2022 - Year in review and a look ahead at 2023

 It seems my blogging has fallen off a lot since co-founding HexaBuild and working on IPv6 full time. I wanted to at least get a post out this year talking about some of the interesting things I have observed in the industry and note if I think they will be trends or simple market changes that won't have much impact.

First, regarding IPv6, it appears that IPv6-only design and architecture is accelerating at a rapid pace and I anticipate that will continue into 2023 and 2024. This is driven in part by the White House OMB mandate but also my the cost structure of IPv4 and the open market to obtain IPv4 addresses that have a clean reputation and are available to use immediate. While enterprise organizations will ponder over IPv6 in 2023 and 2024 and potentially kick off projects, they will, for the most part have limited deployments. The exceptions will be organizations that are consuming all their RFC 1918 address space and their public IPv4 address space due to rapid public cloud expansion. This has been a huge driving force around IPv6 discussions to try and help reduce the rate of IPv4 address space consumption. I don't see that changing in 2023 or 2024 but with some organizations repatriating their workloads, it may slow down.

Second, I think automation is the only way to safely adopt IPv6 for larger organizations and they need to invest in tooling, platforms and their staff to make that happen. Given the complexity of dual-stack for many organizations, getting a consistent deployment method that reduces typing/character mistakes is really important for IPv6. Since many organizations are moving that direction already, it is a natural fit and means that automation processes include IPv6 from day one.

Finally, security is becoming interesting again and Zero Trust is changing how team think about deploying and building services. Zero Trust is another natural fit for incorporating IPv6 early on in the process to ensure you can support all your potential network ingress/egress protocols. Thinking through the dual-stack solution and projecting that to IPv6-only allows you to work through many of the corner cases and potential access issues that end clients would run into in the real world.

So, 2023 will likely be a lot of work around IPv6-only, automation, and Zero Trust, is going to be my guess. Of course more cloud, but I think that is just a given going forward. What are everyone else's thoughts about what 2023 will likely consist of for technology focus?

- Ed

Kentik - Get Observability and Monitoring Under Control

 Kentik presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 15, 2021 and I think Kentik is on the right journey around doing observability and monitoring for enterprise networks. They understand they have to support all the traditional capabilities within networks but they also need to have full support and capabilities for public cloud services. I was very interested in what they are doing with Kentik Firehose which aggregates message bus/queue, observability, real-time analytics and data lake sources and provides telemetry and context. This seems like a super useful tool for companies who have a wide variety of cloud and other systems generating data. Check out Avi Feedman's presentation, it is worth listening to their strategy and how they want to address these issues that almost all companies are going to be facing.

They had a pretty impressive list of new features and capabilities. I think their focus on cloud to on-premises integration is going to be critical.

Kentik also showed off what they are doing for Observability for Cloud Networkers. This is an extremely hard space right now. Each public cloud provider does networking and the associated logging, telemetry and observability data differently. So it is a major pain to integrate it and have some sort of end to end solution that actually helps you determine what the problem or problems actually are so I think they are on to something.

For now, Kentik is a company to keep an eye on and see if their innovate in the right areas to address customers needs. It sure looks like they are heading in the right direction and I think they have a useful product that helps replace a lot of legacy logging and monitoring solutions we have typically deployed in the past with something more modern and extensible.

You can also check out Dr. Peter Welcher's LinkedIn post about Kentik. A.J. Murray and Tim Bertino did an Art of Network Engineering podcast about NFD26.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD26. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved (this event is virtual so none of that happened). In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered but did ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health since the event was during Suicide Prevention week). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own.

ZPE - A New Swiss Army Knife Networking Product

ZPE presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 16, 2021 and I will be honest, at first I couldn't figure out where to put ZPE in terms of a product and service category. As they were a first time NFD presenter and I had not heard of them before I was asking myself, are they a remote console server replacement for the likes of Raritan, OpenGear, and others? Are they an SD-WAN solution? Do you use them for routing and switching? Are they really focus on Out-of-Band (OOB) or Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP)? It turns out you can use them for all or just part of those things.

