I recently had the pleasure of talking with Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks about the work/life balance in the context of network engineering. You can listen to this podcast here.

I think this topic is particularly relevant at this time of year when it is critical that data center networks are performing flawlessly, while those who are responsible for keeping them running are trying to carve out some quality time with friends and family for the holidays. Intent-based networking (IBN) is the solution to this problem.

Intent-based networking was born from the notion that it’s possible to programmatically reason about what a business needs from its network. Capturing high-level intent and translating it to a working network is what Apstra AOS™ is all about.

Therefore, it’s natural for many people to question what the impact of IBN is on network engineers. Many people immediately jump to the conclusion that such systems will put network engineers out of work. What they miss — and this is something we are very passionate about at Apstra — is that IBN and solutions like AOS will actually help network engineers improve the balance between their daily work and their personal lives.

But what causes the imbalance in the lives of network engineers in the first place? The first thing we need to do is acknowledge the problem.

Everything is Broken

This week I had to figure out how to use Python to transmit an ethernet frame. There were constraints and requirements, of course, at every level that complicated the task at hand. I ended up spending all night working on the issue. I went down many rabbit holes. Poor or missing documentation, bad software engineering choices, wrong code examples, and random weirdness all contributed to me spending hours trying to get the task at hand done. All of this was an effort to compensate for a lack of proper network tooling in the first place.

This is the life of a network engineer. This is why so much of what we do is all in our head and so difficult to explain or share with others. Network engineers have a difficult job. It’s certainly a high-stress job much of the time.

For many network engineers, achieving a healthy work/life balance is something of a Holy Grail. At times it seems like there is always something getting in the way of completing even the simplest of tasks. Does it have to be like this?

There’s a Better Way

What if there was a better approach to networking? A saner way of designing, deploying, and operating networks? A smarter, less stressful way with new and better tools to elevate and de-stress you? We’ve all heard the phrase “work smarter, not harder”, but that’s difficult to do when every resource you have is insufficient or misleading in some way.

We all know what we want the network to do, so let there be tools that help you just do it without all the insanity. This is what Intent-Based Networking is all about. It’s what AOS was built to do.

If you want a better work/life balance as a network engineer, then you can start today by learning more about Intent-Based Networking and AOS. Watch this webinar, then contact us or request a demo.

View an on-demand webinar on building/operating physical and overlay networks

Read the white paper “Apstra Operating System Architecture Overview”

Originally published at blog.apstra.com.

Solving customer problems is our top priority at Apstra®. We live and breathe our customers and customer success is a goal we’re extremely passionate about. Apstra has generated revenue globally since 2016, and while we have hundreds of nodes in production it is with excitement and pride that we share today a very special customer case study: Yahoo Japan Corporation .

I am particularly excited about Yahoo Japan Corporation because they have been a great partner to Apstra, working with us since last year when they deployed AOS® in production. Yahoo Japan Corporation is among the most innovative, technologically capable and credible companies anywhere. For those in the US that are not familiar with Yahoo Japan Corporation, they are the largest Internet provider in Japan and also hold the following leadership positions in Japan:

• Stronger than Google in search and mail
• Stronger than eBay in auction
• Stronger than Netflix in video
• Stronger than PayPal in financial payments

By all measures, they’re a webscale company; and like other webscales, they’re seeing an explosion in their traffic growth. For this reason, they have built their data centers using the same state-of-the-art principles the hyperscales have adopted:

• A leaf spine Clos design, which accommodates large amounts of East-West traffic, which is essential to support today’s web applications
• A multi-hardware vendor strategy, leveraging both established hardware vendors (Arista, Cisco), and open alternatives (Cumulus and OCP hardware)
• Major investments in automation and analytics for efficient scalable operations.

