Tag: network engineer

Choosing Between Leaf-Spine and Butterfly Fabrics in Modern Data Centers

Leaf-spine is the default. But it’s not always the right answer.

In modern data center networking, the leaf-spine Clos fabric has become the default architecture for good reason. It’s predictable, scalable, and aligns well with familiar Ethernet-based designs and operational models. But as workloads evolve, particularly with the rise of large-scale AI and distributed systems, alternative topologies like butterfly fabrics are getting renewed attention. Both architectures aim to deliver high bandwidth, low latency, and scale, but they approach the problem in fundamentally different ways.

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A Network Engineer’s Guide to Understanding the Model Context Protocol for AI Integration

If you work in technology long enough, every new framework starts to sound like “yet another API layer.” The Model Context Protocol (MCP) is different. It’s not a product, and it’s not tied to any one vendor or model. It’s an open standard for how AI apps talk to tools and data providing a standardized, model-agnostic way for AI apps to access external tools and data.

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10 Books Every Network Engineer Should Read

These are 10 books that have been foundational for me personally in my career as a network engineer. I left out the Cisco CCNA, CCNP, and CCIE textbooks, though they were all mostly fantastic. However, this list below has been great for me as foundational networking knowledge in a well-written format.

Toward the bottom are several books that I’ve read much more recently, including books about network automation and machine learning in networking. Personally, for anyone seeking to get into network engineering or to become a more well-rounded networking professional, I recommend topics around automation and ML as well.

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A Crossroads in My Networking Career

Not long ago, I needed to put a script together for a simple task, so I wrote something very brief in Python. When I say “wrote”, what I mean is I copied and pasted parts of scripts others had written and created some new monstrosity to get the job done.

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Top 10 Ways to Break Your Network

Check out the first Network Collective video podcast, Top 10 Ways to Break Your Network, in which experienced network engineers share their most memorable blunders and the lessons learned from them.

Here’s the website: http://thenetworkcollective.com/

The header image was used with permission from Michael Nelson who was one of the Twitter participants during the first show. Check out his site here.

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By Engineers, For Engineers

If you haven’t heard, the networking community is awesome. I’ve made some great friends, developed strong new relationships, and I’ve had the incredible luxury to bounce ideas off some seriously talented people. However, whether it’s through various Slack groups, Google hangouts, or private email chains, it’s all been relatively private. Not much makes its way onto Twitter, and not as much as I’d like makes it into blog posts.

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BGP Default Route Failover Using Reachability

Sometimes political, financial, or logistical hurdles determine how we solve networking problems. In these tricky situations we may not be able to solve the problem the way we’d prefer, but we still need to solve the problem.

In this post I’m going to look at how we can solve a WAN failover scenario when we have a default route learned from both of our service providers and a reachability problem via our primary ISP.

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Amazon S3 Outage: We’ve All Been There

I’ve been thinking a little bit about the Amazon S3 incident. Not really the incident, actually, but the responses to it. More than once I read something along the lines of “I’m sure that guy got fired” with regard to the engineer who entered the fatal command.

Sure, that’s kind of funny for a quick tweet or in the greater context of a blog post on change control, but for me, I’m not sitting at my desk shaking my head right now. Instead, I’m reminded about the times I did the exact same thing (on a much smaller scale) and will probably do it again.

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My Network Cutover Soundtrack

Here’s a list of carefully thought-out pairings of songs for specific types of network activities like cutovers, refresh projects, and typical pain-in-the-butt network tasks.

Click on the network-y activity to listen, and make sure to have your sound at a decent volume. Most of these tasks take longer than the length of one typical song, so usually I’m listening to the entire album.

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Apstra: The Intent-Driven Cure for Network Blindness

Apstra, Incorporated isn’t focused on new features, more advanced silicon, or some new widget. Instead, they’re offering a different way to look at networking. Apstra offers an early form of intent-driven networking that abstracts network programmability and allows network engineers to configure intent rather than device features. We expect the network to behave in a specific way, so we configure our intent accordingly. I was very excited to meet the Apstra team at Networking Field Day 13, and they didn’t disappoint.

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SD-WAN with VeloCloud at Networking Field Day 13

It looks like we’re going to have some SD-WAN goodness next week at Networking Field Day 13. I love the technology itself because of the real-world use case and practical benefits a good SD-WAN solution can offer.  Many of the SDN-labeled offerings out there are still a little immature, but adding intelligence to the WAN edge is something that is already being adopted wholeheartedly in even small enterprises.

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Intent-Driven Networking with Apstra at Networking Field Day 13

In a couple weeks I’ll be headed to sunny San Jose for Networking Field Day 13. If you’re not familiar with Networking Field Day and other Field Day events, check out their website, YouTube channel, Twitter feed, and LinkedIn page. Tech Field Day does a great job bringing technology influencers, bloggers, and craft beer enthusiasts together with some of the biggest and newest names in the tech industry.

I’m particularly interested in Apstra’s presentation on Thursday afternoon. I recently wrote an article about intent-driven networking, something of particular interest to me, so I’m really interested to hear what they have to say about their platform, the Apstra Operating System, or AOS.

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Network Automation: Another Tool in the Toolbox

Over the last few weeks I’ve noticed a few tweets and blog posts regarding the immaturity of network automation methods and the danger in utilizing those methods in production networks. Though I agree that processes always have room to mature and that wiggling wires in a production environment always poses some risk, I believe this new emerging narrative in social media makes several assumptions that aren’t necessarily true.

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The Joy of Just Getting the Job Done

Getting the job done, whether blog-worthy or not, always gave me a deep sense of accomplishment in my work. Besides, it’s always the junior engineers cutting over IDFs in the middle of the night that get to expense all the pizza they want.

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Routing at the Access Layer

Network devices have become so powerful that concern over hardware resources have all but disappeared. Modern routers, switches and firewalls can handle much more than their predecessors, and network designs are changing as a result. Network designs are shifting from the classic three-tiered model of a switched access layer and routed distribution and core layers to a completely routed design. Read the rest of the article at TechTarget’s SearchNetworking site.

 

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Your wired LAN is dumb…or at least it should be

Why aren’t our wired LANs more like WLANs? Wireless vendors have already been doing for years what switch manufacturers are only starting to get into in the last couple years. A rough comparison of a few attributes of typical wired and wireless networks shows striking differences in how we manage our LANs and WLANs.

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Write Something

write-somethingWe don’t think in five paragraph essays. At least I don’t. We think in small explosions of ideas in a nebulous, non-linear cloud of word pictures. It makes sense in our own minds, but try to communicate those ideas to someone else, and we find that sometimes we don’t have as clear a picture of our own ideas as we thought we did.

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