In my current role, I am a consumer of remote console and remote access solutions, mainly for lab and proof of concept purposes, as that is how we help many of our customer in validating their IPv6 configurations. For our IPv6 training at HexaBuild we will more commonly use Apache Guacamole and provide access directly via ssh, web and remote desktop which are all natively supported in Guacamole.

While ZPE can certainly do many of these functions, there is a far more compelling use case for organizations that have many distributed branch locations and do not have remote hands or the cost of truck rolls to support the site are very high. Rene Neumann gave an presentation on the ZPE Systems' Nodegrid and ZPE Cloud to do Branch Orchestration. I recommend checking out this part of the presentation to learn how you can leverage ZPE, their cloud options and drive toward Infrastructure as Code from the earliest points of deployment.

What is interesting about what ZPE is doing is starting from Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) without necessarily having to build out all the initial infrastructure you require to get many ZTP solutions up and running. They combine the ZPE Cloud and on-premises gear deployment to make this Day 0 to Day 1 to Day 2 workflow actually make sense. If you have ever tried to do an initial deployment of a network you know how hard it is to automate all that work. At a minimum you need an Intel NUC or a VM on your laptop to run all the services, store initial code, along with templates and configuration files. ZPE takes care of doing all that workflow. They can't build your configuration files for you but they can make it possible for you to load those and set things up without the need to sending someone to the site.

I am glad someone is providing some competition for Raritan, OpenGear and Cradlepoint - it will likely push them all to provide better capabilities and at the same time put some pressure on traditional networking vendors to do better around Day 0 to Day 2 lifecycle management.

You can also check out Dr. Peter Welcher's LinkedIn post about ZPE. He covers a lot of the other capabilities so it is worth a read! A.J. Murray and Tim Bertino did an Art of Network Engineering podcast about NFD26.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD26. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved (this event is virtual so none of that happened). In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered but did ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health since the event was during Suicide Prevention week). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own.

Arista - Open Source Network Automation and Tooling

Arista presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 14, 2021 - I was most excited about the presentation that Fred Hsu gave regarding Arista's Next-Generation Automation Architectures.

Having a vendor share how they see customers putting together a set of automation tools, frameworks and workflow is super helpful. Honestly, one of the hardest parts of getting started in the network automation journey is where to start. What tools, what language to learn (Python, Go, Tcl?), what editor/IDE to use (PyCharm or VS Code?), what environment setup? I draw the analogy to getting started in biking. The best way to start is to have a friend let you borrow a bike, provide the initial gear, pick an appropriate beginner level place to bike and get out and follow their lead. It is very similar for network automation. I don't need to start on a $10,000 mountain bike with high end expensive gear and bomb down a super advanced single track course when I have never ridden a bike before, it just makes no sense! In fact, it sets you up for failure. I can pretty much guarantee you are going to crash into a tree, go up and over your handlebars or have some other equally horrible experience. And you will feel you wasted your money and the experience will sour you to trying it again.

Arista is providing an initial roadmap of how they see the adoption of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in the network automation journey. This consists of a set of tools they see customers using along with support for how they think they can add value to customers.

I think it is super important that Arista is sharing this information with their customers and community. It means that those that are not Innovators or Early Adopters (Crossing the Chasm reference) can have more specific guidance how how to achieve Infrastructure as Code because we are currently in the Early Majority phase of network automation.

You can obviously swap out a specific tool for something your organization might have already adopted. For instance, they list GitLab for code repository and workflow orchestration but maybe you are a GitHub customer already. That is fine, you just end up using GitHub. The point being is they are providing a reference for building Network CI/CD pipeline to help you on the journey. Being specific is actually helpful in the beginning. Just like not having to figure out all the details when you want to get into biking to see if you like it, someone sharing and showing you the basics is incredibly useful.

I did like seeing Arista call out some unique tools that network engineers might not know as much about if they are not developing and/or operating network automation solutions. Things like Batfish which does network modeling (it is a network configuration analysis tool really) and Open Policy Agent or OPA (which reminds me in many ways of Terraform from Hashicorp) that provides for a unified toolset and framework for policy across the cloud native stack and any company who wants to extend it to their environment. There is even a VS Code extension to develop, test, debug, and analyze policies!

