Network automation and orchestration is a great idea… but how do you verify that what your automation script wants to do won’t break the network? In Episode 78 of Software Gone Wild we discussed the intricacies of testing network automation solutions with Kristian Larsson (developer of Terastream orchestration softare) and David Barroso of the NAPALM and SDN Internet Router fame.

One of my readers sent me this question:

Other than using Excel (and of course an automation tool) any suggestions for a tool to create device config for some 200 customer VRFs from a standard template?

You need three things to get the job done:

Last week a large European financial institution had a bad hair day. My friend Christoph Jaggi asked for my opinion, and I decided not to focus on the specific problem (that’s what post-mortems are for) but to point out something that’s often forgotten: don’t believe your system won’t fail, be prepared to deal with the failure.

I keep getting questions along the lines of “should I go with VMware NSX or should I deploy Cisco ACI” every single week, and as you know it’s hard to answer anything but it depends without spending hours on the topic.

That’s exactly what we plan to do in Zurich next Tuesday (May 16th) in a DIGS workshop that will run in parallel with the Data Center & Cloud Day (part of the SIGS Technology Conference).

Not long after I published the let’s drop some configuration commands rant I got a very nice email from Nicolas Delecroix, Technical Marketing Engineer in Cisco INSBU, effectively saying “Would you have time for a short WebEx call to discuss the root cause of the problem and what we did to fix it?”

Of course I agreed and here’s what they told me:

An engineer watching my IPv6 Transition Mechanisms webinar sent me this question:

We would appreciate any insight you might have as to which transitional mechanisms the ISPs are actually deploying.

All of them ;)

One of my readers sent me this question (slightly rephrased):

Assume you have A,B and C connected in a triangle (with an alternate longer path to C). What happens if C loses its links to A and B? Won’t the traffic to C loop between A and B for a while?

As always, it depends.

The awesome Troopers crew published conference videos, including my Securing Network Automation presentation (more, including slide deck).

One of my readers was considering Dell/EMC hyperconverged solutions and sent me this question:

Just wondering if you have a chance to check out VxRail.

I read the data sheet and spec sheet, but have never seen anyone using it (any real-life experience highly welcome – please write a comment).

Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Git, GitLab… the list of tools you can supposedly use to automate your network is endless, and there’s a new kid on the block every few months.

In Episode 77 of Software Gone Wild we explored Salt, its internal architecture, and how you can use it with Mircea Ulinic, a happy Salt user/contributor working for Cloudflare, and Seth House, developer @ SaltStack, the company behind Salt.