For most enterprise NetOps teams, a discussion about the WAN is a discussion about the cloud. Whether it’s as simple as ensuring solid connectivity with a SaaS provider or designing a robust, secure, hybrid, and multi-cloud architecture, the enterprise wide area network is all about connecting us to our resources, wherever they are.
When coupled with a network observability platform, device telemetry provides network engineers and operators critical insight into cost, performance, reliability, and security. Learn how to create actionable results with device telemetry in our new article. For cloud network specialists, the landscape for their observability efforts includes a mix of physical and virtual networking devices.
So far in this series, I’ve outlined how a scaling enterprise’s accumulation of data (data gravity) struggles against three consistent forces: cost, performance, and reliability. This struggle changes an enterprise; this is “digital transformation,” affecting everything from how business domains are represented in IT to software architectures, development and deployment models, and even personnel structures.
A cornerstone of network observability is the ability to ask any question of your network. That means having an unbound capacity to explore the tremendous amount and variety of network telemetry you collect. It means seeing trends and patterns from a macro level, but it also means getting very granular to pursue any line of analysis of your data. Collecting information from flow records, SNMP, streaming telemetry, BGP, eBPF, and so on is indeed very important.
Last summer we teamed up with the New York Times to analyze the re-routing of internet service to Kherson, a region in southern Ukraine that was, at the time, under Russian occupation. In my accompanying blog post, I described how that development mirrored what took place following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Cloud networking is the IT infrastructure necessary to host or interact with applications and services in public or private clouds, typically via the internet. It’s an umbrella term for the devices and strategies that connect all variations of on-premise, edge, and cloud-based services.
In recent years, the rapid development of cloud-based networking, network abstractions such as SD-WAN, and controller-based campus networking has meant that basic, day-to-day network operations have become easier for non-network engineers. The result we’re starting to see today is a sort of consolidation of networking tasks, leading to a need for only a small number of highly skilled network engineers to handle the less frequent heavy lifting of advanced design and troubleshooting.
In today’s digital world, data is generated faster and at a larger scale than ever before. With software architectures increasingly adopting distributed, cloud-based models, network infrastructures have become complex webs of virtual and physical devices.
Traffic telemetry is the data collected from network devices and used for analysis. With traffic telemetry, engineers can gain real-time visibility into traffic patterns, correlate events, and make predictions of future traffic patterns. As a critical input to a network observability platform, this data can help monitor and optimize network performance, troubleshoot issues, and detect security threats. However, traffic telemetry can be difficult to understand.
In an ideal world, organizations can establish a single, citadel-like data center that accumulates data and hosts their applications and all associated services, all while enjoying a customer base that is also geographically close. As this data grows in mass and gravity, it’s okay because all the new services, applications, and customers will continue to be just as close to the data. This is the “have your cake and eat it too” scenario for a scaling business’s IT.
