Using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Free Tier to deploy a HA containerized web application

Firstly, I’m not a front-end developer – nor do I aspire to be. This project first started out as an exercise to get more familiar with Golangs/Go’s net/http module. Creating a janky web app (with probably the worse UI known to humankind) was just a means to an end (see below evidence) I found an

Creating Terraform Providers from YANG Data With JTAF (Juniper Terraform Automation Framework)

Starting out in my NetDevOps journey I didn’t really have much love for IaC frameworks *cough ansible cough* – the whole concept of trying to implement code-logic in a domain-specific language didn’t sit right with me. Ansible just felt like unnecessary abstraction, any attempt at trying to implement any advanced logic and the wheels quickly

Provisioning MPLS L3 VPN’s w/async Python + RestConf

Introduction/Rambilings https://github.com/thecraigus/mpls-auto-provision/tree/master When initially getting into code and marrying it with network engineering, I wasn’t overly obsessed with the speed of execution – my code ran (most of the time) and that was that. Whatever I scripted tended to be faster than manually typing it out box-by-box anyway, any attempt at micro-optimizations tended to be

Unit Testing Network Infrastructure w/ pyATS

There’s nothing better than a greenfield deployment. The infrastructure has been deployed to the ‘Gold Standard’ in terms of design practices and all required optimisations have been put in place from a network engineering perspective to ensure the best user and application experience. In reality, these infrastructures don’t live in an isolated environment, moves adds,

Model-Driven Streaming Telemetry with TIG Stack (IOS-XE)

In the SDN/NetDevOps era, it would be unfair to leave network monitoring behind. Monitoring and general network ‘observability’ is going through just as much of a transformation as the configuration management of the devices themselves. SNMP, although highly structured by design can be a bit of a management nightmare for the uninitiated. Trawling through endless

Creating a Cisco SDWAN Chatbot with Azure App Services + Python

In a previous blog-post I confessed my affinity for ‘ChatOps’, and how instant messaging clients can be used to help network operations teams (using a framework like stackstorm and ‘event’ driven automation). I wanted to explore this idea a bit more with another post. However, this time focusing on how the network administrator might actively

Exploring gNMI with Arista cEOS + YANG

In-network programmability we abandoned the CLI in favor of the API, but what transport protocol do we use? In my journey, I have typically utilised REST, Netconf, RESTconf and even a bit of CLI scraping down an SSH connection when needed to. One of the more relatively recent additions to the network programmability party is

Event Driven Network Automation with StackStorm & WebEx ChatOps

The bulk of network automation I tend to see is what I call ‘proactive’ automation where a task or process has been disseminated into its component parts and codeded up in a language or framework ready to be ran at the behest of the network administrator/engineer. Examples of this approach could be firewall policy extraction

VXLAN BGP-EVPN with Cumulus + NXOS

In one of my previous blogs I outlined the basic configuration required for a simple VXLAN deployment between 2 Cisco Nexus 9k V switches. The overall aim of extending layer 2 across a layer 3 backbone was achieved, however as is the default behavior of VXLAN with no control plane mechanism – the solution still

GNS3 OnDemand TestBed

GNS3 is not the only show in town nowadays – relative newcomers like EVE-NG and CML ( RIP VIRL) have given GNS3 stiff competition and seem to be gaining ground – whenever I see a screenshot of someone’s virtual lab it tends to be in EVE-NG nowadays. I have yet to make the switch and