Category Archives: CCIE General

Happy Holidays and IT Training!

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Happy Holidays to all my faithful blog followers here at AJSNetworking.com. Thank you so much for another incredible year of fun and interesting comments and discussions regarding mainly IT Training. 🙂

IT Training

My Holiday gift to many of you this year is to finally get after my Free Evolving Technologies Training as I promised. This is that new section of every CCIE Written Exam that is causing great stress for many candidates. Stress not. I will do the hard work of finding the correct documentation and detailing it for you on every topic on this list!

Something else I will be doing more than ever per reader request is many more quizzes here at the site. These will run the gamut from Cisco to Juniper to Microsoft and more and will cover all levels of professional certification.

If you are interested in my non-free IT Training stuff 🙂 here is a run down of what I am currently working on this Holiday Season:

  • The Exam 70-698 Installing and Configuring Windows 10 Course for CBT Nuggets; this course features Nugget-based Hands On Labs so you can follow along with me in a Windows 10 Pro environment as you enjoy your IT Training! There are about 46 Nuggets complete and up there at the moment. The total course will be close to 80 Nuggets and completes around 1/13/2017. All of the Nuggets are uploaded by that date, it just takes some time for the video reviewers to watch and approve them.
  • Mastering Agile Project Management is most likely my next course for CBT Nuggets; then I will be looking to hit some key Router and Switch Technologies for you like QoS and Multicast and the like. These topics appear in more professional certifications than ever before (as they should) and there seems to be a drought of great training in these areas.
  • My CCENT ICND1 100-105 Exam Cram, 3rd Edition arrives in print on December 30, 2016 just in time for the new year! You will love this text. Keith Barker was the Tech Editor and we created a work of art here when it comes to your exam success. use the link at the bottom of this blog post for a nice discount on your order!
  • My CCNA Routing and Switching 200-125 Exam Cram, 5th Edition arrives in print on March 1, 2017 (or sooner). Again, Keith Barker helped me create an incredibly laser focused and concise guide to exam success.
  • My MCSA 70-740 Cert Guide: Installation, Storage, and Compute with Windows Server 2016 (Certification Guide) arrives in print around March 2017 and features critical and hard to find documentation on this exciting new Server Operating System from Microsoft. The goal in this text is to get you up and running in production data centers with the new OS, but also to ensure the exam is a manageable and pleasant experience! This can be a challenge when it comes to Microsoft Certs to say the least!

Thanks again for visiting my site – and of course – HAPPY HOLIDAYS!

The CCENT/ICND1 Exam Cram for 100-105icon

CCIE Emerging Technologies – SDN APIs

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CCIE Emerging Technologies

What is the glue that allows the Software Defined Networking (SDN) architecture to function so well? That communication process between the Control and Data planes? It is the Application Programming Interface or API.

What is a classic example of an API in the SDN world? The answer is OpenFlow.  Recall from other discussions here at AJSNETWORKING that the OpenFlow specification defines both a protocol between the control and data planes and an API by which the control plane can invoke the OpenFlow protocol.

 APIs are implemented by writing function calls in the program. This provides the linkage to the required subroutine for execution. An open or standardized API can ensure the portability of the application code and the vendor independence of the called service.

SDN controllers can be implemented directly on a server or on a virtual server. OpenFlow or some other open API is used to control the switches in the data plane. In addition, controllers use information about capacity and demand obtained from the networking equipment through which the traffic flows.

SDN controllers also expose northbound APIs. As we have discussed here at the blog, this allows developers and their network engineers to deploy a wide range of off-the-shelf and custom-built network applications. Obviously, many of these applications were never before possible before SDN.

As yet there is no standardized northbound API nor a consensus on an open northbound API. A number of vendors offer a REpresentational State Transfer (REST)-based API to provide a programmable interface to their SDN controller.

Also envisioned but not yet defined are horizontal APIs (east/westbound), which would enable communication and cooperation among groups or federations of controllers to synchronize state for high availability.

At the application plane are a variety of applications that interact with SDN controllers. SDN applications are programs that may use an abstract view of the network for their decision-making goals. These applications convey their network requirements and desired network behavior to the SDN controller via a northbound API. Examples of applications are energy-efficient networking, security monitoring, access control, and network management.

Want more information – check out the excellent – Foundations of Modern Networking: SDN, NFV, QoE, IoT, and Cloud