Modern traffic steering has evolved into a multi-dimensional optimization problem. From ensuring availability, minimizing latency, maximizing throughput, preventing flapping, and meeting CDN commits; we ask more from our infrastructure today than ever before. With so many competing interests, how do we guarantee an exceptional user experience while still achieving a diverse set of business goals? Redundancy is an essential first requirement in modern application architecture. Investing in redundancy means investing in drop-in replacements to be available in times of crisis. Back-up infrastructure prevents downtime for…
When I started my career in networking (longer ago than I care to admit), the industry was struggling with incompatible systems at the protocol and interface level. As a budding young engineer concerned with ordering a chaotic technosphere, the OSI model seemed like just the remedy. That was an era where innovation moved a lot more slowly. Today, when innovation is advancing at the pace of business, we need to use software and systems to innovate, just like we do with protocols. System APIs and…
SD-WAN opens up many security options to explore. For virtualized security, as more companies adopt SD-WAN technology to enhance the agility of their networking architecture, they must give strong consideration to how and where to apply security across the network. For example, retailers with a lot of store locations can benefit from virtualized SD-WAN and security. Companies that fit this model typically have key applications that run at a centralized data center. They use internet VPNs at the branches to connect back to the mothership…
About 30 years ago, we began connecting devices such as routers, hubs, and printers to IP networks. That meant these resources went from being mostly housed in one location like a data center to spread all throughout an organization’s operations. IT and NetOps teams immediately recognized that they needed a standardized way to monitor and manage those devices remote. And Presto! the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) was born. SNMP made it “simple” for network management systems to request and receive data from the ever-growing…
I will be first to admit that marketing can sometimes get ahead of reality. It is our job to create a story that paints an appealing vision of the future, knowing that it may take a little while for engineering to actually “catch up”. And when multiple vendors start screaming the same buzzwords from the top of multiple different mountains, the line between product and PowerPoint can become a bit blurred and confusing. “AI for IT” is a perfect example of this. Customers want an…
Network teams often look to SD-WAN as a silver bullet for all of their management and monitoring needs, hoping these tools can help curtail the major pitfalls that are notorious for derailing enterprise cloud migration. But not every team’s path to the cloud is the same, especially as companies become increasingly distributed and rely on their network to keep remote teams connected. And while SD-WAN can help streamline management, most platforms leave out a lot of detail where monitoring is concerned. Sure, SD-WAN can help…
In today’s fast-paced cloud environments, automation is required to effectively manage systems of any size. Often the goal is to do more with less, so operators can strive to look beyond what it takes to keep the lights on; this is the same for managing the network or system infrastructure. Even though network operators face similar pain points as those seen in compute environments, they have what seems like an inherent advantage in fewer pieces of equipment to manage. However, with the trend of building…
Over the past several years, the ONUG Community has been keenly focused on IT organization transformation. We know that most digital transformation projects’ success or failure are directly correlated to IT skills, culture and organizational design. We have been keenly aware that many CEOs and their boards have shelved digital projects, thanks to the lack of confidence expressed by their CIOs that their IT organizations are not prepared. There is a massive industry skills gap in IT organizations to deliver good digital outcomes. Skills and…
As companies are trying to become more agile to provide new services to their customers at a faster pace, more and more of them are embracing Network Automation in some shape or form. Network Automation can be very powerful, but it comes with a price: it’s frighteningly dangerous! A mistake in the automation toolchain can bring down an entire organization! Well, you might argue that a mistake made by an engineer typing the wrong command in a single device SSH session can have a similar…
It’s all about the edge. Edge compute, edge containers, micro data centers – these are the latest terms gripping the Internet industry and making the promise of a sweeter tomorrow, filled with more data and faster processing in the ethereal Internet of Things. The edge seeks to provide the IoT we’ve been promised by a simple mechanism: moving data processing closer to where it is collected, closer to the things. However, there’s a fundamental problem with the thesis of the edge revolution. The edge is…
