Net-Centric 2016 (ISOCORE)

I will be speaking at Net-Centric 2016 in the Washington DC area—you can find more information on the ISOCORE web site.

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Worth Reading: Solving network documentation with code

A major issue with network documentation is how to properly explain the policies required to enable a service on the network. In the above diagram, I have a basic application traffic flow overlaid on the network infrastructure the traffic must traverse. Six network device types participate in the handling of traffic for this application all requiring some form of policy definition on them. A change in policy may require a change in any number of network devices to support that change. —route-spf

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Worth Reading: Internet—Quo Vadis (Where are you going?)

I do not believe that the future internet will be a Utopia. Nor do I believe that the future internet will be like some beautiful angel, bringing peace, virtue, equality, and justice. Instead I believe that there are strong, probably irresistible, forces working to lock-down and partition the internet. —CircleID

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On the ‘net: The Foggy Future of Network Engineering

The world of networking tends to be bistable: we either centralize everything, or we decentralize everything. We started with mainframes, passed through Lotus 123 hidden in corners, then to mini’s and middleware, then to laptops, and now to the cloud, to be followed by fog. This particular cycle of centralization/decentralization, however, has produced a series of overlapping changes that are difficult to decipher. You can somehow hear someone arguing about disaggregation and hyperconvergence through the fog — but just barely. —CircleID

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snaproute Go BGP Code Dive (5): Starting a Peer

Last time we looked at the snaproute BGP code, we discovered the peer bringup process is a finite state machine. With this in mind, let’s try to unravel the state machine into a set of calls, beginning from our original starting point, a debug message that prints on the screen when a new peering relationship is established. The key word in the debug message was ConnEstablished, which led to:

func (fsm *FSM) ConnEstablished() {
fsm.logger.Info(fmt.Sprintln("Neighbor:", fsm.pConf.NeighborAddress, "FSM", fsm.id, "ConnEstablished - start"))
fsm.Manager.fsmEstablished(fsm.id, fsm.peerConn.conn)
fsm.logger.Info(fmt.Sprintln("Neighbor:", fsm.pConf.NeighborAddress, "FSM", fsm.id, "ConnEstablished - end"))
}

From here, we searched for calls to ConnEstablished, and found—

func (fsm *FSM) ChangeState(newState BaseStateIface) {
...
if oldState == BGPFSMEstablished && fsm.State.state() != BGPFSMEstablished {
fsm.ConnBroken()
} else if oldState != BGPFSMEstablished && fsm.State.state() == BGPFSMEstablished {
fsm.ConnEstablished()
}
}

Looking for ChangeState leads us to a lot of different calls, but only one that seems to relate to establishing a new peer, as evidenced by a state that relates to established in some way. This, in turn, leads to—

func (st *OpenConfirmState) processEvent(event BGPFSMEvent, data Continue reading

Worth Reading: How Facebook makes you miss out on life

People spend nearly an hour on Facebook every day. Maybe that doesn’t automatically sound impressive. But when you parse the numbers, the significance becomes clear: as James B. Stewart wrote for the New York Times, “That’s more than any other leisure activity surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the exception of watching television programs and movies (an average per day of 2.8 hours). It’s more time than people spend reading (19 minutes); participating in sports or exercise (17 minutes); or social events (four minutes). It’s almost as much time as people spend eating and drinking (1.07 hours).” —The Federalist

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On the ‘Net: Big thinkers leave Cisco

The industry is reeling from Monday’s report that four of Cisco’s best-known executives are leaving the company. An internal memo from Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, announced the resignations of Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani, effective June 17. The four formed a team that many referred to as MPLS — letters that represent the initials of their first names. -Channel Partners

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On the ‘Net: You keep using that SDN word…

Software Defined Networks (SDNs), are everywhere, and everyone is either building one, selling one, or using one. Everyone, that is, except—probably—you. Don’t feel too bad if you’re feeling left out, because it’s hard to know, precisely, what you’re actually being left out of. After all, can you actually define what an SDN is? -ECI

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Worth Reading: Protecting your assets

With emerging trends such as big data, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) mobility and global online collaboration sparking an explosion of data, the data center will only become more important to your organization and will continue to be the target of not only breaches, but advanced malware and other cyberattacks. —Data Center Journal

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Nick

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Worth Reading: Microsoft’s Bid for LinkedIn

It’s time for all organizations and their investors to realize that the tools that they provide to customers — products such as cars, telephones, health-care, or finance — and to their employees in the form of benefits, training, software, and the like — need to be combined with the network to which that group belongs. —MarketWatch

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Worth Reading: Open Internet access on the line

Digital content is king on the net and ISPs have a natural economic incentive to steer you toward their own sports and entertainment content and to charge new fees to the most popular Internet platforms for delivery of movies, music and social media over the same 2-way Internet connection you already pay your ISP for. That’s double selling you capacity while cannibalising your regular Internet access. —CircleID

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Worth Watching: Has SDN lived up to the hype?

This is a recent round table discussion I participated in over at LightReading. My friends over at ECI put this together.

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On the ‘net: What does a control plane do?

To really understand Software Defined Networks (SDNs), we need to start from a place far different than the top of the current hype cycle. Instead, where we need to start is thinking about what a control plane actually does in a packet switched network. There seem to be just a few specific things involved in what a control plane does… —ECI

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Worth Reading: Navigating EU safe harbor

If you’re an organization with trans-Atlantic presence that transmits and stores European citizen data (e.g. employee payroll & HR data, client & prospect data) in the U.S. you will want to pay attention. What we will discuss was administered under the European Union’s Data Protection Directive and a previous EU-U.S. agreement called Safe Harbor. We will cover what happened, what’s next, new rules (and penalties) that are set to go into effect and our recommendations. —Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: All the Apache streaming projects

The speed at which data is generated, consumed, processed, and analyzed is increasing at an unbelievably rapid pace. Social media, the Internet of Things, ad tech, and gaming verticals are struggling to deal with the disproportionate size of data sets. These industries demand data processing and analysis in near real-time. Traditional big data-styled frameworks such as Apache Hadoop is not well-suited for these use cases. —the New Stack

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Open19: A New Vision for the Data Center

This is coming out of the architecture team at LinkedIn—it’s really interesting for mid-tier scalers, large financials, and the like, so I thought I’d share it here as well.

This week at the DatacenterDynamics Webscale conference, I have the privilege of announcing the first step in a long journey, an initiative that we hope will further the state of hardware in the data center. Called Open19, this new project aims to establish a new open standard for servers based on a common form factor. The goals of Open19 are to provide lower cost per rack, lower cost per server, optimized power utilization, and (eventually) an open standard that everyone can contribute to and participate in.

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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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