Show 333: Automation & Orchestration In Networking

Today’s Weekly Show gets into orchestration and automation. We’re seeing networking pros adopt scripting tools like Ansible, Salt, and Puppet – the same tools that are used by Linux sysadmins. At the same time, OpenStack, Kubernetes, and VMware are promoting “end-to-end” visions of orchestration across the entire data center.

Network engineers look around at the DMZ, WAN edge, campus LAN, and the legacy hosts in the data center and wonder how all of these will connect together. While there’s a lot of new stuff bubbling to the surface, the old stuff hasn’t gone away.

Our goal for this conversation is to provide some insight into orchestration and automation for the network. Our guests are Pete Lumbis, a systems engineer at Cumulus Networks, and Michael Damkot, a senior network engineer.

We define our terms around automation and orchestration, and examine some of the tools and platforms most closely associated with each.

We’ll look at the upsides and downsides that come with embracing automation and orchestration, and try to figure out how to these bring tools and processes into existing environments. And we’ll also venture a few predictions about where all this is headed.

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