Thoughts from the clouds
An old Cherokee proverb says: “Listen to the whispers and you won’t have to hear the screams”. Routing problems are hard: Hard to uncover, because sometimes they will not become apparent until something happens. For example, when your backup routes disappear, and you only notice when the primary routes are gone too. And hard in … Continue reading Listen to the Whispers of BGP
In a previous blog we had a setup with a Network Virtual Appliance (NVA) for Internet egress and hybrid connectivity based on Azure Virtual Network Gateways. There is another fairly typical use case with regards to traffic between on-premises an Azure: firewalling it with an NVA: In some situations customers will combine the role of … Continue reading Using Route Server to firewall onprem traffic with an NVA
Amongst the many Ignite announcements this year, my favourite is the new Azure Route Server, in public preview now, since it has the potential to dramatically change how networks are built in Azure. If you are thinking “here he comes with his BGP thing again”… You are right! Let me explain: In public cloud there … Continue reading Azure Route Server: super powers for your Network Virtual Appliance
Hey there! As you might have read, some time ago I wrote a pretty detailed “A day in the life of a packet” post series on how networking works in detail in Azure RedHat Openshift (ARO). Some of the feedback around those blog posts was that they are far too technical, and hard to read … Continue reading Azure RedHat Openshift and Hybrid Networking
In this part 2 of my blog series around ARO networking we will have a look and how inbound and outbound Internet connectivity works, as well as connectivity between different pods in the cluster. Other posts in the series: Part 1: Intro and SDN Plugin Part 2: Internet and Intra-cluster Communication Part 3: Inter-Project and … Continue reading A day in the life of a packet in Azure Redhat Openshift (part 2)
After reading the title above, you might be wondering why the heck you would want to do such a thing. The reason in my particular case is to connect an Azure Stack installation to an Azure ExpressRoute circuit, since Azure Stack needs some kind of connectivity to Azure. Azure Stack uses internally BGP and /31 … Continue reading Setting up /31 interfaces and BGP on a CentOS machine
Lately I have been involved in quite some conversations, where organisations have shown a lot of interest in the integration between Cisco ACI and F5 BigIP and BigIQ (or should I say iWorkflow?). As you might know, Cisco ACI offers the option to integrate L4-L7 services in the network. What does this mean? Optionally, you … Continue reading What do Cisco ACI, microsegmentation, service insertion, REST and Docker containers have in common?
Do you have a network lab to try out new technologies? Then you might have experienced this problem: you finished testing technology A, and you start testing technology B. For that you need to reconfigure your devices, obviously. Now you need to try out something new in technology A, for example a new functionality brought … Continue reading Using NX-API to deploy full networks
First of all, Happy New Year! Thanks for looking at my first post in 2016. As you might already know, Cisco ACI is a new concept of network management. In short, it is a network that brings along embedded network management functionality, that sits in a centralised controller cluster. If you want to manage a … Continue reading A command-line REST client for ACI
