Network Field Day 21 - Itential - The Steady Progression of Network Automation

At some point you run into tool overload. Given the diverse number of tools coming out for networking thing can get complex in a hurry. With automation all the rage along with software defined networks, intent based networking, SD-WAN, underlays, overlays, controllers and new security solutions it is incredibly hard to integrate everything. Never mind the streaming telemetry and analytics, logging, cloud networking, cloud security, IP address management and tracking all these resources too.

So how do you stitch all this together into something that is usable, practical and matches the workflow that your team has adopted? How can you allow these things to work together but not invest years in your networking team to build up coding skills that are not core to their daily jobs? Finally, is there anything flexible enough and extensible to allow your team of low code or no code network engineers to be functional quickly but leverage some of the gains of automation and tool integration?

This is where Itential comes into the picture because they are a network software automation company that is trying to address this core transformation problem. They are not trying to replace any of the best of breed tools that you have (or are considering adopting) for your environment. Instead, they are trying to provide the widest capabilities to integrate them together and do it in a low code or no code manner with the right API and third-party support. What is great is that your network engineer team today can likely integrate and extend the tools they are using (or are interested in using) right away. This means they can replicate many of the common tasks and workflows they are doing manually and making them repeatable and audit-able in the Itential world. Most of those tasks are likely run-book or step by step guidelines for getting changes made to an environment or updating settings or parameters on a variety of networking gear. This is where Itential can have the greatest impact of helping you to understand what you have in your existing environment, managing a workflow and providing the building blocks to get to more complex and interesting automation.

In the overview presentation by Chris Wade, Co-founder and CTO of Itential, he outlines the typical phases of network automation. Starting at Legacy, which starts at manual (CLI) and some scripting. Next moves to the Current view, what they term assisted manual. The Next view covers machine first and finally Future covers programmable. The following Diagram show the specifics. It helps frame the journey and the likely steps you will take in automating your environment.

The descriptions and diagram don’t do justice to how Chris explains it, so it is worth the time to go watch what he has to say. It is a quick 20-minute investment of time but super helpful because he explains many of the typical challenges and the process many organizations go through in moving to network automation and how their product is built to match up to that.

I’m very interested in what Itential is doing because it can have a broad and meaningful impact on many organizations to help move them forward in adopting network automation. But the move isn’t a huge burden or hurdle, it is incremental, builds on existing investments and provides a clear road-map of what you would tackle next. This is often missing in many other solutions, so it is nice to see a company who gets the longer term journey and shares that in an upfront way with their customers.

- Ed

ps: You can also check out fellow #NFD21 delegate Amy Arnold's blog post on Itential where she does a great job covering the API aspect of what Itential is up to with their automation gateway solution.

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 NFD21. 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. In addition, small swag gifts were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. 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.

Network Field Day 21 - Network to Code - Changing the networking landscape

It is not often you get to see a friend and colleague start and grow a business from scratch and have major impact on your industry. My friend Jason Edelman has done just that with his company, Network to Code. It was cool to have him, and his team, present at NFD21 and I wanted to highlight a couple of the things I found impressive about what they are investing in.

First, they are supporting NetBox as an open source project and developing on top of that. They are extending what NetBox can do by hiring Jeremy Stretch (who started the project while he was at Digital Ocean) to work full time on building out functionality and features in NetBox. This allows Network to Code to provide best in class capabilities for companies that wish to use, extend and scale up their projects leveraging NetBox. If you haven’t heard of NetBox, you can check it out the GitHub repository at https://github.com/netbox-community/netbox and the documentation at https://netbox.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ for a more in depth understanding. In summary, from the documentation site: “NetBox is an open source web application designed to help manage and document computer networks.” And it includes the following:

• IP address management (IPAM) - IP networks and addresses, VRFs, and VLANs
• Equipment racks - Organized by group and site
• Devices - Types of devices and where they are installed
• Connections - Network, console, and power connections among devices
• Virtualization - Virtual machines and clusters
• Data circuits - Long-haul communications circuits and provider
• Secrets - Encrypted storage of sensitive credentials

As accurate as the description is, it really doesn’t do this project justice. It is cool what Jeremy and the community has built out, I think many organizations will find it incredibly useful in helping to keep their infrastructure world in order without having to glue together a crazy number of NMS, spreadsheets and diagrams together in a wiki and hope to keep that current. Because it is API and automation focused it makes it easier for operators to leverage custom scripts, normalized data models, and integration into a lot of other tools. The exciting part is that Network to Code is planning on providing commercial support for the product so customers who are nervous about not having formal support for an open source product they would run can obtain it from Network to Code. This is fantastic news for adoption and interest in NetBox. You should check out the NFD21 presentation Jeremy and John gave about NetBox.

