Top 10 Network Management Blog Posts of 2016

It’s been a great year for Packet Design as a company and also for our industry as it moves inexorably towards a more software-defined approach to the network. Most of our top blog posts this year focused on SDN and all the protocols/technologies that are evolving to help support it.

As 2016 draws to a close, we put together a list of our most read blog posts. Here is our top 10 most read blogs of 2016

1. BGP-LS: What Is It Good For?: Here our CTO Cengiz Alaettinoglu addresses BGP-LS, which is a popular topic in his circles because many SDN apps require it. He discusses the pros and cons of BGP-LS in comparison to IGPs and YANG topology data models.
2. SD-WAN Is Not WAN SDN: SD-WAN is getting the lion’s share of attention these days, but it’s basically an enterprise edge technology. It’s important to distinguish it from WAN SDN, which supports the “software defined” concept in the core network (as does Packet Design technology). In this article, our Technical Marketing Specialist Don Jacob compares and contrasts both technologies.
3. Self-learning SDN: In this post our own Nutan Shinde, Software Engineer, examines the importance of the AlphaGo program, using self-learning, beating the world champion Lee Se-dol at the Chinese board game Go. She says the significance of self-learning also applies to SDN.
4. Life in the Control Plane: Network Change Management: One privilege of working with the world’s largest service providers is seeing how they architect their infrastructures and solve problems. Don began a blog series this year outlining these case studies. In this one, he explains how a large U.S. network service provider tackled a major change management issue.
5. Into the World of Routers: A 2-Man Play in One Act: We all know routers talk to each other, but you’ve never seen anything like this! Nutan Shinde wrote this imaginative dialogue between two routers: one whose company has implemented SDN and one whose, well, hasn’t…
6. The Current and Future Status of Traffic Engineering: In this two-part post, Don Jacob looks at the ways traffic engineering is done in MPLS networks. In part 1, he defines RSVP-TE, which is commonly used to reserve resources along the end-to-end path of a traffic flow in an IP network. In part 2, he outlines the advantages of the up-and-coming technology Segment Routing.
7. PCE Tunnels with ONOS Goldeneye: A Packet Design How-to: Shaken, not stirred: Hariharan (Hari) Ananthakrishnan, Distinguished Engineer, is our resident go-to for how-to articles on the blog. In this one, he guides you step by step on using the new BGP-LS and PCE capabilities of ONOS Goldeneye, its seventh version.
8. YANG Mount with OpenDaylight Boron: A Packet Design How-to: In this how-to post, Hari tackles the fifth release of OpenDaylight. He shows you how to mount a remote datastore into OpenDaylight’s NETCONF server.
9. A Case for Segment Routing and YANG Data Models: Keeping the WAN SDN Underlay Simple: Speaking of Segment Routing and YANG, our CTO Cengiz believes both are very promising for simplifying future wide-area networking in an SDN architecture. Here he makes the case.
10. It’s not the network! Or is it? It depends whom you ask: Are network practitioners and their managers/executives really all that different? According to a survey independent research firm TechValidate conducted for us, they have varying perceptions of the extent and impact of routing issues in the WAN. Read our SVP of Marketing Steve Harriman’s post to find out how different these perceptions really are.