7:00-8:30AM Registration
8:00-8:30AM
Opening Remarks
 Welcome and Opening Remarks – Tom Kacprzynski (slides) (video)
8:30-9:00AM Session 1 Ethernet Past and Future, Finding The Right Lever – Peter Jones (slides)(video)
9:00-9:30AM Session 2 Rethinking BGP in the Data Center – Russ White (slides)(video)
9:30-10:00AM Session 3 Seamless MPLS – Vinit Jain (slides)(video)
10:00-10:15AM Break 1
10:15-10:45AM Session 4 Modeling Network Reliability More Simply Using Probability – Rachel Traylor (slides)(video)
10:45-11:20AM Session 5 Multicloud the next generation cloud infrastructure – Deepti Chandra & Jacopo Pianigiani (slides)(video)
11:20-11:50AM Session 6 High Speed Subsea Optical Networks – Tabata Materan (slides)(video)
12:00-1:30 PM Lunch
Track A
1:30-2:00PM Session 7 Streaming telemetry under the hood: something to think about – Viktor Osipchuk (slides)(video)
2:00-2:30PM Session 8 Egress Traffic Controller Using Telemetry and Service Layer APIs – Mike Korshunov (slides)(video)
2:30-3:00PM Break 2
3:00-3:30PM Session 9 Building a Private IP/MPLS Network – Nathan Gotz (slides)(video)
3:30-4:00PM Session 10 Re-Defining Core and Access: A New, Two-Tier Network Model – Chris Grundemann (slides)(video)
4:00-4:30PM Session 11 The State of Networking: Why Analytics and Monitoring are More Important Than Ever – Avi Freedman (slides)(video)
Track B
1:30-2:00PM Session 12 AI Considerations for an Automated Cyber Security Strategy – Ron Winward (slides)(video)
2:00-2:30PM Session 13 Optimizing YANG Model Usage for Automation and Programmability – Craig Hill (slides)(video)
2:30-3:00PM Break 2
3:00-3:30PM Session 14 Python for Network Engineers – A Practical Guide for Getting Started – Jeremy Schulman (slides)(video)
3:30-4:00PM Session 15 Transitioning from ‘write mem’ to ‘git commit’ – Teren Sapp (slides)(video)
4:00-4:30PM Session 16 Network Automation @ LinkedIn – Naufal Jamal (slides)(video)
4:45 – 5:00 PM  Closing Remarks
5:00-7:00PM Social Join us for drinks, appetizers, raffle gifts and time to network with others.

 

Ethernet Past and Future, Finding The Right Lever

Ethernet has been on a long journey. Let’s consider where have been, and new places we are going with this technology, specifically with 2.5G/5G BASE-T (aka NBASE-T) and the under-development 10Mb/s Single Pair Ethernet ecosystem.

 

Peter Jones

Peter is a Principal Engineer within the Catalyst development team, and have been with Cisco for since 2005. He also chairs the NBASE-T Alliance. Peter works on capabilities and solutions in Catalyst system architecture (ASIC/Hardware/Software) that may be up to 5 (or more) years out. He works in industry bodies such as IEEE 802.3, NBASE-T Alliance, Ethernet Alliance, which define and promote new Ethernet Standards. Peter chairs the A1:H14-T Alliance. He is interested in Infrastructure Evolution and Consumable Technology.

 

Rethinking BGP in the Data Center

In the past, most hyperscalers have assumed or defaulted to using BGP for their data center fabrics. Recently, however, many of them are moving to link state technologies for their fabrics. This presentation considers the reasons why, and provides an overview of some of the technologies hyperscalers are moving to.  I intend to discuss RIFT, OpenFabric, Open/R, and Arista’s proposal, as these are the ones being considered by the various hyperscalers I know of.

