In the context of BGP, a valley-free violation is when routing policy governing BGP path selection and advertisement breaks the valley-free policy. The valley-free routing policy basically ensures traffic doesn’t traverse unintended autonomous systems, usually a customer AS downstream from a service provider, and therefore an unintentional transit network.

I love the networking community, and I attribute much of my success as a network engineer, network architect, and now a technical marketer, to the interactions I’ve had with other network pros over the years. That’s meant interaction on Twitter, Reddit, the big conferences, and the small events like Tech Field Day. From those sprang up private Slack and Discord groups, the occasional iMessage or Google Hangouts group, and so on.

That changed significantly during the pandemic. Both the large and small conferences, meetups, and even company events stopped altogether and didn’t come back for a few years. And when they did, they were different. I noticed the large events weren’t as large (although I’m always shocked by how many people are at re:Invent), and the hybrid conference idea didn’t work for me. I missed the days of attending sessions, chatting with people over coffee in between keynotes, grabbing drinks in the evening with old nerd-friends, and getting to interact in person, engineer-to-engineer.

We needed a new networking community.

Here’s a short breakdown of MELT, which stands for metrics, events, logs, and traces. These are the four most basic data types used for network and system telemetry. There are other data types that are widely used and very useful in a robust observability solution, though I would argue some are just another form of one of these general data types.

These data types are used in system monitoring in general, but are very valuable in observability. Metrics, events, logs, and traces have most commonly been the cornerstone of application and system observability, but today they also form key components of the telelemtry used for network observability.

I was a VAR network engineer for years. I worked on location in data centers and network closets to install network gear, perform various types of cutovers, and troubleshoot network problems. Even when I moved to a solutions architect role, I always kept several items with me at all times in my laptop bag when going on-site, just in case. Some items are obvious, and some I carried because I got burned when I didn’t have it with me that one time.

If you’re a network engineer managing your own network or your customers’ network, here’s a list of 10 networking tools that you should consider keeping in your bag.

Here’s a list of my favorite networking-focused events ranked with number 1 being the best. “Best” means a conference or event that either had a ton of relevant networking content for me personally or that helped me directly in my career (for example, I’ve never been focused on storage at all – therefore you won’t see those events that on my list).

So if you’re in the networking field like me, check out these events and feel free to disagree in the comments or on the socials 🙂

Intent Based Networking certainly became a popular term over the last couple years. I don’t hear about it much anymore in terms of new and upcoming tech, though. I hear the term being used almost as a side comment when vendors say things like, “oh yeah we do intent based networking – it’s built right into our GUI.”

So after all the marketing hype, the buzzword bingo, and as much digital transformation as we can stomach, where are we with intent based networking in 2021?

I guess I should start with a disclaimer. I don’t know if this is actually the best way to white balance a video in camera. All I know is that I’m an amateur, and I’ve struggled with nailing down the white balance on my videos for a while. After someone showed me this method, my white balance is almost perfect every time right out of the camera.

Some days it’s all I can do to wearily lift my eyes from my desk, peer over the top of my monitor, and look across my basement at the squat rack.

I should’ve lifted this morning, but as usual I went to bed too last night watching the latest episode of The Expanse and couldn’t get up early enough to get a proper lift in before work.

It’s still there now, loaded with my warmup weight, waiting for me to do something useful with it.

I think it’s safe to say network automation is pretty mainstream now. Judging by what vendors are doing and what the community is talking about, automation is more than the latest advent of hipster networking. It’s becoming the primary way many network admins manage their networks.

But there are a couple barriers to taking the leap into automation. For some it’s the steep learning curve. There are courses to take, programming languages to learn, and entirely new processes to get comfortable with.

But I’ve worked with enough network engineers over the years to say that a steep learning curve is not an insurmountable problem. Many engineers I’ve worked with have an eagerness to learn new things and grow in their profession.

I don’t believe the issue is learning how to automate a network. I think the real barriers are the time and resources it takes to automate a network at scale in a meaningful way.

Continue reading “Get Your Network Under Control with Gluware” →