Second, for me is the community and the effort that Network to Code has put into helping to put support and resources behind that. If you are not aware, they host a Network to Code slack channel (https://slack.networktocode.com/ ) that has 10,000+ members and is a great resource to start learning about what is happening in the networking automation space. They continue to invest in open source tooling and contributions and believe in the model of sharing and supporting interesting projects. The team at Network to Code has build some of the largest commercial network vendor integrations for a variety of platforms but most notable is for Ansible. If you are not familiar with Network to Code then check out Jason giving an overview of the company, and explaining who is Network to Code.

I’m excited to hear what Network to Code will do next and they are a company you should keep an eye on if you are in the networking space. Great people with a goal to change how the industry is doing networking.

 - 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 NFD21. 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. In addition, small swag gifts were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. 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.

Network Field Day 21 - Forward Networks - Useful Intent Based Networking

One of the challenges in larger organizations and service providers is the inherent complexity in the design, deployment and operation of their networks. The reasons are varied and often a function of their business needs, their legacy technology and business drivers and many decades of merger and divestitures. Basically, things out of the control of the technology implementors and operators. The operational impact of deploying or removing a service from the network can be profound. It is often not documented completely, has changed over time and is intertwined with other services in some way that may not be obvious with just a simple assessment.

These challenges are the source of real operational risks that can translate to financial losses for a company. It is no wonder that many larger organizations are slow to implement changes, have challenges understanding impacts of changes they need or want to do and have increasingly complex security and policy issues. Compliance and validation are now becoming standard audit requests from third parties and financial penalties are not insignificant to those that fail to pass many of these new standards.

So, what is an organization like this to do regarding getting their arms around the impacts of changes within their environment? How will they manage a multi-vendor, heterogeneous networking environment? ForwardNetworks is addressing this need by allowing companies to build a digital twin of their network, which is not easy! This approach allows organizations to validate configuration changes, their impacts and understand what actions could potentially be damaging and negatively impact their compliance, SLAs or business services. This digital twin allows for several unique aspects of what Forward Networks can provide to customers. They are an intent driven solution that provides network automation and verification with a useful and practical user interface that enables network operators to really understand the impact of planned changes.

I recommend watching the Network Field Day presentation from Brandon Heller, CTO and co-founder which explains what Forward Networks does and goes over the UI of the product. I do believe that the product, as it is built today, is likely more appropriate for larger organizations. However, I can easily see them expanding their customer base and providing the product as a SaaS platform for small to medium sized companies with less complex networks to leverage the automation and validation capabilities. Given the natural fit to integrate to cloud networking via API’s and their support of existing network and security product technologies that are used on-premises this would be a very desirable solution for many in the complex role of operating highly available or complex networks.

I was impressed with what Forward Networks has built and for operators I believe there are many that would spend most of their time within their UI versus spending their time in the CLI of most networking and security platforms. The good news is that they do not preclude you from using the CLI still and can work in conjunction with many solutions that are based on that as the primary interface to deploy and operate their products. It is a win/win in terms of helping teams adopt a new method and tool.

If you are struggling with large scale networking changes within your organization or you want better validation and verification, along with automation to push out changes then seriously evaluate Forward Networks. I have my fingers crossed that their product will go down market and be something even more of us get to use.

- 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 NFD21. 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. In addition, small swag gifts were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. 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.

Network Field Day 21 - Aruba SD-Branch - Evolution

I am going to focus on the Aruba SD-Branch solution (their combination of SD-WAN -LAN and Cloud making it SD-Branch) presentation that is only a portion of the overall presentation that Aruba gave at Network Field Day 21. I digress quickly, the industry is stuck on Software Defined or SD as a naming convention and I think someone in marketing needs to be creative and break away from it and come up with a solution/product name. Honestly, SD-<anything> has lost all meaning. I think Aruba should rename the product to fit into their existing product naming and not cave to industry convention. With that done, let’s get back to the technical nuts of bolts of what Aruba presented.