 

Russ White

Russ White began working with computers in the mid-1980’s, and computer networks in 1990. He has experience in designing, deploying, breaking, and troubleshooting large scale networks, and is a strong communicator from the white board to the board room. Across that time, he has co-authored more than forty software patents, participated in the development of several Internet standards, helped develop the CCDE and the CCAr, and worked in Internet governance with the Internet Society. Russ has a background covering a broad spectrum of topics, including radio frequency engineering and graphic design, and is an active student of philosophy and culture.Currently a network architect at LinkedIn, Russ is also a co-host at the Network Collective, serves on the Routing Area Directorate at the IETF, co-chairs the BABEL working group, serves on the Technical Services Council/as a maintainer on the open source FR Routing project, and serves on the Linux Foundation (Networking) board. Russ is also active in the Lightning Network open source community and a number of other open source projects.Russ writes extensively, including twelve books, two video training courses, speaking at venues around the world, presenting webinars, and numerous articles from peer reviewed journals to blogs. His most recent works are Computer Networking Problems and Solutions, The Art of Network Architecture, Navigating Network Complexity, and the Intermediate System to Intermediate System LiveLesson.

MSIT Capella University, MACM Shepherds Theological Seminary, PhD (in progress) Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
CCIE #2635, CCDE 2007::1, CCAr

Seamless MPLS

Increasing demand for video content, Mobile broadband and Cloud services are pushing the limits of service provider networks. Service providers need to add network capacity at the lowest cost per bit and reduce their network operations cost. Traditionally, operators have implemented separate networks for separate services (e.g., fixed and mobile) which results in a sub optimal utilization of network resources. Many service providers are implementing fixed and mobile network convergence (FMC) to optimize network utilization and to reduce network capital and operational expenditures. When offering services over a single or converged services network, the end-to-end network must be scalable, flexible to meet evolving service needs and support simple, rapid service provisioning. Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) is the preferred choice for implementing end-to-end networks, a market leader in MPLS development, offers a complete toolkit to implement “end-to-end MPLS” networks. Seamless MPLS is a key component of this toolkit. This Session will review the motivation, architecture and building blocks required to implement a Seamless MPLS network.

Vinit Jain

Vinit Jain, 4X CCIE #22854 is a Technical Leader in Cisco TAC providing escalation support to teams supporting routing technologies on IOS, IOS XE, IOS XR and NxOS code base. Vinit is also a Cisco Press author of Troubleshooting BGP and Troubleshooting with NX-OS and Live Lesson series on BGP Troubleshooting. Vinit is a distinguished speaker at Cisco Live and have presented at other conferences such as NANOG, Cisco Support Forums, etc. Vinit has expertise in troubleshooting Service Provider, Enterprise and Data Center environments and holds multiple certifications on programming and databases along with CCIE.

 

Modeling Network Reliability More Simply Using Probability

Networks are complex objects; analyzing their reliability under random flow even more so. What is the probability a node in a network will fail at any time, given that the requests to that node come in randomly, and that the workload is also random? How do we look at the reliability of the entire network when traffic flows within the network and also arrives from outside the network? Can we determine mathematically the structural importance of any particular node?The answer to all of these questions is yes, and under very general conditions. We discuss novel research done in this area through Dr. Traylor’s PhD thesis, showing that in all of these cases, a closed form solution can be given. We also open the discussion for interactive participation, seeking dialogue on applications of this research across multiple fields.

Rachel Traylor

Dr. Rachel Traylor is the co-founder of The Math Citadel, a private research firm in mathematics. She has a PhD in mathematics, specializing in stochastic analysis, probability, queuing theory, and reliability theory. Her work includes work in stochastic reliability of networks under random flow, dependent sequences of random variables, and anomaly detection. Formerly, she was a research scientist for Dell EMC, with 6 pending patents across several topics. She has been a speaker at the SNIA Storage Developer’s Conference and a Tech Field Day delegate and presenter.

Multicloud the Next Generation Cloud Infrastructure

So, what are data center networks really built for? Short answer “applications”. Whether it is a public cloud provider, private enterprise, FSI or telco cloud – the nature of applications across each data center type impose a different set of demands on the underlying network infrastructure. A next generation architecture is one that is versatile yet modular enough to address these different application needs, whether these are HPC and Big Data, legacy or real-time content. A common architecture goal is for a unified and consolidated network design that can leverage standardized technology attributes and can integrate a versatile workload environment be it high performance bare metal servers to a microservices enabled container environment. This tutorial is aimed at an in-depth structured understanding of data center business and technical requirements and how EVPN-VXLAN constructs serve as a swiss-knife approach to achieve the same. Practical case study examples that translate theoretical concepts into building blocks for designing and automating multi-tenant data center deployments. Explore how a unified technology solution can help build a network that grows with increasing east-west traffic, seamlessly connects with the backbone for north-south communication while leveraging familiar protocol concepts to achieve security insertion. We will also go over operator issues with traffic optimization, multicast and BUM traffic handling and other common pitfalls. A final step would be to define requirements for a cohesive solution using a centralized controller that enables a data center network operator to leverage the same degree of agility and visibility for both the physical network and the application infrastructure to truly build a software-defined data center.

