Network

Do Network Engineers Dream of Software Defined Sheep?

12/04/18 I really want Software Defined Networking (SDN), or something like it, to be the go-to approach for networking, but are we too tied to our idea of what SDN is for us to ge…

Automating the Automators

11/30/18 I’ve heard repeatedly from people in this industry that what we need is a single interface to our infrastructure. For status monitoring, perhaps that’s best represented by…

One Framework to Rule Them All

11/28/18 The Dream of the Data Center For me, it started with OpenStack. I was at a conference a number of years ago listening to Shannon McFarland talking about using OpenStack to…

Words Matter

11/26/18 One of my biggest pet peeves with AI is the word itself. Words matter, especially in IT. Whether you’re trying to nail down a scope of work for a project, troubleshooting …

Application Performance Monitoring: APM In An Agile World

11/21/18 Hopefully, you have been following along with this series and finding some useful bits of information. We have covered traditional APM implementations in part one, part tw…

Silo-Busting and Dream-Dashing; More Fun With Automation

11/16/18 With the popularity of Agile methodologies and the ubiquity of people claiming they were embracing NetOps/DevOps, I could swear we were supposed to have adopted a new silo…

The Evolution of Network Operations

11/14/18 When I first began this post, my thinking revolved around the translation problems of a declarative approach to network operation, but having only procedural interfaces to…

AI-nxiety

11/14/18 So far I’ve written about my love and hatred of what AI can do for me (or cost me) as a network owner. This post is going to cover why I’m afraid to let a machine take the…

A Strong Customer Community Is Critical When Optimizing Innovation

11/13/18 Having a strong customer community for feedback and ideation is critical when optimizing innovation. It supports product strategy while removing blinders to product defici…

If I Was a Grownup, This is the Essay I’d Write

11/12/18 Recently, my friend Phoummala Schmitt, aka “ExchangeGoddess” and Microsoft Cloud Operations Advocate, wrote about her struggles with imposter syndrome. It’s a good read th…

Templates vs. Policies

11/09/18 Are configuration templates still needed with an automation framework? Or does the automation policy make them a relic of the past? Traditional Configuration Management: T…

Automation Paralysis: Why We Get Stuck Automating The Small Stuff

11/02/18 Despite all the talk of all our jobs being replaced by automation, my experience is that the majority of enterprises are still very much employing engineers to design, bui…