Worth Reading: On decomposing systems

Flexibility (we tend to call it agility) and faster development times remain top of mind today. Comprehensibility less so, but perhaps we should be paying more attention there? Say you’re all bought into cloud native microservices based architectures, is splitting your system up into multiple independent services going to help you achieve your goals? —The Morning Paper

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Bridge to the Ocean

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Worth Reading: Do we still need OSPF areas?

When OSPF was created it used areas to minimize the size of the topology graph (and the time it took to run Dijkstra algorithm). In the meantime, the CPU speeds increased by orders of magnitude, and graph computation algorithms got a few optimization boosts (incremental SPF for example). —IPspace

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Worth Reading: The Verisign DDoS Report (Q2 2016)

This report contains the observations and insights derived from distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack mitigations enacted on behalf of, and in cooperation with, customers of Verisign DDoS Protection Services from April 1, 2016 through June 30, 2016 (‘‘Q2 2016”) and the security research of Verisign iDefense® Security Intelligence Services conducted during that time. It represents a unique view into the attack trends unfolding online, including attack statistics and behavioral trends for Q2 2016. —Verisign

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Worth Reading: Why you shouldn’t be bummed if you were laid off

A former boss of mine said it best: “Working for the same company for too long is like living in your parent’s basement. You can’t really say you’ve experienced real life.” Over 12 years, Cisco gave me the foundation and relationships for which I will always be grateful. But over time, like a bad relationship that feels good for the wrong reasons- the comfort of familiarity and easiness, I felt myself getting career stagnant and letting it ride. I knew deep down I could be a better version of my professional self. —Camille Gatenby

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Worth Reading: An internet for identity

Every online identity you have was given to you by someone else. This simple fact makes every online identity completely different from identity in the physical world where you exist first, independently, as a sovereign human being. As a result, online relationships are skewed. There’s an imbalance of power between people and organizations online. Here’s why. —CircleID

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DC Fabric Segment Routing Use Case (5)

In this, the last post on DC fabrics as a Segment Routing use case, I mostly want to tie up some final loose ends. I will probably return to SR in the future to discuss other ideas and technical details.

Anycast

Anyone who keeps up with LinkedIn knows anycast plays a major role in many parts of the infrastructure. This isn’t unique to LinkedIn, though; most DNS implementations and/or providers, as well as just about every large scale public facing web application, also uses anycast. Which leads to an obvious question—how would SR work with anycast? The answer turns out to be much simpler than it might appear. The small diagram below might be helpful—

Assume A and B have two copies of a single service running on them, and we want hosts behind F to use one service or the other, just depending on which the routing system happens to route towards first. This isn’t quite the classical case for anycast, as anycast normally involves choosing the closest service, and both of the services in this example are equal distance from the hosts—but this is going to be the case more often than not in a data center. In Continue reading

Worth Reading: What Facebook learns by shutting down entire facilities

As we have reported before, Facebook has one of the boldest approaches to testing its infrastructure resiliency. The Facebook data center team regularly shuts down entire sites to see how its application will behave and to learn what improvements can be made. During his keynote this morning at the Facebook @Scale conference in San Jose, California, Jay Parikh, the company’s head of engineering and infrastructure, shared some of the big lessons his team has learned so far from these fire drills. —Data Center Knowledge

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Worth Reading: More huge tech acquisitions

The market for tech acquisitions is booming in 2016 as legacy technology companies shed old assets and consolidate, and companies in other industries scoop up tech assets at a historic pace. This comes despite 2015’s boom in overall M&A waning, the market for initial public offerings declining, and as data shows some tech “unicorns” may wait until at least 2017 to make their market debut. The tech industry appears to be an anomaly, with analysts expecting deal making to remain strong for the foreseeable future, despite near-term macro uncertainties such as the U.S. election. —Market Watch

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Technology

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Worth Reading: Connecting Python to Slack

The scripting language Python can retrieve information from or publish information into the messaging app Slack. This means you can write a program that puts info into Slack for you, or accepts your queries using Slack as the interface. This is useful if you spend a lot of time in Slack, as I do. —Ethan Banks

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Worth Reading: Exploring the Cybercrime Underground Part 2

In this second part of Unit 42’s Cybercrime Underground blog series, we dive into the cybercrime forum ecosystem and focus on observed cybercriminal roles, as well as prevalent tools and services bought and sold in the underground. The goal of this post is not to provide an exhaustive directory, but rather to provide additional context on the operations and highly prevalent threats observed within this ecosystem. —Palo Alto

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On Definitions: Whatever is Forwarding Information?

