Hedgehog is the AI network solution builder - plus more

If you are actively looking to build out AI network infrastructure and want to utilize white box, cost effective switching, one of the challenges you have is what software you will use to design, deploy, operate and manage those network switches, because doing that by hand via a CLI will not be fun. Hedgehog wants to be the software you use to solve this problem, along with a few more use cases.

They kicked off their Network Field Day 35 (#NFD35) presentation with the pitch of saying Hedgehog is the AI network solution builder. They are the software to make this happen, but you can definitely use them for more than that, so you have to read between the lines to get the bigger picture on where they fit in the market.

I don't ding them for riding the AI wave, that is what is happening at the moment. And they aren't claiming they are "using AI" to build or deploy the fabric. They are saying you can use their solution to build out network infrastructure easily that makes running AI workloads faster, easier, with better performance, and not necessarily need a network engineering team to do it, which is pretty attractive for companies that are mainly investing the money on teams that can build out interesting AI models and data sets.

The pitch is that folks who are building and running AI workloads likely grew up and are used to cloud first tooling and services. They want an API, and for networking, a VPC like concept to build out what they need to run their AI workloads. Because Hedgehog is providing that user experience, but for whitebox, on-premises environments, the argument is that your existing cloud AI teams can easily get things up and running and have a look, feel, and workflow that matches what they do in a public cloud.

I must admit, I have no idea how many companies are running AI workloads and want to avoid recurring cloud costs and have decided to deploy colocated or dedicated infrastructure on their own to help drive down costs. I think that is the intersection of two customer markets in a small Venn diagram overlap, but clearly Hedgehog can provide a solutions for those folks.

I think the compelling story is the fact that you can build an Ethernet fabric easily with the same workflow and concepts as what you are used to with a public cloud service like AWS or Azure for networking. This is important for organizations that are trying to streamline their AI workload processes and want to leverage the cost saving of running AI workloads on fixes capital investments versus recurring costs in public cloud. It still leverages VXLAN and EVPN, but it is abstracted away from the operator. The reality is, this is where network automation is going. A controller that builds out Ethernet fabric solutions in a standard way where you don't need to touch or maintain the underlay and an API for those that want to consume the fabric can use to set it up they way they need it with a simple abstraction.

Let me repeat that - this is where network automation is going. I'm not saying Hedgehog is the only way to do this, but they demonstrate where the industry is going to go and how the network industry is going to change.

It is also worth noting that the solution is built on Kubernetes but you don't need to know anything about that, it is just under the hood. The other part that is interesting is that the software is all open source. Their goal is to provide a fully automated network operations solution at a reasonable cost.

So who is the target?

I think, given what Hedgehog can do, and what capabilities it is providing, the target customer is really organizations that want to run networks that can scale and change without having to spend a crazy amount for network architects and engineers to design and deploy. In addition, the solution is cost conscious, and those that are willing to purchase white box networking hardware to help drive down their capital costs compared to buying a Cisco, Juniper, Arista, or other mainstream network switch solution will be an idea customer. By having open source software, low commodity hardware, and the focus of the cost in annual software maintenance, it will be very appealing to shops that run lean, with low overhead and staff.

So where is Hedgehog going?

It is clear that Hedgehog can only really innovate at the pace that network white box platform have the right supported capabilities. That being said, having a service gateway to make their cloud like experience consistent with what the public clouds provide will be critical. The DPU integration will give them scale and security that will be beyond what most commercial network solutions are providing today. And finally, having flow scheduling ability from a DPU gives them even more capabilities to optimize AI workloads.

Is there room in the market for Hedgehog? Yes. Will they likely get bought up to help a larger network vendor who wants to own that market? Yep, that will likely happen at some point. For now, if you are looking for where the network automation landscape is going, you might want to check out what Hedgehog is providing the industry with open source, industry standard network automation through API, and the key value provided via annual software maintenance. I'll be keeping an eye on what they do.

- 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 Network Field Day, a Tech Field Day event, was voluntary and I was invited to participate. Tech Field Day events are hosted by Gestalt IT (part of The Futurum Group) 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 or donations were/are provided by some of the sponsors of the event to delegates (I don't accept gifts but I do ask the sponsors to donate to causes that support Mental Health). 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, technical missteps, incorrect opinions, and grammar errors are my own.

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

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.

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.