Software Gone Wild by ipSpace.net

A while ago we did a podcast with Luke Gorrie in which he explained why he’d love to have simple, dumb, and easy-to-work-with Ethernet NICs. What about the other side of the coin – smart NICs with their own CPU, RAM and operating system? Do they make sense, when and why would you use them, and how would you integrate them with Linux kernel? We discussed these challenges with Or Gerlitz (Mellanox),...

In previous Software Gone Wild episodes we covered Snabb Switch and numerous applications running on it, from L2VPN to 4over6 gateway and integration with Juniper vMX code . In Episode 98 we focused on another interesting application developed by Max Rottenkolber : high-speed VPN gateway using IPsec on top of Snabb Switch ( details ). Enjoy! Listen to the podcast

In summer 2018 Juniper started talking about another forward-looking concept: Network Reliability Engineering. We wanted to find out whether that’s another unicorn driving DeLorean with flux capacitors or something more tangible, so we invited Matt Oswalt, the author of Network Reliability Engineer’s Manifesto to talk about it in Episode 97 of Software Gone Wild . Read more …

We love to claim that we’re engineers and yet sometimes we have no clue how technology we use really works and what its limitations are… quite often because understanding those limitations would involve diving pretty deep into math ( graphs , queuing and system reliability quickly come to mind). Read more …

After a series of forward-looking podcast episodes we returned to real life and talked with Carl Buchmann about his network automation journey, from managing upgrades with Excel and using Excel as the configuration consistency tool to network-infrastructure-as-code concepts he described in a guest blog post in February 2018 Read more …

In recent years Linux networking started evolving at an amazing pace. You can hear about all the cool new stuff at netdev conference … or listen to Episode 94 of Software Gone Wild to get a CliffsNotes version. Roopa Prabhu , Jamal Hadi Salim , and Tom Herbert joined Nick Buraglio and myself and we couldn’t help diverging into the beauties of tc , and the intricacies of low-latency forwarding befo...

Hardware vendors are always making their silicon more complex and feature-rich. Is that a great idea or a disaster waiting to happen? We asked Luke Gorrie , the lead developer of Snabb Switch (an open-source user-land virtual switch written in Lua) about his opinions on the topic. TL&DL version : Give me a dumb NIC, software can do everything else. If you want to know more, listen to Episode 9...

In recent Software Gone Wild episodes we explored emerging routing protocols trying to address the specific needs of highly-meshed data center fabrics – RIFT and OpenFabric . In Episode 92 with Dinesh Dutt we decided to revisit the basics trying to answer a seemingly simple question: do we really need new routing protocols? Read more …

In 2014, we did a series of podcasts on Snabb Switch ( Snabb Switch and OpenStack , Deep Dive ), a software-only switch delivering 10-20 Gbps of forwarded bandwidth per x86 core . In the meantime, Snabb community slowly expanded, optimized the switching code, built a number of solutions on top of the packet forwarding core, and even forked a just-in-time Lua compiler to get better performance. To...

David Barroso was sick-and-tired of using ZX Spectrum of Network Automation and decided to create an alternative with similar functionality but a proper programming language instead of YAML dictionaries masquerading as one. The result: Nornir , an interesting network automation tool formerly known as Brigade we discussed in Episode 90 of Software Gone Wild . Read more …

Continuing the series of data center routing protocol podcasts , we sat down with Russ White (of the CCDE fame), author of another proposal: OpenFabric . As always, we started with the “ what’s wrong with what we have right now, like using BGP as a better IGP ” question, resulting in “ BGP is becoming the trash can of the Internet ”. Read more …

Years ago Petr Lapukhov decided that it’s a waste of time to try to make OSPF or IS-IS work in large-scale data center leaf-and-spine fabrics and figured out how to use BGP as a better IGP . In the meantime, old-time routing gurus started designing routing protocols targeting a specific environment: highly meshed leaf-and-spine fabrics. First in the list: Routing in Fat Trees (RIFT). Read mo...

Continuing the Linux networking discussion we had in Episode 86 , we focused on Linux interfaces in Episode 87 of Software Gone Wild with Roopa Prabhu and David Ahern. We started with simple questions like “ what is an interface ” and “ how do they get such weird names in some Linux distributions ” which quickly turned into a complex discussion about kernel objects and udev , and details of implem...

Linux operating system is used as the foundation for numerous network operating systems including Arista EOS and Cumulus Linux. It provides most networking constructs we grew familiar with including interfaces, VLANs, routing tables, VRFs and contexts, but they behave slightly differently from what we’re used to. In Software Gone Wild Episode 86 Roopa Prabhu and David Ahern explained the fun...

A long while ago Marcel Wiget sent me an interesting email along the lines “ I think you should do a Software Gone Wild podcast with Phil Shafer , the granddaddy of NETCONF ” Not surprisingly, as we started discovering the history behind NETCONF we quickly figured out that all the API and automation hype being touted these days is nothing new – some engineers have been doing that stuff for almost...

During Cisco Live Berlin 2017 Peter Jones (chair of several IEEE task forces) and myself went on a journey through 40 years of Ethernet history (and Token Bus and a few other choice technologies). The sound quality is what you could expect from something recorded on a show floor with pigeons flying around, but I hope you’ll still enjoy our chat. Listen to the podcast

In June 2017, we concluded the  Building Next Generation Data Center  online course with a roundtable discussion with Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President, Networking, and Simon Richard, Research Director, Data Center Networking @ Gartner. In the second half of our discussion (first half is here ) we focused on these topics: Read more …

A while ago I got a kind email from Kireeti Kompella, CTO @ Juniper Networks, saying “ A colleague sent me an email of yours regarding SDN, the trough of disillusionment, and the rise of automation. Here's a more dramatic view: the Self-Driving Network -- one whose operation is totally automated. ” Even though Software Gone Wild podcast focuses on practical ideas that you could deploy relatively s...

In June 2017, we concluded the Building Next Generation Data Center online course with a roundtable discussion with Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President, Networking, and Simon Richard, Research Director, Data Center Networking @ Gartner. During the first 45 minutes, we covered a lot of topics including : Read more …

Imagine a service provider that allows you to provision 100GE point-to-point circuit between any two of their POPs through a web site and delivers in seconds (assuming you’ve already solved the physical connectivity problem). That’s the whole idea of SDN, right? Only not so many providers got there yet. Read more …

OpenConfig sounds like a great idea, but unfortunately only a few vendors support it , and it doesn’t run on all their platforms, and you need the latest-and-greatest software release. Not exactly a set of conditions that would encourage widespread adoption. Things might change with the OpenConfig data models supported in NAPALM. Imagine you could parse router configurations or show printouts into...

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. Read...

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 be...

During Cisco Live Europe 2017 (where I got thanks to the Tech Field Day crew kindly inviting me ) I had a nice chat with Peter Jones, principal engineer @ Cisco Systems. We started with a totally tangential discussion on why startups fail, and quickly got back to flexible hardware and why one would want to have it in a switch. Read more …

During Cisco Live Europe (huge thanks to Tech Field Day crew for bringing me there ) I had a chat with Jeff McLaughlin about NETCONF support on Cisco IOS XE, in particular on the campus switches. We started with the obvious question “ why would someone want to have NETCONF on a campus switch ”, continued with “ why would you use NETCONF and not REST API ”, and diverted into “ who loves regular exp...