After last week’s, a reader left a comment noting “I2RS doesn’t manipulate forwarding data.” If I2RS isn’t “manipulating forwarding data,” then what, precisely, is it doing? I thought it’s worth a post to try and help folks understand the definitions in this space—except, as you’ll soon discover, there are no definitions here. In fact, it’s almost impossible to create a single set of definitions that will clarify the issues involved in understanding the various sorts of state in a network device. The following illustration might be helpful in trying to understand the vagaries of the various kinds of state, and the confusion that results from the various names used in different places.

It would be “nice” to say something like: information held in the forwarding table, that’s actually used to forward traffic through the router, is the only real “forwarding data.” This makes for a nice clean definition that clearly separates, say, what the RIB does and what the FIB does in most of the hardware based switching devices produced today. There are two problems with this clean definition, however.

First, there are, and always will be, devices produced that simply don’t have a forwarding table. Instead of Continue reading

Worth Reading: Your QUIC Questions Answered

Watch our second Facebook Live broadcast, where George Michaelson, APNIC’s Senior R&D Scientist, and Byron Ellacott, APNIC’s Senior Software Architect, discussed QUIC – Quick UDP Internet Connection. QUIC is a new protocol that supports a set of multiplexed connections over UDP and was designed to provide security protection equivalent to TLS/SSL, along with reduced connection and transport latency. —APNIC

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Worth Reading: Hybrid and the last common denominator problem

Hybrid cloud only works when applications are designed to run predictably across all the infrastructure choices in the IT portfolio. Most organizations achieve this through a “least common denominator” approach to design, one in which API abstractions are so thoroughly simplified that only the barest set of cloud services remain. This approach, while functional, strips away nearly all of the useful advanced features that different infrastructures offer. A new Apache open source project, ARIA (Agile Reference Implementation of Automation) wants to solve this compromise. —The New Stack

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Hallway

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Worth Reading: Cisco, Arista, and shades of grey

Cisco has effectively designated Arista as their number one competitor by way of this lawsuit. Arista represents a larger threat that HPE, Brocade, or Juniper. Yes, I agree that it is easy to argue that the infringement constituted a material problem to their business. But at the same time, Cisco very publicly just said that Arista is causing a problem for Cisco. Enough of a problem that Cisco is going to take them to court. Not make Arista license the patent. That’s telling. —Networking Nerd

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Worth Reading: Biometrics are less secure than passwords

Many technology pundits talk about biometrics as the ultimate authentication solution — the technology that will make the ‘imperfect’ password obsolete. Despite the hype, most companies are approaching with caution. In fact, CEB found that there are varied degrees of biometrics adoption globally, as around 20 percent of firms have actually deployed the technology. A big reason for low adoption could be that they are less secure. And while many are touting the security of biometrics, there are four issues to consider when evaluating the technology. —betanews

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Docker Forks the Open Source Bubble

The magic of open source.

If I’ve heard this once, I’ve heard it a thousand times.

Put the software “out there,” and someone, somewhere, will add features because they need or want them, fix bugs because they’ve run into them, and generally just add value to the software you’ve created for free.

This is why, I’m told, open source is so much better than open standards—isn’t open standards just another name for a bogged down, broken process where vendors try to run in fourteen different directions at once? Where customers really aren’t heard for the din of careers being made, and technical solutions far too often take a back seat to political considerations? Open source is going to ride in and save the day, I’m told, making all complex software free and better.

Unicorns. No, seriously. Or maybe you prefer frogs on stilts. It doesn’t work this way in the real world. If any project, whether it be an open source project or an open standard, gains enough community buy-in, it will succeed. If any project, whether it be an open source project or an open standard, doesn’t gain community buy-in, it is dead—no matter which company supports it, Continue reading

Worth Reading: Legally Defining Metadata

One of the foundational questions in surveillance law is how to distinguish between the contents of communications and non-content metadata. Contents generally receive very high privacy protection, while metadata generally receive very low protection. Identifying the line between the two is critical. Earlier this week, the ODNI declassified an April 2016 FISCR decision on post-cut-through digits that adopts an approach to the distinction in some tension with a recent Third Circuit case. This post will explain the problem and the apparent disagreement. —Lawfare

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