Worth Reading: Chaos Engineering

Chaos engineering is, therefore, embracing the potential for failure and looking at it as an opportunity to become a more flexible, adaptable team with more flexible, adaptable architecture. And by accepting that you’ll have failure, you can control the failure and get to know your system — and by extension the team building it — better. —Jennifer Riggins @ The New Stack

Worth Reading: The Largest Deal in Tech history

Private equity firm Silver Lake Partners has an appetite for tech, and securing funding for Dell to take itself private and then go out and buy EMC and VMware is now going to take a backseat in terms of deal size – and in potential ripple effects in the datacenter – now that chip giant Broadcom is making an unsolicited bid, backed by Silver Lake, to take over often-times chip rival Qualcomm. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

Do We Really Need a New BGP?

From time to time, I run across (yet another) article about why BGP is so bad, and how it needs to be replaced. This one, for instance, is a recent example.

It seems the easiest way to solvet this problem is finding new people—ones who don’t make mistakes—to work on BGP configuration, building IRR databases, and deciding what should be included in BGP? Ivan points out how hopeless of a situation this is going to be, however. As Ivan says, you cannot solve people problems with technology. You can hint in the right direction, and you can try to make things a little more sane, and a little less complex, but people cannot be fixed with technology. Given we cannot fix the people problem, would replacing BGP itself really help? Is there anything we could do to make things better?

To understand the answer to these questions, it is important to tear down a major misconception about BGP. The misconception?

BGP is a routing protocol.

BGP was not designed to be a routing protocol. It was designed to provide a loop free path through a series of independently operated networks, each with its own policy and business goals. In the Continue reading

Falco joins SONiC

One of the key components of our vision for LinkedIn’s global infrastructure is to ultimately build a programmable data center fabric on top of an open network operating system. While scaling our data centers out, we want to control the complexity of the data center fabric by moving toward an automated, self-defined, and purpose-built, application-centric network that operates on its own. —LinkedIn Engineering Blog

Worth Reading: MEC the Future

If there’s anything our industry is good at, it’s creating ever new hype cycles and continuing to fall into the same traps of overestimating what they can do for mankind as a whole, or at least for network operators. And now comes MEC… Multi-access Edge Computing, formerly known as Mobile Edge Computing, and it’s all the rave. To be honest, it’s been around for a while. Up till now it was mostly tied to mobile, in general and 5G specifically, but according to some people it has such potential that it was worth being renamed (keeping the same acronym) and rolled into the topologies of networks of all kinds. So why the hype, and is it real this time? —Andreas Hegers @ ECI

Weekend Reads 121517

Crooks who make and deploy ATM skimmers are constantly engaged in a cat-and-mouse game with financial institutions, which deploy a variety of technological measures designed to defeat skimming devices. The latest innovation aimed at tipping the scales in favor of skimmer thieves is a small, battery powered device that provides crooks a digital readout indicating whether an ATM likely includes digital anti-skimming technology. —Krebs on Security

Not long ago, phishing attacks were fairly easy for the average Internet user to spot: Full of grammatical and spelling errors, and linking to phony bank or email logins at unencrypted (http:// vs. https://) Web pages. Increasingly, however, phishers are upping their game, polishing their copy and hosting scam pages over https:// connections — complete with the green lock icon in the browser address bar to make the fake sites appear more legitimate. —Krebs on Security

As the European Union General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) looms, a privacy stripping email setting continues in widespread use around the world. It threatens sensitive communications that containing personally-identifiable information, intellectual property, financial information, and your most intimate photos. —Free Code Camp

This week, the Supreme Court will hear a case with profound implications on your security and Continue reading

Hummingbird

Worth Reading: Deployment Strategies

Let’s talk about deployments. This topic used to be considered an uninteresting implementation detail, but is now becoming a fundamental element for modern systems. I feel like everyone understand its importance, and is working to build solutions around it, but we are missing some structure and definition. People use different terms for same meanings, or same terms for different meanings. This leads to other people reinventing the wheel trying to solve their problems. We need a common understanding of this topic in order to build better tools, make better decisions, and simplify communication with each other. —Itay Shakury

Worth Reading: The Math Behind Reliabity

So last week I was looking at some things around Reliability and I realized how big the Reliability Engineering field is. Then I thought why not share it with others on what I have learned so far and at the same time with a hope that experts in this field may read this and correct me if there are any mistakes in my understanding. —Diptanshu Singh @ Packet Pushers

‘net Neutrality Collection

I’ve run across a lot of interesting perspectives on ‘net Neutrality; to make things easier, I’ve pulled them onto a single page. For anyone who’s interested in hearing every side of the issue, this is a good collection of articles to read through.

