Magma Brings a Systems Approach to Wireless Networking

Bruce Davie Bruce is a computer scientist noted for his contributions to the field of networking. With Larry Peterson, he recently co-founded Systems Approach, LLC, to produce open source books and educational materials. He is a former VP and CTO for the Asia-Pacific region at VMware. Prior to that, he was a Fellow at Cisco Systems, leading a team of architects responsible for multiprotocol label switching (MPLS). Davie has over 30 years of networking industry experience and has co-authored 17 Requests for Comments (RFCs). He was recognized as an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Fellow in 2009 and chaired ACM SIGCOMM from 2009 to 2013. Wireless networking is one of those technologies that is, for most of us, so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. WiFi permeates our homes, offices and coffee shops, while cellular networks allow us to stay connected in many other settings. Of course, network access of any sort is a lot less ubiquitous once you get out of densely populated areas. It turns out that making networking ubiquitous requires some fresh thinking about how wireless networks are built. This fresh approach has been realized in an open source project called

Service Mesh: The Next Step in Networking for Modern Applications

By Bruce Davie, CTO, Asia Pacific & Japan

What’s New in the World of Networking

As I’m currently preparing my breakout session for VMworld 2019, I’ve been spending plenty of time looking into what’s new in the world of networking. A lot of what’s currently happening in networking is driven by the requirements of modern applications, and in that context it’s hard to miss the rise of service mesh. I see service mesh as a novel approach to meeting the networking needs of applications, although there is rather more to it than just networking.

There are about a dozen talks at VMworld this year that either focus on service mesh or at least touch on it – including mine – so I thought it would be timely to comment on why I think this technology has appeared and what it means for networking.

To be clear, there are a lot of different ways to implement a service mesh today, of which Istio – an open-source project started at Google – is probably the most well-known. Indeed some people use Istio as a synonym for service mesh, but the broader use of the term rather than a particular implementation is my Continue reading