One API to Rule Them All, Transforming Network Management & Infrastructure Trends

by | October 25, 2019
One API to Rule Them All, Transforming Network Management & Infrastructure Trends


Week of October 20th, 2019


 

One API to Rule Them All, and in the Ether(net) Bind Them

While some APIs are more open than others, and some APIs are better documented than others, APIs prevail. From basic network infrastructure elements to all the complex applications flowing across them, just about everything we deal with today in IT has an API. The sheer quantity and diversity among these APIs presents network engineers, who are just starting to get a handle on automation, with the additional challenge of wrangling umpteen different versions of APIs into cohesive, scalable, and maintainable processes that don’t make them hate their lives on a daily basis. So what better way to corral your herd of APIs than with another API?

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Transform Network Management With A Network Automation Strategy

Enterprises can employ a network automation strategy to provide some stability for network management and monitoring. Automation, however, still requires some hard work.

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Gartner: Ten Infrastructure Trends You Need To Know

Corporate network infrastructure is only going to get more involved over the next two to three years as automation, network challenges and hybrid cloud become more integral to the enterprise. Those were some of the main infrastructure trend themes espoused by Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst David Cappuccio at the research firm’s IT Symposium/XPO here this week. Cappuccio noted that Gartner’s look at the top infrastructure and operational trends reflect offshoots of technologies – such as cloud computing, automation and networking advances the company’s analysts have talked about many times before.

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Are MEF’s SD-WAN Specs Enough?

The industry has come a long way since SD-WAN came into the limelight a few years ago. From a debate within service providers on its relevance vis-à-vis MPLS to becoming an essential part of the business offering by service providers, SD-WAN boasts not only industry-wide acceptance but tremendous growth too. With such strong growth, the industry felt the need for SD-WAN standards, so the MEF 70 specifications are an important milestone in the standardization of SD-WAN. This standard specifies the “service attributes” for an SD-WAN service, providing what had been a missing piece from the SD-WAN managed services offered by communications service providers.

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What Does It Take For Network Automation To Succeed?

Over the last couple of years, the drive toward network automation has gained momentum. Today it’s widely acknowledged that automation is essential to the success and effectiveness of future network operations—and it’s easy to see why. Communication service providers (CSPs) have reached a tipping point. The modernization of network infrastructure needed to support the ever-increasing demands placed upon the network—from streaming, applications’ usage, social media and more—mean that CSPs will have to scale-up their efforts to create and maintain networks that are more agile and efficient than ever.

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Traditional WAN Vs. SD-WAN: How Do They Compare?

While comparing traditional WAN vs. SD-WAN, network professionals can see the many benefits of SD-WAN, including centralized control and dynamic traffic management.

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Discover Cloud Key Cloud Networking Basics For Your Organization

Clear away the fog, and explore these five key cloud networking fundamentals — such as models, challenges and tools — you need to know before you adopt a cloud network strategy.

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5G And SD-WAN Will Unlock Communications’ True Potential

The communications industry is in a state of rapid transformation, driven by the arrival of countless new and improved technologies. It’s not just things like AI and IoT that’s leading the way to the business world of tomorrow, Telecommunications providers are also exploring opportunities in the form of enhanced connectivity too. For instance, 5G combined with SD-WAN has the potential to revolutionize various industries, by offering faster connections, reduced delays, and greater connectivity for all users.

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Network Automation Leads To Improved Organizational And Team Performance

CIOs who prod their organizations to make greater progress in network automation can expect to realize improvements in both organizational performance and team performance, according to Juniper’s 2019 State of Network Automation Report (SoNAR). As enterprises focus on multi-cloud, rapid application development and deployment, and software-defined infrastructure and services, automation is increasingly a critical element of network management. In fact, 96 percent of those surveyed for the report indicate they are taking steps toward automation.

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Survey Suggests DevOps Drives Digital Business Transformation

A survey published this week by New Relic, a provider of IT monitoring services, suggests there is a high correlation between organizations that have embarked on digital business transformation initiatives and adoption of best DevOps practices. Revealed at the Futurestack conference hosted by New Relic, the survey 750 global senior IT decision-makers of enterprises with 500 to 5,000-plus employees in Australia, France, Germany, UK and the U.S. conducted by the market research firm Vanson Bourne finds roughly 50 percent of organizations in the U.S. have completed or are close to completing their digital transformation journeys.

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The Security Side Of SD-WAN

SD-WAN is fast becoming a go-to technology for IT departments and organizations looking to reduce the cost of connecting their various sites. Historically, private links such as MPLS, T1, and Private Ethernet connections were used to provide sufficient, reliable bandwidth. In most cases, these legacy connections were premium priced and difficult to manage. Network redundancy was labor-intensive, required a high degree of complexity, and was costly. WAN acceleration for applications required extra add-in products. Although cost savings have been the major adoption driver to date, moving forward, the application performance improvements and simplicity will likely be the defining reason for moving to SD-WAN. The challenge will be how to meld application performance with security.

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How To Scale DevOps: Tackle Seven Common Time-Wasters

DevOps requires structure, visibility, and orchestration to make everything flow smoothly and continuously. The challenge: Throughout the different stages of DevOps work, the way that software development processes and cultures operate can lead to mistakes. In turn, these result in wasted time and slowed down software releases, thus negating the value of DevOps.

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How IT Pros Deal With SD-WAN Security Concerns

SD-WAN technology is becoming increasingly popular because it’s less expensive, more flexible and easier to deploy than MPLS, it provides centralized visibility and management, and it boosts the overall performance of WAN links, which makes employees more productive. But enabling end users in branch offices to connect directly to the public internet and to cloud services raises serious security concerns, which adds another level of complexity and risk to an SD-WAN rollout.

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Dell Launches SD-WAN Solution For Network Modernization

Dell Technologies announced new advancements in software-defined networking so customers can simplify and lower the cost of networking in today’s multi-cloud world. “Dell EMC and VMware are rebuilding the network for the cloud era with everything open, automated and software-defined,” said Tom Burns, senior vice president and general manager, Dell EMC Networking & Solutions. “New SD-WAN solutions powered by VMware and network fabric management delivered by SmartFabric Director raise the stakes when it comes to network virtualization and security in today’s highly-distributed software-defined enterprise. We’re just getting started on our combined innovation.”

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Is Lack Of Knowledge Creating Failures In DevOps Practices?

One of the biggest points of tech is the ability to use what we already know to find solutions, develop products and, ultimately, create something better. But one topic that seems to be reoccurring in DevOps is that when it comes to implementing the newest trends, controversially, people don’t really seem to know what they are doing. Two big areas where this issues seems to be occurring are in Shift Left and Kubernetes. Shift left for example, is the practice of testing early and often. This is to prevent problems from occurring later down the line. However, those that practice this form of Test Driven Development will probably have come across issues that start to arise.

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Itential

Itential is the only automation platform built to support both network and cloud, making it easy for enterprise organizations to maintain network compliance, reduce manual operations, and simplify network management. The Itential Automation Platform is a low-code cloud-native SaaS solution that seamlessly connects IT systems with network technologies for end-to-end network configuration, compliance, and automation.

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