The page is here.

Worth Reading: Operational Excellence in April Fools Jokes

At 10:23 UTC on April 1, 2015, stackoverflow.com enabled an April Fools’ prank called StackEgg.1 It was a simple Tamagotchi-like game that appeared in the upper right corner of the website. Though it had been tested, we didn’t account for the additional network activity it would generate. By 13:14 UTC the activity had grown to the point of overloading the company’s load balancers, making the site unusable. All of the company’s web properties were affected. The prank had, essentially, created a self-inflicted denial-of-service attack. —Thomas A. Limoncelli @ ACM Queue

Worth Reading: Barefoot Releases Per Packet Network Monitoring

Barefoot Networks, maker of the programmable Tofino silicon for network devices, has released a new network monitoring application for Tofino switches called Deep Insight. Deep Insight, which is built from the open source P4 programming language, lets administrators and operators monitor Tofino-based switches down to individual packets. —Drew Conry-Murray @ Packet Pushers

History of Networking: The Early Years of Voice Over IP

Worth Reading: The Costs and Concerns of Cloud

Moving large-scale enterprise operations into the cloud is not a decision to be made lightly. There are engineering and financial considerations, and the process of determining the costs pros and cons of such a move is significantly more complex than simply comparing the expense of running a workload on-premises or in a public cloud. —Jeffrey Burt @ The Next Platform

Worth Reading: Dim Fiber

Perhaps you have not yet heard the term “dim fiber services”. If so, allow me to introduce you to a concept that is growing in popularity among fiber network owners. Dim services fall in between lit services and dark fiber services (hence the name) and provide network operators with an additional revenue stream while providing end users a more transparent and flexible service choice. &#8212s;Scott Wilkinson @ ECI

Reaction: AT&T’s Paper on dNOS

The AT&T White Paper: What they get Right, what they get Wrong

AT&T recently published a paper on dNOS, an open, disaggregated, Network Operating System for any kind of hardware. They list three primary purposes for their effort at helping the networking industry build an open source dNOS:

• To improve the rate of innovation and introduction of new features
• To provide more flexibility in network design
• To reduce costs where possible by taking advantage of purchasing “at scale”

How could disaggregation help with these three goals? The first of these, the rate of innovation, is really about packaging and perception, but we often forget that perception is a large part of innovation. If software developers always believe they must wait on the hardware, and hardware developers always feel like they must wait on the software, then the two teams develop an interlocking system that can slow down the pace at which either team can operate. One certain way to drive innovation is to break up such interconnected systems, allowing each one to use the features of the other in ways not originally intended, or drive the other team to create new features through competition. For instance, if the software team Continue reading

Worth Reading: Battle of the Infinibands

When it comes to HPC, compute is like the singers in a rock band, making all of the noise and soaking up most of the attention. But the network that lashes the compute together is literally the beat of the drums and the thump of the bass that keeps everything in synch and allows for the harmonies of the singers to come together at all. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

Worth Reading: Big Data and Social Change

Our authors will argue the big data challenge is the not technical problem of moving the maximum amount of bits in the minimum amount of time, but the scientific challenge of formulating methods to represent the complex and entangled systems that we must design and manage to run the modern world. This goes beyond “computational analytics” that abstract statistics from large data sets; “data mining” that discovers useful structures in combined data streams; and “visual analytics” that display multisource data as ingenious maps, color-coded images, and multidimensional videos to aid understanding and inform decisionmaking. —David Sousa-Rodrigues @ ACM

Do What You Love?

Worth Reading: VXLAN Designs

With VXLAN design, the easiest thing to overlook is how communication occurs between subnets. I think many times, network engineers take for granted that our traffic will flow in a VXLAN environment. And it’s also easy to get confused when trying to figure out traffic routing path between your overlay and underlay. —Rama Darbha @ Cumulus