We started with an overview presentation (https://techfieldday.com/video/aruba-why-sd-branch/) around Why SD-Branch and how it is different than tradition SD-WAN. In simple terms, they are using the same technology to do application insight and management for LAN, WAN and Cloud services through a single interface which is build on their wireless and wired LAN portfolio. It really does make a lot of sense for companies to want to move this direction. To be able to manage LAN, WAN, Cloud, Wireless, Wired, Identity and Security from a common interface with metrics and performance. In addition, props to the Aruba team for having a great user interface. It makes sense, is easy to find things, is clean and snappy too.

So, what was most compelling about SD-Branch and specifically the SD-WAN portion? First, you get a unified interface to manage everything and one that is done correctly, not just cobbling together a bunch of separate products and hoping everyone uses the same terms and layout. Second, I think it was the flexibility in configuration. The fact that you can easily stand up and have multiple design topologies for VPN and do that across multiple Internet and private dedicated links in many combinations shows that Aruba really understands what customers are trying to address. The demos really highlight how easy and straight forward it is to configure, monitor and operate the network so you should check that out at https://techfieldday.com/video/aruba-seamless-sd-wan-orchestration/ and finally, you really should see how everything is displayed in a single view for operations. If you are willing to invest and go all in with Aruba you get a lot of upside from an operations view. Check out https://techfieldday.com/video/aruba-simplify-network-operations/

Given that most SD-WAN solutions will likely provide a break even ROI in 12-18 months it is likely worth investing in Aruba SD-Branch if you are an existing Aruba wireless/wired customer. If you are doing an evaluation of products today such as LAN (wired and wireless), WAN, Cloud, and SD-WAN you would be doing a disservice in not putting Aruba on your list. I’ve been very impressed with what they have been doing over the last several years and my experience at #NFD21 has shown they are continuing down the right road and build on top of their great product portfolio.

One note, they don’t have IPv6 support in their SD-WAN product yet, but given the great IPv6 support they have in their LAN (wired and wireless) products today I would not be surprised to see that happen for SD-WAN soon. Fingers crossed they keep up the great work and get IPv6 in there and push their competitors to do the same.
- Ed

ps: You can also check out fellow #NFD21 delegate Remington Loose's blog post on Aruba where he does a great job covering the technical aspects and components of what Aruba is up to with their SD-Branch solution.

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 NFD21. 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. In addition, small swag gifts were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. 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.

Network Field Day 21 - October 1-4, 2019 - Biggest Tech Field Day Event Ever?!?

I have had the privilege of participating in a few Network Field Day events in the past, dating all the way back to NFD6. They are always interesting, lots of good technology to learn about, but the best part is the engagement and meeting some amazing people. The delegates, the representatives of all the companies and the field day teams supporting the event. I'm grateful I was invited way back in 2013 and I am delighted to be back for NFD21.

What is really surprising is the line up for NFD21, the list is impressive of both companies and delegates - you can check it out at the website! In fact, they have so many companies they expanded the format and it is going on for 4 days and they are having delegates rotating in and out of the line up because there are so many presentations. A few of us will be attending the entire 4 days, I think we get a special marathon badge when we are done on the fourth day.

If you are at all into networking then I encourage you to follow along live for the events on the Tech Field Day website or keep up with the activity via twitter by following the hashtag #NFD21. I'll be posting thoughts via twitter and after the event I will post a few blog posts too. If you want a fast way to learn what these companies are up to technically, this is the way to do it, well, outside of getting invited as a delegate. If you are interested in becoming a delegate you can do that too, you get to rub elbows with some pretty amazing people.
- 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 NFD21. 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. In addition, small swag gifts were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. 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.

SnapRoute - Is there something new happening in networking?

The launch (or relaunch depending on your opinion of when they started and on what they were building verse what they are doing now) of SnapRoute was an interesting event to be able to participate in. SnapRoute presented at Network Field Day 20 as part of the launch of their Cloud Native Network Operating System.

I think what SnapRoute is doing is the start of a fundamental shift in thinking about how network equipment, specifically data center switching and routing, should be deployed, managed and, more importantly, how they are classified. I believe they are the start of the transition where a managed resource in a data center is not something special but simply a compute object with different characteristics that can be assembled in a way that serves the purpose of the workloads that need to run in that data center.

