this can be customized and configured to fit an organizations needs.
Apstra’s Intent-Based Networking
Pete Welcher continues his excellent look at the presentations from Networking Field Day last month, focusing on Apstra in this post. As Pete points out, the company was ahead of the curve, trumpeting Intent-Based Networking before it became a buzz word. He reviews their vendor-neutral approach, and how quickly the company demonstrated deploying and configuring AOS.
MPLS for the masses: The need for simplicity and standardization, at least in networking (The wheel has already been invented)
Nicola Modena found a kindred spirit when he heard Apstra present at Networking Field Day last month. Both share an appreciation for removing the superfluous and using the right tools and in the right way. Their Apstra Operating System was made to create and manage multivendor Clos IP Fabrics. As part of this, Apstra included a number of standard configuration models that fit within this ethos. After talking to Apstra, while their customers are at liberty to modify these configuration, the vast majority leave them in their essential state.
Network Automation and Monitoring with Apstra AOS
Jed Casey attended his first Networking Field Day event earlier this month. He got to hear from a variety of prominent networking companies, and in this post, he highlights what he saw from Apstra. Their AOS has been an early innovating in the intent-based networking space. During this presentation, they discussed bringing intent to automation and monitoring.
The Glue that brings the Intent together!
While Apstra is no stranger to Networking Field Day, Al Rasheed got to hear them for the first time as a delegate at the event earlier this month. He digs into their presentation, and how the company’s AOS isn’t just about using Intent for Day 1 operation, but how the company has innovated around bringing intent to automation and analytics.
Apstra’s NFD19 Experience: Part 1
Carly Stoughton has presented at a few Tech Field Day events, but Networking Field Day earlier this month was the first time the delegates got to see her present for Apstra. Using her whiteboard prowess, she was able to showcase Apstra AOS and how it enables organizations to embrace intent across automation and analytics.
Intent Based Networking , Is it the next big thing ?
This post by Orhan Ergun does a great job of providing background on Intent-Based Networking, why it’s getting so much buzz, and what some of the tradeoff can potentially be. This sets up his thoughts from Networking Field Day presentation from Apstra, a startup active in this space for a few years and who have started to innovate into the Intent-Based Analytics world as well. Orhan certainly found their presentation impressive, especially compared to other competitive solutions.
Why Have I Joined Apstra?
One of former Networking Field Day delegates, Jeff Tantsura, recently became the Head of Networking Strategy for Apstra. Jeff got a technical deep dive on the company at Networking Field Day last year, where he was immediatelty struck by the massively scalable and distributed design of their platform. In the end, the company had exciting technology and just the right people for Jeff to accept the role.
GraphDBs and Network Automation
In this post Nicola Arnoldi clears up some confusion. For him, when network automation is vital for any organization, it’s important to keep in context what things like Ansible are. This isn’t SDN or an orchestration framework. Instead, taking a cue from Ansible’s recent Networking Field Day presentation, this is just one tool to accomplish automation. These kind of tool are perfect for building a Graph DB of your network resources. This is what underlies Apstra’s intent-based networking, as demoed at Networking Field Day last year.
Apstra to Demonstrate Intent-Based Data Center Network Automation with VMware vSphere Integration at VMworld
James Green first got a look at Apstra back at Networking Field Day in 2016. The company offers an intent-based networking solution based on their Apstra Operating System. They’ll be presenting at VMworld next week, and James looks at their newly announced vSphere integration. This now allows for viewing the relationships between workloads, applications, tenants, and virtual networks,with specific interfaces, CPUs, and links, to all co-exist in the same graph representation.
Apstra at NFD16
Terry Slattery got a look at Apstra at Networking Field Day last year. He was impressed by the potential of their Apstra Operating System for intent-based networking. Now the company has announced support not just for more modern leaf-spine architectures, but for VXLAN overlays as well. He looks forward to the day when he can use AOS in a real network deployment.
AOS Bridging Two Worlds
At Networking Field Day last month, Apstra showed off version 2.0 of AOS, with a focus on how the OS can be used by developers. Previously Apstra had focused on operation applications of AOS, but with this new persona developers are able to create sophisticated AOS application products for operators to use on the platform. In this piece, Apstra’s Jeremy Schulman makes the case that this allows for businesses to stay agile and help operations and develops stay in step across network functions.
Apstra: Networking by Intent
Pete Welcher got to see more from Apstra at last month’s Networking Field Day. The company is pushing back on other companies jumping on the intent-based networking bandwagon, calling it “intent washing”. Pete remains impressed that the company clearly defines what they mean by intent, remain firmly hardware agnostic, and approaching their intent fabric as a single managed entity. This presentation focused on how developers can use Apstra’s intent-based features, which impressed Pete with the versatility for a number of different network roles.
Is the Data-Driven Network Next Step in Networking?
First we had software-defined network as the buzzword de rigueur. More recently intent-based networking has increasingly crept into marketing parlance. But Terry Slattery thinks he might have found a new network paradigm at work, one that has so far escaped buzzwordification. He postulates the data-driven network, which would use real time big data analytics on raw network traffic, and then use the results to optimize the network. Terry cites Cisco Tetration, Arista Networks, Apstra, and Veriflow Systems as example, all of which he saw at Networking Field Day last month.
Intent-Based Analytics: What is it?
After their presentation at Tech Field Day last month, Apstra’s Sasha Ratkovic shares a post defining intent-based analytics. Their solution is based around formally defining a single source of truth from which you can reason about the presence of change. This allows for analytics based on that criteria, rather than a constantly fluctuating current state.
NFD16 day two – Apstra
Apstra defines “intent” for their IDN solution as “the definition of the expected outcome”. After seeing their Networking Field Day presentation, Gian Paolo Boarina appreciated their ease of use, without sacrificing important features like robust configuration validation. Instead of merely backing up different device configuration throughout the network, Apstra has designed a “snapshot of intent” that generates configurations as needed to fit it. Its a powerful model, albeit one that calls for substantial trust.
