Worth Reading: LinkedIn’s Ambry

The overall design of Ambry should look fairly familiar. There are frontend servers that handle incoming requests (there are just three operations: put, get, and delete) and route them to backend data nodes which store the actual data. A ZooKeeper-based cluster manager looks after the state of the cluster itself. —the morning paper (the full paper is here)

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Worth Reading: Hyperties

Today’s “cloud” is characterised by a broadband “dumb pipe” that takes us to “someone else’s computer”. The pendulum is now in the process of swinging away from the “dumb pipe” model, towards adding functionality back into networks (by which I include gateway devices, like a home hub). SDN/NFV is just one example of this trend. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: Sharing your password is illegal

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit ruled last week in favor of the government’s use of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to put away David Nosal, a headhunter who left his job at the firm Korn/Ferry to start his own firm. After leaving, Nosal persuaded a former co-worker still employed by Korn/Ferry to share his login credentials for a database he used for research without the firm’s permission. —The Federalist

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Light Posting Week—IETF in Berlin

Y’all—I’m in Berlin at the IETF this week, so I won’t be posting as many “long articles” as usual. I will have my usual slate of worth reading/etc. If anyone has questions about the IETF they’d like answered, feel free to comment here… I should be back to some state closer to normal next week, but between Live last week and the IETF this week, I’ve just not had my normal dose of “writing time” to work with.

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Worth Reading: Real time data processing at Facebook

‘Realtime Data Processing at Facebook’ provides us with a great high-level overview of the systems Facebook have built to support real-time workloads. At the heart of the paper is a set of five key design decisions for building such systems, together with an explanation of the choices that Facebook made. —morning paper

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BGP Code Dive (4): Starting a Peer

In the last three episodes of this series, we discussed getting a copy of SnapRoute’s BGP code using Git, we looked at the basic structure of the project, and then we did some general housekeeping. At this point, I’m going to assume you have the tools you need installed, and you’re ready to follow along as we ask the code questions about how BGP actually works.

Now, let’s start with a simple question: how does BGP bring a new peer up?

It seems like we should be able to look for some file that’s named something with peering in it, but, looking at the files in the project, there doesn’t seem to be any such thing (click to show a larger version of the image below if you can’t read it).

Hmmm… Given it’s not obvious where to start, what do we do? There are a number of options, of course, but three options stand out as the easiest.

First, you can just poke around the code for a bit to see if you find anything that looks like it might be what you’re looking for. This is not, generally, for the faint of heart. Over time, as you become Continue reading

Worth Reading: Digital intoxication

The time has come to speak of digital intoxication: an excessive use of the most common digital tools, such as a computer, tablet or smartphone, to the point of dependency. A frantic and imbalanced use of these new media can result in more or less serious consequences, be it on the physical or psychological levels, with symptoms and disorders that mirror those of the classic drunkard. —Connecting

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Worth Reading: What we lose when we photograph life instead of experiencing it

Increasingly, images have become a crucial part of communicating with others, receiving affirmation and documenting new experiences. And though it may seem that a barrage of colors and pixels and faces and scenery could only enrich our imaginations and enhance our engagement with the world, the opposite seems to be taking place. —Intellectual Takeout

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Chandelier

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Worth Reading: thinking about big data — part two

In Part One of this series of columns we learned about data and how computers can be used for finding meaning in large data sets. We even saw a hint of what we might call Big Data at Amazon.com in the mid-1990s, as that company stretched technology to observe and record in real time everything its tens of thousands of simultaneous users were doing. Pretty impressive, but not really Big Data, more like Bigish Data. —I, Cringely

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Worth Reading: Why the desire to label other opinions as ‘dumb’?

As you’ve by no doubt heard or read, America is becoming increasingly polarized. This polarization brings with it a pressure to circle the wagons with one’s ideological compatriots, and dismiss those on the other side of an issue as “dumb.” —Intellectual Takeout

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Worth Reading: Thinking about bid data

Big Data is Big News, a Big Deal, and Big Business, but what is it, really? What does Big Data even mean? To those in the thick of it, Big Data is obvious and I’m stupid for even asking the question. But those in the thick of Big Data find most people stupid, don’t you? So just for a moment I’ll speak to those readers who are, like me, not in the thick of Big Data. What does it mean? That’s what I am going to explore this week in what I am guessing will be three long columns. —I, Cringely

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Worth Reading: Who’s world is this?

