Russ

Author Archives: Russ

Reaction: The Power of Open APIs

Disaggregation, in the form of splitting network hardware from network software, is often touted as a way to save money (as if network engineering were primarily about saving money, rather than adding value—but this is a different soap box). The primary connections between disaggregation and saving money are the ability to deploy white boxes, and the ability to centralize the control plane to simplify the network (think software defined networks here—again, whether or not both of these are true as advertised is a different discussion).

But drivers that focus on cost miss more than half the picture. A better way to drive the value of disaggregation, and the larger value of networks within the larger network technology sphere, is through increased value. What drives value in network engineering? It’s often simplest to return to Tannenbaum’s example of the station wagon full of VHS backup tapes. To bring the example into more modern terms, it is difficult to beat the bandwidth of an overnight box full of USB thumb drives in terms of pure bandwidth.

In this view, networks can primarily be seen as a sop to human impatience. They are a way to get things done more quickly. In the Continue reading

The Value of Community

What seems, now, like a few short months ago, I was drawn into a small community known as The Network Collective. This last week, we launched our paid membership service.

The first thing that must come to mind is that there will be training. Of course there will be training. A (minor) theme throughout the community launch among Eyvonne, Jordan, and I, is that the training on tap will be different from anything else out there. We all three have a great deal of respect for the existing training materials, and we all intend to continue to be involved in other training and education efforts. On the other hand, the style, tone, and content will be different at The Network Collective. The first series being launched are math for network engineers, a long conversation on network design, and a long conversation on communication skills. But training is, once again, a minor theme.

The major theme of The Network Collective is community.

Consider the position of the “average” network engineer. You are either the expert, or one of a few experts, on a topic very few people care about in your organization. What you build is largely seen as an opaque Continue reading

Weekend Reads 060118: GDPR Heavy

“But what’s the harm?” Far too often, this is one of the biggest questions posed in debates about the value of privacy and the costs of violating it in the United States. Just last fall, the Federal Trade Commission conducted a workshop exploring the contours of “informational injury”, in which CDT participated. —Joseph Jerome @CDT

WHOIS is a service that was inherited from the pre-ICANN registries and has never had a formal definition or rationale beyond that’s the way it’s always been. None of the attempts to rationalize WHOIS have gone anywhere, and there was a broad agreement that the processes had been repeatedly derailed by trademark lawyers who want a one-stop source for whom to sue if someone utters their client’s name in vain. —John Levine @CircleID

Email addresses are seemingly simple to eliminate in theory, devilishly difficult in practice, and potentially expensive mistakes under GDPR. Send an unreacted address to the wrong place, and someone in Europe becomes a Euro Millionaire. Whoops. —Neil Schwartzman @CircleID

The General Data Protection Regulation is here, and soon we will see if it ushers in a new era of individual empowerment or raises novel barriers to innovation in technology. Fears of Continue reading

Worth Reading: A hard rain is going to fall in public cloud

The public cloud, like Internet service and Internet hosting, is a rich person’s game. If you can’t pony up billions of dollars for infrastructure design, manufacturing, and installation each quarter, then you probably are not going to get the kind of low infrastructure costs that AWS, Google, Microsoft, IBM, and Alibaba can, and therefore you are going to be priced out of the infrastructure cloud. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @The Next Platform

Worth Reading: Open Optical

Network operators are intrigued by the concept open optical systems, whereby they can assemble an optical network by piecing together parts from various vendors. They are encouraged by concepts like disaggregated transponder boxes for DCI applications, an Open ROADM MSA, and the Telecom Infra Project Voyager white box initiative. While there is undoubtedly increasing interest in the open model, the question is how far can and should this model be pushed. —Jonathan Homa @ECI

Research: BBR Congestion-Based Congestion Control

Congestion control has proven to be one of the hardest problems to solve in packet based networks. The “easy” way to solve this problem is with admission control, but this “easy” solution is actually quit deceptive; creating the algrorithms and centralized control to manage admission control is much more difficult than it seems. This is why many circuit switched networks just use some form of Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), giving each device connected to the network a single “slot,” and filling empty slots with idle frames, ultimately throwing bandwidth away in the name of simpler computation of fairness.

The problem space has, however, attracted a lot of research. In this post, I’ll be looking at one such effort, a research paper published in the October 2016 edition of ACM Queue describing a system called BBR, a congestion-based congestion control system. At the heart of this system is the concept of the bottleneck link, or bottleneck in the path, which is the lowest bandwidth, highest delay, or perhaps the most congested link in the path between two hosts. The authors use the following figure to describe the current operational point of most congestion control systems, and then the optimal point of Continue reading

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