Josh VanDeraa

In a recent podcast there was some discussion that it sounded like the term Micro Segmentation was being used where it was really traditional segmentation. So I thought I would put out a few thoughts on this front.

What is Segmnentation in Networking #

Segmentation is a methodology to create separatet zones of sorts of various traffic types. Various places you may want to do this is within a campus environment to separate students from faculty, or engineering from finance. The list of examples goes on and on. Go to a basic reading of VLANs and you will get the idea of what segmentation is. Once you have VLANs, really segmentation then builds upon this and allows policy to be applied. This policy can be whether or not hosts should be able to talk to each other, or various traffic treatments (QoS). This is something that is well covered already and I do not wish to cover more.

Life always gets busy. That is one thing that you always hear about. I am definitely in that boat as well that things are getting busy. With this in mind, I have never felt better about my ability to learn new things in the field. I do a few things that I feel are probably unique that I should share.

The first opportunity that has never been more capable of doing is to listen to podcasts. The commuting time to/from work is a tremendous opportunity. I leverage three podcasts as my primary learning mechanism these days.

Why this post? Because I decided to change the style of how I was hosting my blog. Before I had decided to just host the blog on something that was easy to get to and update. I could have kept on blogging there, but I found making blog posts a little bit more difficult than what I wanted to. I also wanted to learn some of the new ways of doing things within networking technologies.

At DevNet Create 2018 there is a video that was put together related to CI/CD in the NetDevOps world. This is something that is very exciting to see that there has been time put in to putting that together. The video can be seen here:

DevNet Create Video
Pete Lumbis CI/CD Info

With tools such as VIRL, EveNG, and GNS3, there should be a methodology to be able to put a network together to do testing. I have not yet put together the full pipeline, but is something that I’m very interested in getting built some day.

One of the more interesting features that I have just come across within the Ansible automation world is that of the block. I find this very helpful for both error handling, and also grouping tasks into logical separation.

Ansible Official Link #

Ansible Docs: Block

Blocks allow for logical grouping of tasks and in play error handling. Most of what you can apply to a single task can be applied at the block level, which also makes it much easier to set data or directives common to the tasks. This does not mean the directive affects the block itself, but is inherited by the tasks enclosed by a block. i.e. a when will be applied to the tasks, not the block itself.