On both sides of the Atlantic, we are witnessing the dramatic expansion of government hacking powers. In the United States, a proposed amendment to Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure would permit the government to obtain a warrant, in certain circumstances, to hack unspecified numbers of electronic devices anywhere in the world. Meanwhile, across the pond, the British Parliament is currently debating the Investigatory Powers Bill, which (among many other things) would authorize the government to hack the devices of broad classes of people without geographic limitation. The exercise of these powers will have significant implications for the privacy and security of individuals around the world and therefore commands our attention. —Just Security

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Cisco Live: Midweek Impressions

I’m at Cisco Live this week in Las Vegas; forthwith, some observations, thoughts, and… a long rant.

First, if you’re here, look me up. I normally hang out around the Certification and/or Social areas when I’m not in meetings/etc. I’m pretty easy to find, so drop by and say hi. It’s been like old home week for me—reconnecting with people I’ve not seen in years, catching up and friendships, etc. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the people I’ve worked with over the years in terms of friendships offered and skills learned. Seriously.

Second, I’m speaking on Thursday afternoon about understanding and managing network complexity. I’m pretty certain the session isn’t full yet, so come by and listen. It’s a 90 minute investment that could change the way you think about network design and operation. Seriously.

Third, The content seems to be deep and interesting this year, as always. This brings me to my first contrary point, though—this industry needs a show that compares with Live in depth of technical material, but isn’t tied to a particular vendor. Are you listening, Interop? I know, it’s hard to talk deep technology in the modern networking world—which leads me to Continue reading

Worth Reading: The five styles of workload orchestration

Workload orchestration is what distinguishes the modern way of providing digital services from how it was done even five years ago. Many have asked, what’s so new about this stack compared with all the others? The answer is the orchestration of workloads. We can now think of the functions our servers perform and the services we provide to customers as workloads, rather than applications with brands, or virtual machines with golden masters and overwrite protection. —NewStack

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Worth Reading: Measuring IPv6 from the Internet’s core

Measuring the state of IPv6 deployment is difficult, particularly when there are so many different measurement tools out there offering different stats. APNIC Labs shows global IPv6 deployment at 6% while Google shows it at 12%, why such disparity? The answer is because they are measuring from different vantage points on the network. —APNIC

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BGP Code Dive (3)

This week, I want to do a little more housekeeping before we get into actually asking questions of the bgp code. First there is the little matter of an editor. I use two different editors most of the time, Notepad++ and Atom.

• Notepad++ is a lightweight, general purpose text editor that I use for a lot of different things, from writing things in XML, HTML, CSS, Python Javascript, C, and just about anything else. This is an open source project hosted on the Notepad++ web site with the code hosted at github.
• Atom is a more GUI oriented “programmer’s editor.” This is a more full featured editor, going beyond basic syntax highlighting into projects, plugins that pull diffs in side by side windows, and the like. I don’t really have a build environment set up right now, so I don’t know how it would interact with compiled code, but I assume it would probably have a lot of the tricks I’m used to, like being able to trace calls through the code, etc. Atom is available here.

I haven’t actually chosen one or the other—I tend to use both pretty interchangeably, so you’re likely to see screen shots from Continue reading

Worth Reading: What makes a network architecture or design good?

The defining quality of good network architecture is elegance. Elegance as a word has an ethereal abstract quality that we liken to what makes an artwork beautiful. However the definition of elegance gives us a clue to what the real defining quality of network architecture and design is: Complexity. —route-spf.net

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Worth Reading: IPJ June 2016

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DC Fabric Segment Routing Use Case (1)

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a special segment routing Networking Field Day. This set me to thinking about how I would actually use segment routing in a live data center. As always, I’m not so concerned about the configuration aspects, but rather with what bits and pieces I would (or could) put together to make something useful out of these particular 0’s and 1’s. The fabric below will be used as our example; we’ll work through this in some detail (which is why there is a “first part” marker in the title).

This is a Benes fabric, a larger variation of which which you might find in any number of large scale data center. In this network, there are many paths between A and E; three of them are marked out with red lines to give you the idea. Normally, the specific path taken by any given flow would be selected on a somewhat random basis, using a hash across various packet headers. What if I wanted to pin a particular flow, or set of flows, to the path outlined in green?

Let’s ask a different question first—why would I want to do such a thing? There are Continue reading