Years ago Petr Lapukhov decided that it’s a waste of time to try to make OSPF or IS-IS work in large-scale data center leaf-and-spine fabrics and figured out how to use BGP as a better IGP. In the meantime, old-time routing gurus started designing r

Continuing the Linux networking discussion we had in Episode 86, we focused on Linux interfaces in Episode 87 of Software Gone Wild with Roopa Prabhu and David Ahern.We started with simple questions like “what is an interface” and “how d

Linux operating system is used as the foundation for numerous network operating systems including Arista EOS and Cumulus Linux. It provides most networking constructs we grew familiar with including interfaces, VLANs, routing tables, VRFs and contexts, bu

A long while ago Marcel Wiget sent me an interesting email along the lines “I think you should do a Software Gone Wild podcast with Phil Shafer, the granddaddy of NETCONF”Not surprisingly, as we started discovering the history behind NETCONF w

After explaining the challenges of data center fabric deployments, Dinesh Dutt focused on a very important topic I cover in Week#3 of the Building Network Automation Solutions online course: how do you separate data (data model describing data center fabr

During Cisco Live Berlin 2017 Peter Jones (chair of several IEEE task forces) and myself went on a journey through 40 years of Ethernet history (and Token Bus and a few other choice technologies).The sound quality is what you could expect from something r

One of the design scenarios we covered in Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Architectures webinar is a pure layer-3 data center, and in the “how do I do this” part of that section Dinesh Dutt talked about the details you need to know to get this idea impl

In June 2017, we concluded the Building Next Generation Data Center online course with a roundtable discussion with Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President, Networking, and Simon Richard, Research Director, Data Center Networking @ Gartner.In the second

A while ago I got a kind email from Kireeti Kompella, CTO @ Juniper Networks, saying “A colleague sent me an email of yours regarding SDN, the trough of disillusionment, and the rise of automation. Here's a more dramatic view: the Self-Driving N

PowerShell is a great scripting environment if your vendor provided PowerShell libraries to control their software or devices… but what if all you got is REST API (example: Nexus switches)? We’ll conveniently ignore the challenges of managin