Software Gone Wild by ipSpace.net

How many times have you received exact specifications of the traffic the e-commerce platform you have to deploy will generate? How do you buy a load balancer (application delivery controller in marketese) to support that (somewhat unknown) amount of traffic? In most cases, you buy a box that’s several times too big for the traffic the site is receiving most of the time, and still crashes under pea...

Want to know even more about Tail-F NCS after listening to Episode 22 of Software Gone Wild ? Boštjan Šuštar and Marko Tišler from NIL Data Communications continue their deep dive into the secrets of NCS in Software Gone Wild Episode 23 . Enjoy the show

Tail-F NCS implements one of the most realistic approaches to service abstraction (the cornerstone of SDN – at least in my humble opinion) – an orchestration system that automates service provisioning on existing infrastructure. Is the product really as good as everyone claims? How hard is it to use? How steep is the learning curve? Boštjan Šuštar and Marko Tišler from NIL Data Communications have...

When we started planning a VMware NSX-focused podcast episode with Dmitri Kalintsev , I asked my readers what topics they’d like to see covered. Two comments that we really liked were “ how do I get started with VMware NSX ? ” and “ how do I troubleshoot this stuff? ” Read more …

Imagine you need a data center WAN edge router with multiple 10GE uplinks. You’d probably go for an ASR or a MX-series router, right? How about using a 2 Tbps ToR switch and an SDN solution to make it work with full Internet routing table? If you happen to have iTunes on your computer, please spend 10 seconds rating the podcast before you start listening to it. Thank you! Read more …

One of the interesting challenges in the Software-Defined Data Center world is the integration of network and security services with the compute infrastructure and network virtualization. Palo Alto claims to have tightly integrated their firewalls with VMware NSX and numerous cloud orchestration platforms - it was time to figure out how that’s done, so we decided to go on a field trip into the sca...

Highly customizable high-speed virtual switch written in Lua sounds great, but is it really that easy to use? Simon Leinen was kind enough to get me in touch with Alex Gall , his colleague at Switch, who's working on an interesting project: implementing L2VPN over IPv6 with Snabb Switch. Read more …

It was a dark stormy autumn night and three networking engineers had nothing better to do than ponder the heavy topics of transactional consistency in a distributed SDN environment in Episode 16 of Software Gone Wild podcast. Here are a few of the topics that crossed our minds: Read more …

Like many of us Khalid Raza wasted countless hours sitting in meetings discussing hybrid WAN connectivity designs using a random combination of DMVPN , IPsec, PfR, and one or more routing protocols… and decided to try to create a better solution to the problem. Viptela was acquired by Cisco not long after we recorded this podcast. I left the podcast online for historic reasons. Read more &h...

Imagine being an IT administrator running a multi-tenant enterprise environment (example: an SMB business center). How many things would you have to configure to add a new tenant? How about adding a new user for an existing tenant? The engineers behind the scenes of FlipIT cloud service ended up with a 40-page configuration guide when they started the service years ago… and obviously decided full-...

A year ago Matthew Stone first heard about Cumulus Linux when I ranted about it on a Packet Pushers podcast (which only proves that any publicity is good publicity even though some people thought otherwise at that time), and when his cloud service provider company started selecting ToR switches he considered Cumulus together with Cisco and Arista… and chose Cumulus. Read more …

The stars have finally aligned, and after months of scheduling Jason and myself found time to chat about network automation tools and all the other exciting things Jason is doing (and blogging about ). We started with easy topics: Read more …

Jeremy Schulman was the driving force behind the Puppet agent that Juniper implemented on some Junos switches (one of the first fully supported Puppet-on-a-switch implementations). In the meantime, he quit Juniper and started his own company focused on a network automation product – more than enough reasons to chat with him on Software Gone Wild . Read more …

If you mention open-source cloud orchestration tools these days, everyone immediately thinks about OpenStack (including the people who spent months or years trying to make it ready for production use). In the meantime, there are at least two other comparable open-source products (CloudStack and Eucalyptus) that nobody talks about. Obviously having a working product is not as sexy as having 50+ ven...

A while ago Rick Parker told me about his amazing project: he started a meetup group that will build a reference private/hybrid cloud heavily relying on virtualized network services, and publish all documentation related to their effort, from high-level architecture to device and software configurations, and wiring plans. In Episode 8 of Software Gone Wild Rick told us more about his project, and...

The pilot episode of Software Gone Wild podcast featuring Snabb Switch created plenty of additional queries (and thousands of downloads) – it was obviously time for another deep dive episode discussing the intricate innards of this interesting virtual switch. During the deep dive Luke Gorrie , the mastermind behind the Snabb Switch , answered a long list of questions, including: Read more …

I first met Elisa Jasinska when she had one of the coolest job titles I ever saw: Senior Packet Herder. Her current job title is almost as cool: Senior Network Toolsmith @ Netflix – obviously an ideal guest for the Software Gone Wild podcast. In our short chat she described some of the tools she’s working on, including an adaptation of pmacct to environments with numerous BGP exit points (more det...

SDN evangelists talking about centralized traffic engineering , flow steering or bandwidth calendaring sometimes tend to gloss over the first rule of successful traffic engineering: Know Thy Traffic. In a world ruled by OpenFlow you’d expect the OpenFlow controller to know all the traffic ; in more traditional networks we use technologies like NetFlow, sFlow or IPFIX to report the traffic statisti...

What can you do if you have a small team of networking engineers responsible for four ever-growing data centers (with several hundred network devices in each of them)? There’s only one answer: you try to survive by automating as much as you can. In the fourth episode of Software Gone Wild podcast David Barosso from Spotify explains how they use network automation to cope with the ever-growing inst...

The use of tools has accelerated human evolution and made us what we are today. Networking is no different, and yet there aren’t that many tool builders among the networking engineers … or maybe all you need is a nudge and some hints on how to get started. Read more …

For the second episode of Software Gone Wild I got a truly interesting guest: David Gee, a network engineer already working on numerous network programmability and orchestration deployment. During our half-hour chat we couldn’t avoid the question of whether every networking engineer will become a programmer and David provided an interesting answer: you don’t have to program, but you’ll definitely...

Last September I received a peculiar tweet from Luke Gorrie pointing me to a software switch pushing 200 Gbps through an Intel server literally hours after I’d watched the Deutsche Telekom Terastream presentation , so I mentioned Luke’s Snabb Switch as a potential performance solution in an email to Ian Farrer… and before Ian managed to reply, Luke was already working for Deutsche Telekom. Read mo...