
Brian MonaghanRed Hat
Ansible for NEPs: Techniques to implement network automation and manage container applications
Network Equipment Providers (NEPs) are engaged with Communication Service Providers (CSPs) in a variety of areas. NEP’s offerings for CSPs include custom hardware/systems, VM and container-based software applications and platforms, and value-added services including design, operations and support. For these dynamic and complex networks and offerings, the importance of automation has dramatically increased.
Ansible is an open source IT configuration management, deployment, and orchestration tool. It provides large productivity gains to a wide variety of automation challenges and can perform the orchestration of complex multi-tier workflows and can assist in application software deployment.
Two areas of note for Ansible use are for network automation and to manage the deployment of container applications. In the first, Ansible’s task- based, agentless nature makes it easily applicable to the networking space, and support is included with Ansible for automating networking from major vendors.
Another important use of Ansible is to help simplify deployment, management, and operations of stateful applications in Kubernetes container clusters. This is done using Kubernetes Operators which can be mostly easily written using Ansible. Kubernetes Operators are Kubernets-native applications that use a standard API.
Join this webinar to learn about the benefits of using Ansible for NEPs and how you can get started quickly.
Jim Hodges, Chief Analyst – Cloud and Security, Heavy Reading
Jim leads Heavy Reading’s research on the impact of NFV on the control plane and application layers at the core and edge. This includes the evolution path of SIP applications, unified communications (UC), IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), session border controllers (SBCs), Diameter signaling controllers (DSCs), policy controllers and WebRTC. Jim is also focused on the network and subscriber impact of Big Data and Analytics. He authors Heavy Reading's NFV and SDN Market Trackers. Other areas of research coverage include Subscriber Data Management (SDM) and fixed-line TDM replacement. Jim joined Heavy Reading from Nortel Networks, where he tracked the VoIP and application server market landscape and was a key contributor to the development of Wireless Intelligent Network (WIN) standards. Additional technical experience was gained with Bell Canada, where he performed IN and SS7 network planning, numbering administration, technical model forecast creation and definition of regulatory-based interconnection models. Jim is based in Ottawa, Canada.
Brian Monaghan, Red Hat
Ashwin Moranganti, Senior Product Management Leader - Affirmed Networks
Ashwin Moranganti is a successful senior product management leader with over 18 years’ experience in Product Strategy and Management. A Passionate “Lean Startup” practitioner, who drives constant innovation, increasing enterprise value. He successfully led the journey of several products from concept to market, which resulted in over Billion dollars in revenue. Ashwin has been part of both Large Enterprises like Cisco, Ascend, Lucent and several startups like BigBand, PeerApp, Ineoquest that had either an IPO and or a successful acquisition.