For awhile now the push has been (for the networking industry anyway) scripting and automation working up to some sort of orchestration to make networking advance into the realm of cloud first or at least something a developer could code against. While this is important and will likely continue for the next decade or more it is far from the final goal of what a cloud first approach really entails.

Some in the industry are thinking the next evolution is intent based networking. Defining what you want to have happen and having the system orchestrate the outcome to match the intent. I actually consider that a big jump from where we are at today and companies like Apstra are trying to be an early market leader in that space. But I still consider that solution fundamentally orchestration and there are other methods and approaches out there that are just as valid but still only go up the stack as high as Level 3 (see the chart below).

I think a tweet from my friend Gian Paolo helps explain what is happening really well.

It is worth noting that this applies much wider than the networking industry overall. It seems what SnapRoute is attempting to do is the tooling for Level 4 and they are doing an end run around traditional networking tooling and methods. Instead, they have chosen to leverage cloud native constructs and tools to make networking adapt to those ethos instead. So, SnapRoute uses Kubernetes to run and deploy the resources on the Edge Core switches they support (more suppliers to be added, I imagine, depending on customer demand). Today, their solution runs on a single switch running Kubernetes but it is clear where their vision is going. A grouping of leaf/spine switches in the data center will be a Kubernetes Pod and likely Istio and Envoy will be used to expand the capabilities of what SnapRoute can do in that Pod. More importantly, a traditional network operator really has no choice but to learn cloud first methods and working with Kubernetes, Istio and Envoy are exactly the tools they must learn to make that transition.

I suppose the interesting question is, how is where SnapRoute going significantly different then where the networking market is currently going today? I think the simple answer is they are using the Cloud Native approach which really combines Level 2, 3 and 4 together. They get to avoid the incremental moves of the industry and have a first mover advantage, they are effectively leapfrogging several steps. This assumes they are able to pull off a Kubernetes Pod for the data center fabric but from what I can tell, it sure looks possible. What they are working on could really change the game for developers deploying in on premises data centers. They are worth keeping an eye on and seeing if they are able to make significant deals to help push their vision forward.
- 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 was voluntary and I was invited to participate in NFD20. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my hotel, transportation, food and beverage was paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event. In addition, small swag gifts were provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. It should be noted that there was 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.

Tech Field Day 18 - Day 2 with SolarWinds

Picking up from the data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence discussion from my last blog post about Tech Field Day 18 - Day 1, I wanted to dive into the briefing we got from SolarWinds on Day 2. SolarWinds is using that analytics and data sets to make informed decisions and they are leveraging machine learning as part of that process. The presentations are up to watch, you can find them at the link below.

SolarWinds:
https://techfieldday.com/appearance/solarwinds-presents-at-tech-field-day-18/

Of particular note is the presentation by Thomas LaRock, Head Geek and Karlo Zatylny, Distinguished Engineer at SolarWinds discuss machine learning, anomaly detection, and Database Performance Analyzer. This presentation goes over the difficulties of using algorithms to try and determine the right way to do predictive analysis and how to display that information to users. It was a very good presentation on the challenges the industry faces in getting things right and how hard it can be to make good assumptions. It also highlights how important it is to have good data and the context of that data. I think even harder is the UI work and how to give the right context around the data being displayed. Honestly, that will likely be the second hardest part of all of this data science work. Providing an intuitive way to understand what the data is telling you without putting in unnatural bias or artificial conclusions in the presentation of that data will be tough. I think SolarWinds is on the right track with what they are doing and their customers will ultimately get a lot of value from the product because of that. At the end of the day, value is what is most important. If they can provide better insight to drive better outcomes or actions then they win a vote of confidence from their customers. I think, for most customers, this will be the determination of if they demand data analytics, machine learning and eventually artificial intelligence or not and if they are willing to pay for it. SolarWinds is helping folks find the needles quickly, now what to do with them is the next challenge.
- 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 was voluntary and I was invited to participate in TFD18. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my flights, hotel, transportation, food and beverage was paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event. In addition, small swag gifts were provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. It should be noted that there was 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.