DIY, Hardware Lock-In, or Apstra

Like other webscale companies, Yahoo Japan Corporation embraced a disaggregated approach, separating the hardware, choice of Network Operating System, and automation layer. If you’re going to the OCP Summit next week, you’ll hear more about these best practices and we look forward to seeing you there. In their search for the right operational model for their data center network, Yahoo Japan Corporation had three options:

1. Use the automation software provided by the hardware vendor. Yahoo Japan Corporation concluded quickly that this approach didn’t work for them because of their multi-vendor strategy.
2. Build it themselves — after all, if anyone can build the automation software, it would be Yahoo Japan Corporation, given their industry leading technological acumen.
3. Use Apstra AOS, which is the only multi-vendor solution that would enable them to automate their entire processes involved in designing, building, and operating their data center networks — day 0, day 1, and day 2+.

Yahoo Japan Corporation investigated DIY and Apstra extensively, and decided against hiring a large team, at a high cost over many years to deliver such a critical undertaking and selected and deployed Apstra’s AOS as the first commercial automation software ever deployed in the company’s network.

Through this process, they also realized that they really didn’t have to choose between Build and Buy. In working with us closely, they concluded that we had built an extensible platform that they could rely on and develop around — and in the process, integrate AOS into their environment to meet their requirements.

Indeed, by adopting AOS, Yahoo Japan Corporation got access to all of the capabilities Apstra has built into our solution — capabilities they didn’t have to build themselves or integrate — and that they immediately were able to leverage in production. Amongst those capabilities:

• A highly scalable distributed data store
• Abstractions that capture user intent
• A graph representation of all intent and infrastructure state, which captures in real-time all the relationships between objects, e.g. user intent, topology, physical elements (including switches, interfaces, transceivers, links), logical elements (virtual networks, security zones), and telemetry
• Extensible telemetry agents that can extract telemetry across platforms
• Device drivers across various vendor devices used to both configure, and extract telemetry from these devices
• Comprehensive design tools that architecture teams can use to design data center PODs in a matter of minutes
• Comprehensive build tools to stand up PODs in minutes
• A continuous validation engine that generates anomaly alerts in real-time anytime infrastructure state deviates from intent
• Intent-Based Analytics™, an integrated big data pipeline that enables the user to configure signatures pertaining to how they’d like their network to run in a matter of minutes
• An intuitive Web interface that one can use to design, build, deploy, and operate these networks with unmatched simplicity.

Furthermore, given the unmatched extensibility of the Apstra solution, and its programmatic nature, they could leverage our APIs, streaming interfaces, graph queries, plugin modules, and other methods to extend the platform and integrate it within their environment.

Yahoo Japan Corporation recognized that the DIY path is not a one-time investment but a forever internal commitment to keep up with best-of-breed and best practices that is the sole mission and life blood of Apstra.

The company also recognized that we’re building features at record speed — in their words, “Apstra’s feature velocity is unmatched, and a huge differentiator.” In standardizing on Apstra, they are riding along with us on the journey, benefiting from all the features and capabilities that we’ll be adding to our platform.

Hardware lock-in versus DIY — you no longer have to choose

In our engagements with customers and prospects — webscales, but also service providers and large enterprises, it is clear that many organizations are facing the same choice:

Choice 1: Should I use the software that’s provided by a hardware vendor?

Choice 2: Or should I build my automation and analytics software myself to avoid vendor lock-in?

Both choices are flawed. With Choice 1, hardware-vendor provided software will lock an organization into that hardware vendor and it is exceedingly hard to pursue a dual-vendor strategy. How can you believe that switch vendor C would support switch vendor A’s hardware even if vendor C claims so, when A is C’s most feared competitor?

Yet most customers I talk to want at least two hardware vendors in their data centers.

And with Choice 2, this approach is fraught with danger and risk. I’ve seen organizations spend $20M over 2 years investing in DIY and get nowhere. DIY requires the ability to hire dozens of top software engineers, and have them focused on building the solution from the ground up. As important, DIY requires the ability to retain those top engineers so they are able to support the solution they’ve built over many years. To quote Tsvi Gal, CTO at Morgan Stanley, at a recent ONUG event, “the worst vendor lock-in is our own … We are basically locked into our own environment.”

Yahoo Japan Corporation and our other customers have shown that there is now a much better path — a choice that was not available to Facebook when they built out their automation solution. With Apstra AOS, you have the full range of hardware vendors to choose from in their dual-vendor strategy, and can avoid lock-in. Yet in doing so, you don’t have to build and retain a world leading development team to reinvent the wheel and recreate an integrated solution that enables a fully automated operational model. And, you can focus your management and development talent on areas that are strategic to your business.

