This part of the challenge will cover the setup of the infrastructure at AWS with Terraform, and since I’m a fan of Python I will use/learn FastAPI for web front server effect, plus a picture embedded in the served web page will come from a secured S3 bucket. All of this was part of this great training course Networking in Public Cloud Deployments. We will create all the basic infrastructure from your PC just to follow the training course and gain the fundamental knowledge that we will need for what is to come. ...

I found my next challenge while I was defining the Lab exercises for Networking in Public Cloud Deployments training course. Honestly, I didn’t know much about what was ahead, but I had a great learning idea and the will to go through the challenge. I’m not saying that this is correct nor complete, is my first run exploring the whole thing, so I’m just saying “hey! I can do this!, and this is the Proof of Concept. ...

In the previous post we set up the infrastructure at AWS and we stored the states at GitLab. Now let’s go for the most fun part, integrate everything. We will modify a security group to allow HTTP access to the FastAPI app, and we will have all kinds of notifications and requests for approvals sent to Slack. Every step will be logged and stored in the form of messages in Slack and in a DevOps fashion at GitLab: terraform states, artifacts (which are specifics output that you want to store), logs for each run of the pipeline, etc. This will give you incredible traceability of your IaC. ...

In the previous post, I oversimplified the situation just for an easy onboarding to the case. Now it’s time to go into deeper details. First I will describe a bit more the design I had for this case, with my context and constraints, and then a great option to add dynamic routing (based on some talks with Ivan Pepelnjak and Nicola Modena, thanks for that gentlemen). By the end of the post, you will have a pretty complete rationale that might be helpful. Then it’s your job to find the right balance for your scenario. ...

Not so long ago a customer asked me for help on how to block IP addresses on their regional firewalls infrastructure. They needed a solution urgently, since lately there were some severe attacks on other companies in the region, and they didn’t want to be “on the news” too. Having a network engineer available 7x24 to block IP addresses on all the firewalls is not timewise efficient nor effective. It is simply not realistic to get him to work at any time (like midnight) and configure everything in less than 1 hour without errors and back and forths while chatting in the middle of the crisis with the rest of the organization. ...

Some time ago I was asked to design the networking part as a basic DRP solution with the aim to fulfill an audit requirement, basically, the DRP has to cover the scenario of the main Datacenter going completely offline. So, all or nothing scenario, and only the main applications were covered. The secondary site would be an already existing site in the same metropolitan area. It was very time-constrained, so there were several aspects to overcome, the most important ones were related to IP addressing. ...

Finally, I got my expert subscription to ipspace.net, and enrolled in one of the full courses. After a couple of weeks, I have to say that I’m really impressed with the quality, content, and structure. It’s my best career investment in a long time. It feels like a master degree in networking, why? - content already digested and explained better than a vendor static long pages and isolated from a wider technology perspective ...

Introduction A couple of months ago I was tasked to accelerate a cloud migration from the networking perspective. Context: Cisco ACI already deployed, with security rules grouped by functions and already agreed with the security team Migration to Oracle Cloud (aka OCI) already started and growing But, since Cisco ACI and Oracle OCI are configured in a different way, now there were two growing and divergent schemas, where manual deployment on OCI would take several months and a lot of conflicts, between operations and delivery. ...

Even if you don’t fully understand what is an API, it is really easy to leverage their power to have some useful information directly sent to a collaboration platform and receive it on your mobile or PC in real-time. All the tools in use are Free: Python, Slack, and WebEx Teams. In this post, I will show you how to send Cisco ACI faults and events to messages straight to Slack and WebEx Teams. ...

In my previous post, I showed you how easy it is to have a network configuration backup with a GUI and messaging and keep it synchronized with GitHub to see the changes, and also sending messages to Slack and emails when it runs. For this post, I modified the scripts to use a cool Open Source tool named Gogs (Thanks Nikolay Ryzhkov for bringing this tool to my attention). With Gogs you will have a local repository system with the same functionalities as GitHub, so you don’t need to worry about sending your configs outside of your own infrastructure. ...