Ivan Pepelnjak was a delegate at Networking Field Day in September 2017 and was impressed with the presentations from Kentik’s CEO and Co-founder, Avi Freedman. Ivan, his colleagues, and Avi Freedman discussed streaming telemetry on the podcast, Software Gone Wild. Check out this episode to hear what they had to say!
Cloud Networking Architectures
In this post from Ivan Pepelnjak, he breaks down one of the realities of running virtual machines on cloud infrastructure. These VMs still look for an Ethernet interface. For many enterprise-focused platforms, this means simply emulating a physical Ethernet cable. This allows admins to not have to relearn their networking stack. But the cloud providers implemented virtual networking that can scale beyond a few hundred hosts, using smart NICs. At Cloud Field Day, Pensando showed how they are trying to bring that kind of scale to the enterprise with their own smart NIC. Ivan looks at their solution and how it can fit into the enterprise world.
My Journey Into Cloud Networking
Nicola Arnoldi shares his journey into cloud networking in this blog post. For Nicola, this isn’t a hard break into a brave new networking world, rather an extension of all that has come before. This started during network disaggregation planning while working at a large telco, but really accelerated as Nicola started getting comfortable with automation. He sees the hardest part for a lot of network engineers on this journey is being able to trust a lot of the cloud networking abstractions, rather than worrying about all the underlying specifics. We’re glad that Nicola’s conversations with Ivan Pepelnjak at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe a few years ago was considered a significant milestone on his journey with cloud networking.
Worth Reading: Understanding Scale Computing HC3 Edge Fabric
Ivan Pepelnjak shares a great piece looking at Scale Computing HC3 Edge Fabric, something the company talked about during their recent Tech Field Day presentation. While Ivan doesn’t think its a once size fits all solution, he thinks it makes perfect sense in small environments.
How Do You Provision a 500-Switch Network in a Few Days?
One of the interesting aspects of a IT event the scale of Cisco Live is that it has its own unique set of IT challenges. During a behind the scenes tour during Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live US 2019, Ivan Pepelnjak got to ask how they created the network for the event in such a short amount of time. What he found was that provisioning a large campus network in a few days is easy and reliable as long as you do your homework and keep things as simple as possible.
Tech Field Day Extra @ CLEUR19 Recap
Cisco Live Europe is an event big enough that it’s tough to encapsulate in any one post. That’s why it’s great to have smaller, more focused looks, especially when it comes from Ivan Pepelnjak. He wrote up a posting looking at what he saw from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe. Cisco touched on automating Meraki deployments, new AWS-focus Cisco ACI features, HyperFlex updates, and more. Be sure to read Ivan’s thoughts on what he saw, and watch the presentation video for yourself.
Data Point: Why Automation Won’t Replace Humans
Ivan Pepelnjak thinks network engineers don’t need to worry about automation replacing them in the near future, given that a forward looking company like Tesla has failed with their complete automation efforts. Instead, he points that network engineers should train themselves to do higher value jobs for organizations, which seems to be a good hedge against automation. He points out some recent Networking Field Day videos on the topic as well.
Brief Recap: Tech Field Day at Cisco Live Europe 2018
At Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe, Ivan Pepelnjak saw a dizzying array of presentations from Cisco, seventeen total in just two days. In this post, he breaks down some of his initial takeaways. The most memorable sessions off the bat were the Tetration dive into how they collect flow statistics in CloudScale ASICs, and Fred Niehaus’ wireless presentation. There was a lot to take in, and Ivan does a good job covering the busy event.
Revisited: The Need for Stretched VLANs
In this post, Ivan Pepelnjak revisits an old saw inspired from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe: Stretched VLANs. Ivan lays out why he’s skeptical of the need for stretched VLANs at all.
Pluribus Networks… 2 Years Later
Pluribus Networks was a returning presenter for Ivan Pepelnjak, who first saw them at Networking Field Day in 2015. Overall this was the company’s fourth Networking Field Day presentation. Make sure to check out our full video coverage from their most recent appearance!
NFD16 First Impressions
Networking Field Day just wrapped up earlier this month, but Ivan Pepelnjak already has his initial impressions in order. He nominated Avi Freedman from Kentik as winner of the “Nerd Factor” category for the event, with a close runner up from Apstra. The formal verification for networks from Veriflow also merited an initial mention. We’re looking forward to reading more from Ivan on each.
PRTG Monitoring Software Now Available in Cloud Version
Ivan Pepelnjak says that one of the most interesting presentations during Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Berlin was from Paessler. Paessler is developing a little known monitoring software called PRTG which they will offer as a SaaS service running in Amazon cloud. Ivan completely agrees with this decision by Paessler and recommends their cloud service as an alternate network monitoring and management tool.
Programmable ASICs on Software Gone Wild
At Tech Field Day Extra with Cisco Live Europe, Ivan Pepelnjak sat down with Peter Jones, principal engineer at Cisco, for his Software Gone Wild podcast. In their wide-ranging discussion, they talk about why startups fail and NPUs vs ASICs. They then dig into a deeper discussion on the substantive differences and use cases for both. Overall it’s an interesting episode and well worth a listen.
Cisco and Apple Agree: QoS Marking Is an Application Problem
Cisco and Apple announced the first fruits of their partnership at Cisco Live Europe. Ivan Pepelnjak wrote up his thoughts on the announcements. Overall, he was delighted to find that the two companies are letting admins bring QoS to apps on Cisco networks. He runs through some of the potential problems in the solution, but overall finds it well thought out.
Networking Field Day 9 Wrap-up on Software Gone Wild
Networking Field Day 9 Wrap-up on Software Gone Wild
Cisco ACI – a Stretched Fabric That Actually Works
Cisco ACI – a Stretched Fabric That Actually Works