Deepti Chandra 

Deepti Chandra is currently Senior Systems Engineer with the Cloud Provider Vertical at Juniper Networks. Along with her past experience as a Technical Product Manager, she has multiple years of direct experience with customers in the Data Center and Cloud domain. Along with co-authoring a software patent, her most recent publication includes the Juniper – This week series “Data Center deployment with EVPN-VXLAN”, where she has factored in her field engagement experience that comes from versatile roles with pre-sales, operations and engineering.

High Speed Subsea Optical Networks

Globalization, portability, the concept of cloud, instant response time, real-time video and all the interaction through multiple applications wouldn’t be possible in today’s world, without a high-speed connection backbone between continents. Before the internet era, Broadcasting was the only way to reach masses; nowadays, interaction is added through social media and mobile apps around the world, providing instant and massive communication in real time. All this is only possible thanks to the connectivity between continents based on High Speed Subsea Optical Networks. The first submarine cable was laid in 1850 for Telegraph communication. Over 168 years later we have evolved from receiving a signal of electrical pulses in Morse code for a telegram, into transmission of high definition video in real time with low latency. Since construction of the submarine cables take long periods of times, the need for immediate communication have led providers to develop new technologies to dramatically increase the initial capacity of existing cables while new ones are being built. Join me in this session to learn a little more about the evolution of submarine cable technologies and the new players behind their construction. I will go through network architecture and system design, regulation and policy, testing and measurement, business models, upgrades and increasing capacity, maintenance and marine operations.
Also I will present a real case: BRUSA.

Tabata Materan

Bachelor in Science with a degree in Electronic Engineering and a Master in Communications and Data Networks. Over 22 years of experience in the Telecommunications industry with deep knowledge in International Networks. Global Account Director at Telxius Cable USA. Born and raised in Caracas – Venezuela, with the last 10 years based in Miami, FL working for Telefónica, and most recently at Telxius. Have managed international projects for the largest US based Carriers and OTTs connecting North America with the LATAM region.

Track A
Streaming Telemetry Under the Hood: Something to Think About

Streaming telemetry is a hot topic and yet one of the least explained. One can find some high-level information about this technology, but is it good enough to jump into this new world and forget about SNMP? The goal of this session is to briefly remind what telemetry is and cover the most interesting aspects from the router perspective and from the collection side. The session will contain a number of questions you should ask yourself as well as your supplying vendor about fast data streaming. Come to know interesting things about telemetry to be ready for your next step!

Viktor Osipchuk

A Technical Marketing Engineer at SPNSA (Service Provider Networking and Software Automation) Group and currently focused on automation, telemetry, data models and APIs for large scale Web and Service Provider deployments. Joined Cisco Russia in 2011 and worked there with the biggest national Tier-1 SP customers on different projects, including development of backbone designs. After moving to Cisco HQ in San Jose, had an opportunity to work directly with one of the biggest and most interesting Web Customers in the world. Before joining Cisco, worked for a couple of different networking vendors, holding in total around 14 years of diverse networking experience. Was a speaker in different events, such as CiscoLive, CiscoConnect, Canadian ISP Summit, NFD, etc.

Egress Traffic Controller Using Telemetry and Service Layer APIs

Most of us, probably, have been in a situation where users have reported performance issues with the network or that the network is down and we have to investigate to discover the root cause of the problem. When this happens, we usually rely on some sort of network monitoring and reporting application in order to get an idea of what our network is doing at the time. In this talk we will get a deeper look into automated remediation techniques by utilizing such components as Streaming Telemetry and APIs provided by Network Infrastructure layer to proactively target network problems as part of the deployment exercise.

 

Mike Korshunov

TME @ Cisco Service Provider. Handling CI/CD tools and programmability on IOS-XR, previously software engineer. Speaker at Cisco Live, hackathons enthusiast.