Onwards and upwards

In closing, I would like to thank Kenya Murakoshi and Yahoo Japan Corporation for being a great partner to Apstra. The aspect I enjoy the most in the process of building companies is working with like-minded innovators and early-adopters who “get it”. We are committed to our customers, and especially our early adopters’ success, and look forward to a long term relationship with Yahoo Japan Corporation . You can read more about Yahoo Japan Corporation ’s deployment of AOS in this case study or press release or join a webinar about Yahoo Japan Corporation’s data center network plan.

I would also like to invite organizations that are looking to build new data center networks, and are faced with the hardware-specific versus DIY conundrum, to try Apstra. We provide risk-free try-and-buy programs so you can experience the power of a hardware inclusive intent-based operational model. You can download a data sheet, schedule a demo, or schedule a 1:1 with us at OCP.

Originally published at blog.apstra.com.

As your Developer Advocate, I would now like to show you, the network engineer, how you can start using these IBA probes in a way that does not require you to be a Python programmer. Rather than asking you to write long programs or show you long pages of code, we are going to provide you with step-by-step workbooks that intermix instructive text, graphics, and yes, python code snippets; usually just a line or two each. We will use a system called Jupyter notebooks — an approach that I believe lends itself very well to network engineers who want to harness the automation capabilities of using Python without having to actually write python programs.

So please check out these two short videos: The first one introduces you to using the Apstra github repository of IBA probes that includes a collection of Jupyter notebooks. This github repo contains the IBA probe definitions that are the same as those we include in our shipping product. You can use what you learn here to even create your own new IBA probes! The second video then shows you how you can alternatively directly call the AOS REST API to manage these predefined probes.

I hope you enjoy these automation tutorials, and I look forward to sharing new ones with you soon!

View our on-demand webinar on preventing outages with Intent-Based Analytics

Read the white paper “A Next-Gen Vision for the Next-Gen Network”

Originally published at blog.apstra.com.

Fast forward 25 years… my hands have healed and telnet morphed to ssh but it’s still all the same process. This, despite the fact that “compute” (whatever happened to calling them “servers”?) was automated over a decade ago and switches effectively became servers with a bunch of ports. But compute automation tools — think Ansible, Puppet, and Salt — were not built for this type of work because networks are distributed systems intertwined in ways that servers will never be. And these tools were meant to handle provisioning which only happens initially and rarely after that. But you still need to operate networks, which inevitably requires yet another tool! Why? Well it can all be traced back to siloed organizational structures.

I remember one large bank I worked for had a Configuration Management Group (CMG). All they did was create/push configs based on diagrams an Engineering group gave them. I was in that Engineering group then and I loved it! I would create a before and after diagram and hand it over to them to figure out “the nitty gritty.” I felt sorta like a CIO, only vastly underpaid…

READ MORE: Network Automation

Payment facilitator expert Todd Ablowitz speaking at a recent conference on one of the reasons the payment facilitator model is so successful — software companies know their customers!

With a unique blend of experience, connections and know-how, Double Diamond Group helps payments industry clients solve their most critical business challenges.

“Double Diamond was essential in helping refine our portfolio company’s strategy and prioritizing its resources. Then, Todd and his team worked side by side with the management team to manage implementation and execution. The entire board was very pleased with the process and the results of our collaboration.” Carty Chock, Co-Founder and Partner, ClearPoint Investment Partners, (Worked with Double Diamond Group in a prior private equity firm)

Our clients range from venerable leaders to promising start-ups, and includes companies of all sizes and all markets, including processors, acquirers, ISOs, agents, vendors, suppliers, service providers, application developers, investors and merchants.

LEARN MORE: PAYMENT FACILITATOR COMPANY

Double Diamond Group Videos

Click Here: View ALL Videos from Conference — Payment Facilitator Business — Todd Ablowitz Payments Facilitator Expert

Originally published at doublediamondgroup.com on April 22, 2018.

