Real-life SDN and network automation architectures and solutions that work outside of the cozy environment of vendor-branded PowerPoint.
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SDDC Podcasts
The first IPv6 specs were published in 1995, and yet 30 years later, we still have a pretty active IETF working group focused on “developing guidelines for the deployment and operation of new and existing IPv6 networks.” (taken from the old charter; they updated it in late October 2025). Why is it taking so long, and what problems are they trying t…
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In March 2024, I received my first PR from an airplane: Sander Steffann was flying to South Africa to deliver an Ansible training and fixed a minor annoyance in the then-new multilab feature.Of course, I wanted to know more about his setup, but it took us over a year and a half till we managed to sit down (virtually) and chat about it, the state of…
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By ipSpace.net
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It’s been over four years since I published the last Software Gone Wild episode. In the meantime, I spent most of my time developing an open-source labbing tool, so it should be no surprise that the first post-hiatus episode focused on a netlab use case: how Ethan Banks (of the PacketPushers fame) is using the tool to quickly check the technology d…
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By ipSpace.net
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By ipSpace.net
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Remember my rant how “fail fast, fail often sounds great in a VC pitch deck, and sucks when you have to deal with its results”? Streaming telemetry is no exception to this rule, and Avi Freedman (CEO of Kentik) has been on the receiving end of this gizmo long enough to have to deal with several generations of experiments… and formed a few strong op…
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By ipSpace.net
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By ipSpace.net
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By ipSpace.net
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By ipSpace.net
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By ipSpace.net
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By ipSpace.net
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By ipSpace.net
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Everyone is talking about FRRouting suite these days, while hidden somewhere in the background OpenBGPD has been making continuous progress for years. Interestingly, OpenBGPD project was started for the same reason FRR was forked - developers were unhappy with Zebra or Quagga routing suite and decided to fix it. We discussed the history of OpenBGPD…
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Sick-and-tired of intent-based GUIs that are barely better than CiscoWorks on steroids? How about asking Siri-like assistant queries about network state in somewhat-limited English and getting replies back in full-blown sentences? Warning: you might be reentering the land of unicorns driving flying DeLoreans... but then keep in mind what Arthur Cla…
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Imagine you would have a system that would read network device configurations, figure out how those devices might be connected, reverse-engineer the network topology, and be able to answer questions like “what would happen if this link fails” or “do I have fully-redundant network” or even “how will this configuration change impact my network”. Welc…
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When I was still at university the fourth-generation programming languages were all the hype, prompting us to make jokes along the lines “fifth generation will implement do what I don’t know how” The research team working in Networked Systems Group at ETH Zurich headed by prof. Laurent Vanbever got pretty close. The description of their tool says: …
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By ipSpace.net
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By ipSpace.net
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I mentioned Multipath TCP (MP-TCP) numerous times in the past but I never managed to get beyond “this is the thing that might solve some TCP multihoming challenges” We fixed this omission in Episode 100 of Software Gone Wild with Christoph Paasch (software engineer @ Apple) and Mat Martineau from Open Source Technology Center @ Intel. Read more ……
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A while ago we did a podcast with Luke Gorrie in which he explained why he’d love to have simple, dumb, and easy-to-work-with Ethernet NICs. What about the other side of the coin – smart NICs with their own CPU, RAM and operating system? Do they make sense, when and why would you use them, and how would you integrate them with Linux kernel? We disc…
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By ipSpace.net
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By ipSpace.net
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We love to claim that we’re engineers and yet sometimes we have no clue how technology we use really works and what its limitations are… quite often because understanding those limitations would involve diving pretty deep into math (graphs, queuing and system reliability quickly come to mind). Read more ……
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After a series of forward-looking podcast episodes we returned to real life and talked with Carl Buchmann about his network automation journey, from managing upgrades with Excel and using Excel as the configuration consistency tool to network-infrastructure-as-code concepts he described in a guest blog post in February 2018 Read more ……
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