Worth Reading: Using DNS as a Single Signon

Internet-wide identity management is one of the hot issues currently — dealing with hundreds of separate usernames and passwords is insecure and unfriendly for users. Increasingly, people use their social network accounts to log into websites, which works well, but forces you to allow either Google or Facebook to track all your logins — you don’t have a lot of choice. —Vittorio Bertola @APNIC

Short Take: Learn to Think

Worth Reading: DNS Inconsistency

In fact, I contend that it is likely impossible to construct a definitive version of the DNS graph at any point in time this way. The challenge stems from the phenomenon of DNS inconsistency, particularly in real-world NS RRset deployments. —John Kristoff @APNIC

Worth Reading: Chip architecture switches to heterogeneous

There are shifts underway in computing that are driving the need for more heterogeneous computing that can adapt to the workload at hand without having to change any of the underlying infrastructure. —Jeffrey Burt @The Next Platform

Is BGP Good Enough?

In a recent podcast, Ivan and Dinesh ask why there is a lot of interest in running link state protocols on data center fabrics. They begin with this point: if you have less than a few hundred switches, it really doesn’t matter what routing protocol you run on your data center fabric. Beyond this, there do not seem to be any problems to be solved that BGP cannot solve, so… why bother with a link state protocol? After all, BGP is much simpler than any link state protocol, and we should always solve all our problems with the simplest protocol possible.

 
Will these these contentions stand up to a rigorous challenge?

I will begin with the last contention first—BGP is simpler than any link state protocol. Consider the core protocol semantics of BGP and a link state protocol. In a link state protocol, every network device must have a synchronized copy of the Link State Continue reading

Worth Reading: Edge Analytics

Edge analytics is the lynchpin that drives real-time decision-making. So, edge analytics means increased intelligence on the devices at the edge. This translates to increased processing capabilities (compute) as well as higher storage on the edge devices. —Balaji Sivakumar @https://opensourceforu.com

Bridge of Sighs

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Portland, Maine—The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU are urging the state’s highest courts in Massachusetts and Maine to rule that law enforcement agents need a warrant to access real-time location information from cell phones, a clear application of a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling from June. @EFF

Survey data from Qualia suggests that as DevOps becomes mainstream, both organizational resources and budget allocation tied to measurable business outcomes will be attached to this method of rapid application development. DevOps enables a faster iterative process that drives innovation while doing more with less and increasing efficiency. —Thomas MacIsaac @Data Center Journal

Cobalt Group (aka TEMP.Metastrike), active since at least late 2016, have been suspected in attacks across dozens of countries. The group primarily targets financial organizations, often with the use of ATM malware. Researchers also believe they are responsible for a series of attacks on the SWIFT banking system which costs millions in damages to the impacted entities. @Netscout

At the end of our last post we had just emerged from the Fireswamp only to be captured by the six-fingered man. No, no, that’s not right. We had just caught up to the present, in which the Continue reading

Worth Reading: The BGP hackathon report

The research and operations communities have developed a set of tools and data sources for understanding and experimenting with BGP, and on February 2016 we organized the first BGP Hackathon, themed around live measurement and monitoring of Internet routing. The Hackathon included students, researchers, operators, providers, policymakers, and funding agencies, working together on projects to measure, visualize, and improve routing or the tools we use to study routing. @ACM SIGCOMM

CLKscrew: Another side channel you didn’t know about

Network engineers focus on protocols and software, but somehow all of this work must connect to the hardware on which packets are switched, and data is processed. A big part of the physical side of what networks “do” is power—how it is used, and how it is managed. The availability of power is one of the points driving centralization; power is not universally available at a single price. If cloud is cheaper, it’s probably not because of the infrastructure, but rather because of the power and real estate costs.

A second factor in processing is the amount of heat produced in processing. Data center designers expend a lot of energy in dealing with heat problems. Heat production is directly related to power usage; each increase in power consumption for processing shows up as heat somewhere—heat which must be removed from the equipment and the environment.

It is important, therefore, to optimize power usage. To do this, many processors today have power management interfaces allowing software to control the speed at which a processor runs. For instance, Kevin Myers (who blogs here) posted a recent experiment with pings running while a laptop is plugged in and on battery—

Reply from 2607:f498:4109::867:5309:  Continue reading

Worth Reading: Why serverless is being rapidly adopted

Our study found that 46 percent of IT decision makers are using and evaluating serverless, while 35 percent alone are evaluating serverless computing, a ten point increase year over year. —Chip Childers @The New Stack

Worth Reading: The people pushing a decentralized ‘net

As August began, the non-profit Internet Archive convened the Decentralized Web Summit in San Francisco, promising appearances by “the creators and builders of the original Internet and World Wide Web, plus other developers of cutting-edge decentralized protocols and representatives of civil society, human rights and government from around the world.” —David Cassel @The New Stack

Short Take: State, Optimization, and Surface

Worth Reading: Application Changes Driving the Cloud?

Maybe you believe in edge computing, or in IoT or AI, or maybe carrier cloud, or all of the above. The main thing is you believe the future requirements for applications and hosting will be different, and so the data centers and servers of the future will be different. The obvious question is what these differences will be, and how might they impact vendors and even software. —Tom Nolle @CIMI

Worth Reading: Apple Pushes Subscriptions

Apple is pushing suppliers/developers to move to subscription models instead of pay up front. Only 15% of purchases are paid leaving the remainder to be in-app purchases or subscriptions. —Greg Ferro @Packet Pushers

Network Collective: Breaking Things

Worth Reading: Passive observations of a large DNS service

Due to the centralization that is caused by public DNS services, large content delivery networks (CDNs), such as Akamai, are no longer able to rely on the source IP of DNS queries to pinpoint their customers. Therefore, they are also no longer able to provide geobased redirection appropriate for that IP. —Wouter de Vries @APNIC

Worth Reading: Waht to consider when Leasing Dark Fiber

Leasing, “lighting” and operating a dark-fiber network is a major undertaking that requires a well-trained technical staff. The next few paragraphs review important factors, especially fiber-optic attributes, to keep in mind when planning to lease dark fiber. —Jabulani Dhliwayo @Data Center Journal

Reaction: Centralization Wins

Warning: in this post, I am going to cross a little into philosophy, governance, and other odd subjects. Here there be dragons. Let me begin by setting the stage:

Decentralized systems will continue to lose to centralized systems until there’s a driver requiring decentralization to deliver a clearly superior consumer experience. Unfortunately, that may not happen for quite some time. —Todd Hoff @High Scalability

And the very helpful diagram which accompanies the quote—

The point Todd Hoff, the author makes, is that five years ago he believed the decentralized model would win, in terms of the way the Internet is structured. However, today he doesn’t believe this; centralization is winning. Two points worth considering before jumping into a more general discussion.

First, the decentralized model is almost always the most efficient in almost every respect. It is the model with the lowest signal-to-noise ratio, and the model with the highest gain. The simplest way to explain this is to note the primary costs in a network is the cost of connectivity, and the primary gain is the amount of support connections provide. The distributed model offers the best balance of these two.

Second, what we are generally talking about here Continue reading

Worth Reading: Chasing Shannon’s Limit

In the 1850s, the first submarine cables carrying telegraphic traffic were laid, initially across the English Channel connecting the United Kingdom to the rest of Western Europe. Later, in the 1860s, cables were laid across the Atlantic Ocean connecting North America to Europe reducing communications time from ten days — the time it took a ship to sail across — to minutes, via telegraphic messaging. —Anup Changaroth @APNIC