 

Building a Private IP/MPLS Network

Some electric and gas utilities are still installing and running private TDM infrastructure. With the grid becoming smarter and the need for more data about the underlying infrastructure, the underlying networks need to be able to support these new and emerging technologies. IP/MPLS provides a converged infrastructure to support legacy TDM and new emerging services for utilities allowing utilities a migration path to the future providing a more proactive grid for end users. One of the reasons for keeping TDM services is the unique needs of utilities but there are ways to keep those unique TDM services in IP/MPLS. This presentation will discuss:
– Lessons learned from our private MPLS deployment
– Unique TDM pseudowire needs for utilities
– How MPLS can support legacy services along with new and emerging services

Nathan Gotz

Nathan has been at We Energies for over 5 years in the Telecommunications department on the Radio Microwave Transport team and Network team. In these positions he has helped design, build, deploy, and support multiple private network platforms such as IP/MPLS, fiber, microwave, MAS, and local area networks throughout the We Energies service territory. Nathan graduated from the University of Wisconsin Parkside in 2013 and was an intern at We Energies during this time.

 

 

Re-Defining Core and Access: A New, Two-Tier Network Model

In the past, when we designed, built, and operated networks as a collection of devices (routers, switches, and firewalls) we defined our network architecture in terms of physical layers. The three-tiered Core, Aggregation/Distribution, and Access model is familiar to every network engineer. Server virtualization and new application frameworks have forced us to reconsider this model. Instead of a multi-tier hierarchical design, we have found folded-Clos (spine-leaf) networks much more efficient at moving large quantities of packets from anywhere to anywhere. In order to keep up with the speed of virtualized compute and storage, we’ve adopted virtualized networks that run as an overlay (with the physical Clos network becoming an underlay).Visualizing the network in this way gives us a new 2-tier model. Instead of trying to conceptualize the physical network into an outdated hierarchy, we can now look at the entire logical network platform as a two tier system. The underlay is the Core layer switch and the overlay is the Access layer router. This is super helpful when we want to decide where network functions should live. The Core is still there to move packets, fast, and the Access is there to handle routing and policy as well as to provide additional features and functions.

Chris Grundemann

Creative|Technologist. Curious. Boisterous. Autotelic Autodidact. Heretic. Rider of Boards. Writer of Words. (((Security/SDN/Cloud/Mobility @MyriadSupply)))

The State of Networking: Why Analytics and Monitoring are More Important Than Ever

Most business processes are now transacted over networks, and increasingly, over the internet. Yet many enterprises and digital businesses lack visibility into the network traffic that underlies those processes, or rely on outdated technology that can’t handle modern scale or cloud deployment models. It’s like FedEx or UPS operating today without package tracking. The result is long incident response times and a lack of proactive anomaly detection that leaves today’s businesses at increased risk for performance, availability, and security incidents which directly impact customer experience and revenue. During this talk, Dan Ellis, former head of content delivery operations for Netflix, who now serves as CTO of Kentik, will present the “State of the Union” for web-scale network traffic visibility, including both open-source and commercial options, and modern requirements for network and performance data, visualizations, correlations, anomaly detection, and automatic actions. Ellis will also discuss how monitoring and analytics enable automation that allows networks to be manageable as they grow more complex.

Avi Freedman

Avi Freedman is Co-founder and CEO of Kentik, the leader in network traffic intelligence for modern digital business operations. He has decades of experience as a networking technologist and executive. As a network pioneer in 1992, Freedman started Philadelphia’s first Internet Service Provider (ISP), known as netaxs. He went on to run network operations at Akamai for over a decade as VP of Network Infrastructure and then Chief Network Scientist. He also ran the network at AboveNet and was the CTO of ServerCentral.

 

Track B
AI Considerations for an Automated Cyber Security Strategy

Security threats are growing faster than security teams and budgets cannot keep up. There is already a huge talent shortage in security. Proliferation of data from dozens of security products in complex environments is paradoxically making it harder, not easier, for teams to detect and investigate threats. Hackers are leveraging automation in their attacks, increasing the number of targets and the probability of victimizing organizations even in the smallest of windows of opportunity. Like with the Equifax hack, most hacks do not stem from highly complex exploits, but merely from exploiting a small window of opportunity between public announcement of vulnerabilities and the actual patch being available and applied on the systems.Most attacks go through a Cyber Kill Chain of events and as a defender you get a handful of opportunities to detect and block breaches. That means you have a chance to come out on top providing you have visibility. Unfortunately, that is not the whole story. Finding the proverbial needle in the haystack has become nearly impossible without automation. The attackers have an unfair advantage over the defenders in cyber-attacks, it’s time for security strategies to leverage automation in detection and mitigation, restore the balance and increase our chances to come out on top in the war against cyber threats. This presentation will discuss the different options in automating the detection and mitigation of attacks and where they fit in a modern cyber security strategy.