Finally, they briefly talk about some of the work they are doing with the team at Network to Code around Nautobot for single source of truth and how that interfaces with Cloud Vision Portal (CVP). What I was pleased with about the presentation was while they talked about CVP, it was only to talk about integration and where it can help. While CVP can do many of the roles these other tools provide, they focused the effort around how the CI/CD pipeline is being developed, regardless of CVP. So hats off to Arista for not being heavy handed and pitching product the entire time.

You can also check out Girard Kavelines' post about Juniper at TechHouse570 - Networking Field Day - Day 1 Recap. A.J. Murray and Tim Bertino did an Art of Network Engineering podcast about NFD26.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD26. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved (this event is virtual so none of that happened). In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered but did ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health since this is Suicide Prevention week). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own.

Juniper - Mist API and Automation with Postman

Juniper presented at Networking Field Day 26 on Sept 14, 2021 - I really recommend you check out the presentation on network automation that Ryan and Jake did, you will likely learn something new if you are not staying super current on network automation and APIs. Even if you are staying current, it is worth a watch honestly.

Jake showed off Postman (which is an open source tool and is an API platform for building and using APIs) and how they are leveraging the "Power of the Juniper API". More importantly, they provided a Postman Collection Runner (the Collection Runner allows you to run sets of requests in a specified sequence - this link explains the runner) for free which is really amazing. You can find the Mist Runner Collection (this is the link to their actual collection) up on GitHub. This means that folks who are trying to get started with automation in networking don't have to start from zero. This helps with the stress of the situation where your management team expects you to be at automation hero level in a week or two. Jake does a full hands on demo of his runner deploying a campus fabric from a simple CSV initialization file (he provides example files too.) It really is pretty cool. Using a Collection to do workflow and automation when you are leveraging an API makes a lot of sense. And when a vendor releases for free how to leverage a tool like this to help make you life easier, it is worth checking out. You can see from the Postman UI, it is really straight forward.

You do need to create a free account with Postman, but you have to do that for things like GitHub too, and the value you get from this tool make it worth the inconveniences of doing so.

In addition, Mist has up on the GitHub repo the Mist API Cookbook. It is a good way to start figuring out how to use the Mist API. I recommend grabbing that to start exploring the API with Postman. Even if you just want to explore and learn about how an API can be useful versus doing some CLI scripting, this is a good way to figure that out. The repo contains simple PDF files that cover things like EVPN to Access Layer deployment, for instance. As you can see from the screenshot, very straight forward:

I'm excited to see vendors sharing their tooling, scripts and examples for the community to learn from. It is super difficult to get started in network API and automation when you also have to run and operate a day to day network. Being able to leverage what other smart engineers have put time and energy into in invaluable in the learning part of the journey. I look forward to seeing more content from Juniper in this space.

You can also check out Girard Kavelines' post about Juniper at TechHouse570 - Networking Field Day - Day 1 Recap, Jason Gintert's post on Automation and Assurance of the AI Driven Campus with Juniper Networks and Tim Bertino's post on NFD26 – Experience First Networking w/ Juniper. You can listen to Drew Conry-Murray and I chat about Juniper's NFD26 presentation on the Packet Pushers Briefings in Brief podcast. A.J. Murray and Tim Bertino did an Art of Network Engineering podcast about NFD26.

- Ed

In a spirit of fairness (and also because it is legally required by the FTC), I am posting this Disclosure Statement. It is intended to alert readers to funding or gifts that might influence my writing. My participation in Tech Field Day events was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD26. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was/is paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event, if travel was involved (this event is virtual so none of that happened). In addition, small swag gifts or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I didn't accept the swag gifts offered but did ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health since this is Suicide Prevention week - Juniper was kind enough to do so). It should be noted that there was/is no requirement to produce content about the sponsors and any content produced does not require review or editing by Gestalt IT or the sponsors of the event. So all the spelling mistakes and grammar errors are my own.