Treat the Network as Software, SD-WAN Best Practices & Measuring DevOps
Week of October 27th, 2019
How You Should Treat the Network as Software
DevOps has become an aspiration for technology companies everywhere, and the networking space is no exception. Unfortunately, for network engineers, the way to manage the network doesn’t necessarily align with the pre-existing patterns software engineers use to implement DevOps methodologies. In order to accelerate automation, network operators need to change the way they think about code deployment and look to DevOps practices of building software with traditional CI/CD pipelines.
Consider These Three SD-WAN Best Practices Before Deployment
Interest in software-defined WAN is surging, as seen in SD-WAN market growth and industry conferences. Research firms IDC and IHS Markit estimated SD-WAN revenue will reach $5.25 billion and $4.4 billion in 2023, respectively. While those numbers are eye-catching, enterprise IT teams are more concerned about SD-WAN best practices, how to troubleshoot the technology and whether it will make their networks more complex.
Itential’s Network Automation Software Wins TechTarget Award
At the ONUG Fall 2019 conference in New York, one word was on everyone’s lips: automation. Itential’s infrastructure-as-code platform helps turn those four syllables into action.
SD-Branch Vs SD-WAN: What’s The Difference?
The difference between SD-branch and SD-WAN is that SD-branch is the broad concept of applying software-defined principles to branch networking, and SD-WAN is a tool to help make that happen. Thought about another way, SD-branch advances SD-WAN by holistically extending the virtualization and intelligence of a software-defined WAN into the branch IT infrastructure. In fact, recent SD-WAN offerings have expanded to include branch infrastructure without calling it SD-branch, suggesting certain vendors see SD-branch technology as a marketing term and not a distinct technology.
The Benefits Of NFV Are Unfolding In 5G
This year’s SDN NFV World Congress, which took place in the Hague from October 14-17, 2019, continued to follow the progression of NFV transformation as the platform for 5G. Ericsson had a strong presence at the conference, as well as on the show floor. Here are six takeaways from this leading event for the Software-Defined Networking and Network Functions Virtualization industries.
How SD-WAN Is Evolving Into Secure Access Service Edge
SASE, pronounced “sassy,” stands for secure access service edge, and it’s being positioned by Gartner as the next big thing in enterprise networking. The technology category, which Gartner and other network experts first introduced earlier this year, converges the WAN edge and network security into a cloud-based, as-a-service delivery model. According to Gartner, the convergence is driven by customer demands for simplicity, scalability, flexibility, low latency, and pervasive security.
Two-Thirds Of IT Leaders Want DevOps Skills To Modernize Operations
A new survey of enterprise IT operations leaders by infrastructure monitoring and management specialist OpsRamp reveals that 64 percent indicate DevOps is the most sought-after skill. Other in-demand skills are cloud certifications (61 percent), industry knowledge (56 percent), data science (47 percent) and machine learning (44 percent). Among other findings, nearly 60 percent of organizations have more than half of their mission-critical workloads running in the public cloud.
Identifying And Abstracting Business Intelligence From Kubernetes Workloads
In the age of big data, businesses are inundated with data points. While they know there’s an abundance of valuable resources available to them, making sense of this data to derive actionable insights is often still a challenge. CNCF industry survey data shows workload complexity and monitoring remain top challenges for enterprises in terms of using and deploying Kubernetes. Many understand there are valuable resources within these environments, but struggle to best identify and extract meaning from machine data. While most of this data is readily available, it just takes the right tools to gather and view intelligent insights.
Cisco: AI, Intent-Based Networking In High Demand
IT teams are anxious to adopt intent-based networking (IBN), artificial intelligence and machine learning to improve the operations, security or business impacts of their networks. That’s according to Cisco’s 2020 Global Networking Trends Report. Cisco asked more than 2,000 IT leaders and network strategists how they plan to prioritize investment and the current state of their networks. Raakhee Mistry, senior director of enterprise networks marketing at Cisco, tells us IT leaders and network strategists are “incredibly optimistic” about the advancements they expect to make in the coming years.
Industry Voice: How To Advance Your DevOps Capability And Measure What Matters
There is a temptation, once operating under the DevOps model, to rest on your laurels, content that you are now working in a modern development environment. The upshot is many organizations don’t measure the outcomes brought about through DevOps. They’ve done the hard bit, undergoing the initial technology, people, and process changes that the model demands, but are leaving unknown benefits on the table by not measuring how the approach is now performing.
Juniper Set To Reinforce Edge Networking, Cloud
There is a fundamental, but perhaps a logical evolution in the way networks are being built to handle hybrid cloud applications – resources are moving closer to the edge; data centers are becoming more distributed and cloud hyperscalers are building bigger backbones to handle that traffic. That is the overarching networking landscape laid out by Juniper’s CTO Bikash Koley in an interview this week ahead of the company’s NXTWORK 2019 customer event next month.
5G May Soon Explode With New Factory Functionality
Speedy 5G networking is beginning to show up; in some places it is already a reality. While we know it will speed up consumer applications such as streaming or downloads – like a movie in seconds – what will it mean for industrial settings? At a session at the Design and Manufacturing Minneapolis show last week, Joshua Ness, senior manager of 5G Labs at Verizon, explained the coming impact of 5G during his session, Prepping for the 5G Factory.
Ten Years Of DevOps: With The Hype Cycle Moving On – What’s Next?
This year marks 10 years since the term DevOps was first coined, during a now legendary presentation at a Toronto tech conference. Anyone who’s seen the 90s brawler film Fight Club will know—the first rule of Fight Club is: you don’t talk about Fight Club. All those years ago, IT professionals weren’t part of Fight Club—but a small number formed their own underground DevOps club. But even though the first rule of DevOps Club is, “always talk about DevOps,” it’s taken a decade to catch on in a significant way.
Accelerating Cloud Scale And Migration With SD-WAN
Mission critical enterprise applications and services are increasingly moving to the cloud, driving the need for wide area network (WAN) agility, flexibility, and scalability. For customers deploying Internet of Things (IoT) devices and applications, the massive amount of local data and low latency requires IT organizations to scale edge network capabilities. Find out how SD-WAN technology is becoming widely deployed to enable accelerated cloud access, quality of user experience, increased WAN bandwidth and support for IoT applications.
How To Harmonize Dev And Ops
When DevOps first emerged roughly a decade ago, it looked like a smart solution to a longstanding problem. Developer and IT operations teams often worked separately and antagonistically, rarely collaborating. So why not bring the opposing sides together into a single department with a shared mission? Since then, DevOps has become an industry‑standard methodology for rapid‑fire software development. Still, in many organizations DevOps is something of a shotgun marriage, an uneasy union of clashing cultures and conflicting goals.
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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