SANOG

This post covers option to exclude CGNAT for the Google’s GGC cache traffic

Next month is SANOG 39 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. SANOG is a South Asian Network Operator Group event and a good place for meeting a number of ISPs, telecom players, Ops team members of content networks, internet exchanges etc. Besides attending the conference, I will be doing a workshop on Network Automation. It will be a four-day workshop covering Containers, Ansible, Gitlab CI/CD pipeline and REST APIs for automation in the workflow.

Next week SANOG (South Asia Network Operator Group) event will start in Kathmandu, Nepal. I will be instructing on a 4-day workshop on Network Automation with two fellow instructors. The idea of this workshop is to make fellow Ops / Network engineers familiar with concepts of Docker, Ansible, and Gitlab CI/CD pipeline and ultimately to make use of REST APIs to bind these all together.

This is the first time I am doing such a workshop and the content here is built from scratch. On the positive side, it gives good flexibility on content but the challenge is to stick on time. Since content is not tested before, there will always be a risk of going “too slow” or “too fast”. The goal by the end of the workshop is to ensure that attendees can build up event-driven automation. They should be able to set up a system where “if x happens” then “action y is triggered”. This can fit a wide variety of use cases.

Attending SANOG 34 in Kolkata and today Champika from ICANN mentioned about how they (LKNOG) is trying to promote local participation by keeping the event free for locals. That is great if they can manage that. As he finished, I went to the microphone and suggested that whether or not such NOG (Network Operator Group) events are free for local operators but they must be kept free for students. I was part of INNOG 2 which happened recently and we kept the event free for the students.

Just finished with SANOG 26 conference and tutorials. It went very nice. Interestingly this time conference did not start early morning like it did in SANOG 24 at Noida. It was rather late in afternoon. Also, on very good note - there were less Govt. bureaucrats to bore attendees with usual stuff they always talk about but have very little idea. One specific interesting presentation was  Opportunities and Challenges for Broadband Wireless in India by Prof Abhay Karandikar (from IIT Mumbai). In start I felt it to be usual crappy 5G talk but later realized it was much more interesting. I loved the idea “Have 2Mbps everywhere static broadband and not some absurd number on mobile wireless broadband as we hear in case of 3G/4G. Although 2Mbps now is much slower and I would rather suggest that we target for 10Mbps everywhere (something which can be supported by copper/coax/fiber hybrid) but anyways it was nice refreshing talk. His thoughts were interesting but mostly impractical since had high dependence on useless project like NOFN. For the next part, we had a nice theme of keeping network simple which everyone kind of liked. Simplicity in Network Design & Deployments by Dany Pinto (from Colt) and Unified Forwarding with Segment Routing by Mohan Nanduri (from Microsoft Azure Cloud WAN team) were part of that. Santanu Dasgupta gave a presentation about Challenges of L2NID based Metro-E Architecture for vCPE/NFV Deployments and kind of confused everyone. :P