TechField Day 18 - Day 1 with Datera, NetApp and VMware

I was fortunate to be invited to participate in Tech Field Day 18 in Austin, TX. Day one had Datera, NetApp and VMware presenting to the delegates. The mix of delegates made for some interesting questions and discussions so I recommend you watch the presentation for each so you can hear the conversations. You can find each of the videos at the links below:

Datera:

https://techfieldday.com/appearance/datera-presents-at-tech-field-day-18/

NetApp:
https://techfieldday.com/appearance/netapp-presents-at-tech-field-day-18/

VMware:

https://techfieldday.com/appearance/vmware-presents-at-tech-field-day-18/

While all the marketing in the industry is talking about data analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence it was interesting to see how companies are actually trying to apply these ideas in practice in their products. I think the transition happening today is that data analytics is providing information that allow lay people the ability to discover details and insight into their business or technical processes that they didn't know before. This is an opportunity for companies that are providing this level of insight to stand out. Using that analytics and data sets to make informed decisions and leverage machine learning is the natural progression. Not everyone is there, not everyone has the same data sets gathered and the journey from data, to information, to knowledge, will not be equally distributed across the industry either.

As an example, it is clear that the data insights that Datera leverage allow them to make a much more efficient and cost effective storage solution, there isn't anything unique about the hardware, in fact they make that a selling point. The value is in looking at the data, the intention of what that data needs to do and the letting their system figure out what the right thing to do with the data.

A different lens is what NetApp Active IQ is doing with the huge telemetry data they get in supporting their customer. They are providing proactive guidance and recommendations on what to do in supporting their solutions. Their challenge is given the massive amount of data they gather, how do you gain the best insights and turn those into recommendations and finally, how do you extend that to something predictable. I think their next challenge will be how to integrated third party data into the platform in a meaningful way. While I am happy to see them doing this work, it feels too narrow in it's current form. Once their data and insights are extended out into other third party products or they can integrate with major partners then their combined data insights become that much more compelling. I will be keeping an eye on what they do to see if that happens.

Finally, VMware has an equally interesting data support insight model around vSAN and their vCenter products. They are doing some fantastic work around anonymizing customer data and still providing great support and telemetry around what they customers need. I would like to also see them extend beyond their own product lines to do integration with third party so that customers can see across their diverse products and solutions and get a much more holistic view of their environment and the potential impacts might happen from an operational change or upgrades/downgrades.

As with any transition, the devil is in the details and this data revolution is no different. Moving from unstructured data to structured in order to gain data insights is hard. Logging and monitoring data is hard to manage and without the right tools, almost impossible to get anything useful out of it. Finding all the needles is the goal with what is happening now. They next phase is what do you do with all these needles once you find them.
- 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 was voluntary and I was invited to participate in TFD18. Tech Field Day is hosted by Gestalt IT and my flights, hotel, transportation, food and beverage was paid for by Gestalt IT for the duration of the event. In addition, small swag gifts were provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates. It should be noted that there was 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.

Tech Field Day 18 is Feb 6-8, 2019 - Look out Austin!

With my current role at my new company, one of the fortunate benefits is that I can participate in more independent industry events. Some of my favorite in the industry are the Tech Field Day events. I'm luck enough to get to head out to Austin, TX to participate and engage with the folks from Datera, NetApp, SolarWinds and VMware for two days while hanging out with some amazing people.

One of the aspects I have always enjoyed about the Tech Field Day events is how they are set up. Direct community engagement with vendors to learn about their products, provide feedback and occasional insight. Plus the raw and direct nature of the presentations and interaction makes it so much more real for those of us in the room but also for those watching remotely. I have meet so many wonderful people through my participation and I feel very fortunate to be invited back on a regular basis.

My first event was the Software Defined Data Center Symposium back on Sept 10, 2013. A day after was Network Field Day 6, my first real full blown Tech Field Day event. At that single event I meet for the first time Anthony Burke, Bob McCouch, Brent Salisbury, Carole Warner Reese, Chris Marget, Ethan Banks, Greg Ferro, Ivan Pepelnjak, Jason Edelman and Matt Oswalt. I was lucky enough to already know Brandon Carroll, Stephen Foskett and Tom Hollingsworth prior to the event. If you are in the networking community that the names in that list are likely familiar to you.

I am fortunate to be the co-host of the IPv6 Buzz Podcast on the Packet Pushers (which Greg and Ethan run). I have participated with Ivan in his excellent training platform IPSpace.net, and kept in touch with Anthony, Jason, Matt and Brandon through the years. Without the Tech Field Day events some of these wonderful opportunities and relationships would have never have happened and for that alone I am grateful.

So, with any luck I will get to meet some other fantastic folks and hear about some really interesting technology too.

- Ed