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IT/IT: Network scale is more than size
“Judge me by my size, do you?”
I’ve had several discussions with people over the years about the concept of scale in the world of network engineering. Most often, when network engineers think of a “large scale network,” they used to mention large service providers. Now they tend to think of some large cloud provider. But is scale really about size? I’m not much into the backflipping Yoda of the later Star Wars movies, but I would argue scale is much more about backflips than it is about being big.
So what is scale about? In the networking world, scale can be given the shorthand services x size. Standing in a huge data center with rows and rows of racks and blinking lights, it’s easy to forget about the services part of that equation.
A useful way to understand this is consider the services offered by a pair of networks, one large, and one small. The typical cloud provider’s network might contain thousands of nodes in a single data center — something more than 1000x10g (or 10,000x1g) ports on the edge is moderately sized in this world. What services does such a network — within the network itself — Continue reading
Worth Reading: More Leaky Routes
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Consequences Teach
"The sad consequences of cruelty, injustice, violence, deceit, and laziness teach us to be gentle, just, moderate, faithful, and industrious. The experience is lengthy, but it is efficient.
" Raoul Audouin — http://ProvidenceandLiberty
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Worth Reading: Don’t be so Surprised
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Worth Reading: Politics and Technology
[P]re-acting to something that hasn’t happened yet is nonsense.
Refusing to learn from people you don’t agree with isn’t a particularly modern vice, but in our world of information overload, where there are so many voices that we can choose to listen only to people we agree with, it does create a particularly modern narrowness of mind.
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Why I Support Certifications
I’m betting that I could take my certifications off my resume and still have a fair chance at finding a job. It’s a guess, of course, and I’ve never tried any sort of an experiment towards finding out, but the point is this: at some point in your career, certifications should become just one more thing on an excellent resume, rather than the focal point of your resume. Given this, why do I still support certifications? To answer this question, I need to back up into the certification development process a bit.
One of the strangest “mind trips” I’ve ever encountered was working with the “psycho’s” (psychometricians, really, but you know how engineers are with long words) through the entire CCDE/CCAr process. The two things we were challenged constantly were:
- What does the minimally qualified candidate look like?
- How do you intend to test for that skill?
Both of these are hard questions.
The first question we turned into a simpler one (again, you know how engineers are): Why do I care? When someone would suggest a particular question or skill, they were immediately met with the counter — Do I care? If I were a designer working on a Continue reading
Worth Reading 06:19
Much as I’ve been trying to keep up on interesting stuff to read on the right column, I still seem to have built a long list of bookmarks! Having nothing better to do on a Friday morning, I’m dumping them on your.
So there! 
I’ve posted in the past on the problems of the IT job market. Primarily I think it’s too much about “what narrow set of skills do you have,” rather than, “are you a good engineer,” and I think we engineers are as much to blame as anyone else for this. “Yeah, but do you know about the latest gobberfubble embedded fingernail pick API??” we say with pride, trying to find something we know about the person we’re interviewing does. Interviews shouldn’t be about making yourself feel better about your technical skill — they should be about finding a good engineer for your team. Okay, I’ve ranted long enough — it’s time for Infoworld to take over on this score with more practical advice.
The Midyear State of the IT Job Market.
By the way, I know my response to the esoteric game won’t work for everyone, but whenever someone gets me into this position of Continue reading
Anger
"I suppose that when one hears a tale of hideous cruelty anger is quite the wrong reaction, and merely wastes the energy that ought to go in a different direction: perhaps merely dulls the conscience which, if it were awake, would ask us, “Well, what are you doing about it? How much of your live have you spent in really combating this?”
" C.S. Lewis —
Review: Building Microservices
Building Microservices
Sam Newman
ISBN: 978-1-491-95035-7
Scale out where you can, scale up where you must.
Someone, somewhere, should probably start a collection of “where you can, where must” sayings, as these rules of thumb (thumbs were used by carpenters instead of a ruler to measure an inch, apparently) are important to remember, even if they’re imprecise. Route where you can, switch where you must — really refers to using layer 3 versus layer 2 networking as much as possible — for instance. Scaling out, from the perspective of network engineering, is all about repeatable modules, spine and leaf fabrics, and distribution of the control plane (didn’t think of that last one, did you?).
But what does scaling out mean in the application development world? It means splitting services into modular pieces which interact over the network. The ultimate goal of splitting services is to get to the microservice.
But what is a microservice?
To answer this question, you need to turn to the first chapter of Scaling Microservices, which says, “Microservices are small, autonomous services that work together.” Sam Newman, in the rest of the first chapter, explains the concept well, from a number of different angles, Continue reading
Worth Reading: SD-WAN and Per Application Routing
Of course, routing on a per application (or a per packet) basis provides more optimization, but it also adds more state in the control plane, and it increases the speed at which that state changes. In my forthcoming book on network complexity, I’m going to work around a model of state/speed/surface, with a side of optimization, to gain an understanding of network complexity and how to manage it.
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