Payment facilitator expert, Todd Ablowitz addresses the future of the payment facilitator ecosystem at a recent conference.

Double Diamond Group — Payment Facilitator Business — We Wrote The Book

Literally, we wrote the widely respected guidelines for PF best practices.

Over 15 years working directly with payment facilitators.

“When it comes to the Payment Facilitator model, very few people have the depth and breadth of knowledge and expertise as Double Diamond Group” — Chris Rhode, memberplanet

Over 150 companies from every region in the world have worked on their PF business with Double Diamond Group.

LEARN MORE: PAYMENT FACILITATOR GUIDE

Double Diamond Group Videos

Click Here: View ALL Videos from Conference — Payment Facilitator Business — Todd Ablowitz Payments Facilitator Expert

Originally published at doublediamondgroup.com on April 22, 2018.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

INFINICEPT LAUNCHES UNDERWRITING ON DEMAND, PROVIDING INSTANT AUTOMATED MERCHANT UNDERWRITING FOR ANY PAYMENTS COMPANY

Fast, easy set-up. Designed to work right “out-of-the-box”

DENVER — April 16, 2018 — Infinicept, creators of the innovative, turnkey payments platform Payment Facilitator in a Box™, launches unprecedented underwriting on demand (UWoD) functionality, extending frictionless underwriting pioneered in the Payment Facilitator model to the entire merchant acquiring market.

The product functionality serves the entire merchant acquiring marketplace from merchant acquirers to financial institutions to marketplaces, payment facilitators, aggregators and ISOs. Organizations requiring instant automated merchant underwriting will enjoy the fast, easy set-up that works right out-of-the-box with minimal customization needed. This solution has been pre-configured and is backed by the payment industry’s best and most talented underwriting experts that collectively have over 75 years of experience. Leveraging this experience allows Infinicept customers to be set up for success with minimal effort.

Configurability Without Complexity

For those organizations that require more customized merchant underwriting, the UWoD functionality provides the ability to configure underwriting triggers that best serve their business model and risk appetite. Once the underwriting services are selected for each trigger, the user can set the result for each attribute based on their risk profile.

Any organization that underwrites merchants can leverage the full set of APIs and web hooks to integrate the underwriting on demand functionality directly into their own solution. The functionality is supported by an easy to use, all-inclusive dashboard as well as an intuitive manual review dashboard for those instances where human input is needed.

UWoD can be used alone or as part of the full suite of Infinicept solutions. The Infinicept platform is an artful technology solution that fully supports frictionless merchant acceptance, underwriting, boarding and back office operations with a series of automated modules that can be adapted to any vertical market. Its unique, agnostic framework allows organizations that support Payment Facilitators to easily integrate their platform with any sponsor, processor, gateway and/or CRM without starting from scratch.

“Underwriting on Demand is a true differentiator in the industry,” said Todd Ablowitz, Co-Founder and chief executive officer of Infinicept and payments consultancy Double Diamond Group. “The Payment Facilitator ecosystem is a $4.4 billion opportunity by 2021, and it is completely disrupting traditional ISOs and acquirers. PFs know that rapid onboarding is crucial for growth, yet underwriting is one of the functions you must get right. Underwriting on Demand provides that rare combination of a beautiful system out-of-the-box, while allowing just about anything to be configured. It really is the best of both worlds and best of all it is backed by the industry’s premier risk and compliance experts.”

“We started this for Payment Facilitators. We designed underwriting for the PFs that had triggers, meaning, at different processing levels or events, the PF was supposed to take different actions,” said Deana Rich, Infinicept co-founder and chief executive officer of Rich Consulting. “Infinicept mirrors that process. Once complete, what we realized was, EVERYONE needs triggered underwriting!”

About Infinicept
Infinicept, is a robust suite of automated services that collectively perform as an operational backbone for Payment Facilitators. Whether used as a fully integrated package, or a la carte, Infinicept makes it possible for Payment Facilitators to get up and running in weeks, not years. For more information visit www.infinicept.com.

Media Contact: Greg Myers Chief Marketing Office greg@infinicept.com

(214) 738–0406

Originally published at infinicept.com on April 16, 2018.