Ron Winward

Ron Winward is a Security Evangelist for Radware, where he helps execute the company’s thought leadership on today’s security threat landscape. Ron brings 20 years of experience in the Internet service provider space, most recently as Director of Network Engineering of ServerCentral. With an expertise in network architectures and DDoS mitigation, Ron has helped design solutions for carriers, enterprises, and cybersecurity service providers around the world.

Optimizing YANG Model Usage for Automation and Programmability

While the power of model-driven approaches for programmability and automation with YANG models are becoming evident, the usage of those models is not intuitive and can be quite complex, even more so for application developers familiar with languages such as python, but not familiar with network protocols. This session will introduce the open source tool set of YANG Development Kit (YDK) and discuss how network operators can leverage the capabilities of YDK for YANG models into their network operations tools. The session will provide a brief overview of model-driven approaches, the basic fundamentals of YDK, and several use cases as they apply to both automation of configuration and how YANG models can be leveraged to be the driving force behind model-driven telemetry.

 

Craig Hill

Craig Hill has been working at Cisco for 23 years, and is currently a Distinguished Systems Engineer in the U.S. Public Sector CTO office. Customer focus set is government Defense/Intelligence and large enterprise. Core competency target core WANs, campus, and data center, and includes large-scale routing and switching, IP/MPLS/Segment Routing, MPLS over IP, data center designs, and high speed encryption. More recent evolving technologies includes segment routing, SDN/NFV, network programmability and automation using Ansible, Python, YDK, and other open source tools, and network designs in public cloud. Craig is a 23 year CCIE (#1628) in Routing and Switching, and is based out of the Cisco office in Herndon, VA.

Python for Network Engineers – A Practical Guide for Getting Started

Jeremy presents his views on how Network Engineers can reasonably get started using Python, without requiring them to be programmers, developers, or software engineers. The presentation will consist of slides, followed by an interactive use-case using Jupyter notebook to make Python “feel like” a CLI.

Jeremy Schulman

Jeremy is a software engineer, developer advocate, and has been involved in modern network automation since 2012. He has contributed to Ansible, Puppet, Chef, and developed a number of open-source projects for the networking community. You can find him on Twitter @nwkautomaniac.

Transitioning from ‘write mem’ to ‘git commit’

Networks have largely been configured in the same manner for over 20 years despite advancements in automation tools and API functionality. We will go through some of the challenges both technically and culturally with deploying automation on the network and actually work through an example of full CI/CD utilizing Git, Ansible and Jenkins to configure the network.

Teren Sapp

Teren has had a variety of responsibilities in networking over the years including experience in the public sector, enterprise and service provider. Teren has always had an interest in large scale data center design and automation along with service provider networks and is very much a hands on network engineer at heart. Teren is currently a SE Manager and Solution Architect at Arista Networks for the north central area, in his free time he enjoys spending time with his family, spending time outdoors and various home improvement projects, lately more focused on woodworking.

Network Automation @ LinkedIn

The presentation will be about simple network automation tools that we have built in-house using python to make our lives easy. Some tools that i would like to cover are:
* AuditIn – A tool which audits network and figures out if there are any potential issues in the network and it also gives flexibility to the user to customize the audit in such a way that he can populate a yaml file with the audit parameters and run a customized audit as per his needs.
* Litracert – A troubleshooting tool which can scan a network path between any given source and destination and shows issues like errors/drops/latency etc along the paths
* NetSMART – Its a smart way of doing network maintenances. This tool captures the entire snapshot of the devices in terms of configuration/routing parameters and post maintenance, it gives a summarized report of changes happened in those network devices. This helps the engineers to find out if there are any undesired changes in the network due to the maintenance
* Device Decom Tool – How we decommisioned 2 DC’s of 5000 network devices in 3 days?

Naufal Jamal

A CCIE network engineer with 12 years of experience in deploying networks of different sizes currently focused on solving network engineering problems using python