The Foundation of the Future With Barefoot Networks

Tom Hollingsworth is impressed by some of the recent announcement from Barefoot Networks. The first was announced at OCP which saw new support for P4 and Tofino in the Software for Open Networking in the Cloud. Then there was the company’s announced partnership with IP Infusion (another Networking Field Day presenter). Finally Barefoot announced partnerships with Xilinx and Kaloom to bring Tofino and P4 to their switching platforms. For Tom, this sets the company on a firm foundation for the future, one where they don’t try to bring customers to use cases that might not apply, but instead meet customers where they already are.

GraphDBs and Network Automation

In this post Nicola Arnoldi clears up some confusion. For him, when network automation is vital for any organization, it’s important to keep in context what things like Ansible are. This isn’t SDN or an orchestration framework. Instead, taking a cue from Ansible’s recent Networking Field Day presentation, this is just one tool to accomplish automation. These kind of tool are perfect for building a Graph DB of your network resources. This is what underlies Apstra’s intent-based networking, as demoed at Networking Field Day last year.

Data Point: Why Automation Won’t Replace Humans

Ivan Pepelnjak thinks network engineers don’t need to worry about automation replacing them in the near future, given that a forward looking company like Tesla has failed with their complete automation efforts. Instead, he points that network engineers should train themselves to do higher value jobs for organizations, which seems to be a good hedge against automation. He points out some recent Networking Field Day videos on the topic as well.

Big Switch is Changing the Cloud Game

Rita Younger looks at how Big Switch enable customers to build a self-service data center private cloud. They do this by approaching it from a cloud-first strategy to make an automated environment via their virtual private clouds. This was presented during Big Switch’s presentation at Networking Field Day last month.

Nyansa Voyance at NFD18

In this post, Aaron Conaway takes a look at Nyansa’s Voyance, which he saw at Networking Field Day last month. This network analytics solution focuses on user experience. He focuses on how the Voyance Crawler sits inside a network, looking at a variety of data points, from wireless controllers to API calls and more. This is correlated to get a full understanding of how a user experiences a network, and provides suggestions on how to remediate issues.

NFD 18 – Day 2 – RedHat Ansible

Nicola Arnoldi clears up any confusion around what Ansible is and what it is not, relaying what he heard from their Networking Field Day presentation earlier this month. He makes it clear that Ansible is not SDN, nor an orchestrator, but just a powerful tool in your networking toolbox. He goes on to discuss the Ansible Network Engine, Ansible and Openconfig, and the Ansible ML2 plugin for Openstack.