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Worth Reading: Amazon is the new Microsoft

Microsoft in the Bill Gates era was truly full of itself, pushing competitors around, crushing enemies and occasionally breaking the law as a bevy of anti-trust settlements show. Microsoft was the second most valuable company on Earth after ExxonMobil and seemed to feel it could get away with anything. … Today in the public cloud space Amazon is behaving much like Microsoft did in the 90s. They are hugely dominant with more than 70 percent of the cloud market and growing. According to Gartner Amazon Web Services (AWS) will soon have 80 percent of the public cloud market. — Robert Cringely

Worth Reading: Intel moves into 5G

The Intel XMM 8000-series of 5G-capable modems will bring the next generation of wireless connectivity to PCs, smartphones and infrastructure devices with a target consumer-product launch in mid-2019. Intel INTC, -2.23% also updated plans for a new 4G LTE modem that will offer speeds as high as 1.6 gigabits per second, a substantial upgrade from current connectivity options on smartphones (peaking at 1.0 gigabits per second), again with a 2019 target release. — Ryan Shrout @ Market Watch

Thoughts on Open/R

Since Facebook has released their Open/R routing platform, there has been a lot of chatter around whether or not it will be a commercial success, whether or not every hyperscaler should use the protocol, whether or not this obsoletes everything in routing before this day in history, etc., etc. I will begin with a single point.

If you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough.

Design is about tradeoffs. Protocol design is no different than any other design. Hence, we should expect that Open/R makes some tradeoffs. I know this might be surprising to some folks, particularly in the crowd that thinks every new routing system is going to be a silver bullet that solved every problem from the past, that the routing singularity has now occurred, etc. I’ve been in the world of routing since the early 1990’s, perhaps a bit before, and there is one thing I know for certain: if you understand the basics, you would understand there is no routing singularity, and there never will be—at least not until someone produces a quantum wave routing protocol.

Ther reality is you always face one of two choices in routing: build a protocol specifically tuned Continue reading

Worth Reading: Infiniband Quantum Leap

InfiniBand and Ethernet are in a game of tug of war and are pushing the bandwidth and price/performance envelopes constantly. But the one thing they cannot do is get too far out ahead of the PCI-Express bus through which network interface cards hook into processors. The 100 Gb/sec links commonly used in Ethernet and InfiniBand server adapters run up against bandwidth ceilings with two ports running on PCI-Express 3.0 slots, and it is safe to say that 200 Gb/sec speeds will really need PCI-Express 4.0 slots to have two ports share a slot. — Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

Worth Reading: Docker Networking

There’s been a lot of talk about container networking in the industry lately (heck, we can’t even stop talking about it). And it’s for a good reason. Containers offer a fantastic way to develop and manage microservices and distributed applications easily and efficiently. In fact, that’s one of the reasons we launched Host Pack — to make container networking even simpler. Between Host Pack and NetQ, you can get fabric-wide connectivity and visibility from server to switch. — Diane Patton @ Cumulus

Weekend Reading: 2017-11-17

There’s an “automation meteor” headed right at us, according to financial adviser and Reformed Broker blogger Josh Brown, who used this troubling “chart o’ the day” from Wharton to show just “how quickly things have changed” over the past decade. And how they’re going to keep on changing. — Sean Langlios @ MarketWatch

Andrew Ng, formerly the head of AI for Chinese search giant Baidu and, before that, creator of Google’s deep-learning Brain project, knows as well as anyone that artificial intelligence is coming for plenty of jobs. And many of us don’t even know it. — Racel Metz @ MIT Technology Review

Cloudflare provides security and domain name services for millions of the most prominent sites on the web. The company has built a solid reputation for its secure encryption and one of the key factors in its system is a wall of 100 lava lamps in the lobby of its San Francisco headquarters. — Rhett Jones @ gizmodo

Worth Reading: Court Overreach with SOPA

Nearly six years ago, Internet user communities rose up and said no to the disastrous SOPA copyright bill. This bill proposed creating a new, quick court order process to compel various Internet services—free speech’s weak links—to help make websites disappear. Today, despite the failure of SOPA, a federal court in Virginia issued just such an order, potentially reaching many different kinds of Internet services. — Mitch Stoltz @ Deep Links

Worth Reading: Anonymous Speech Takes a Hit

First Amendment protections for anonymous speech online were dealt a serious blow earlier today when the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit issued its opinion in United States v. Glassdoor. In its opinion, the Court ruled in favor of the US government’s efforts to compel Glassdoor to unmask anonymous reviews of employers by employees posted on the site. The ripple effects of this case for online speakers could be severe, and with the case having been placed under seal from day one, it’s not surprising that the decision reflects a clear lack of understanding of its potential impact from the Court. — Lisa A Hayes @ Center for Democracy and Technology

Worth Reading: Continuous Infrastructure

Continuous delivery (CD) and continuous integration (CI) are two well-known aspects of DevOps. But the CI in vogue today is missing a critical “I:” infrastructure. There was a time when “infrastructure” meant headless black boxes, enormous server rooms, and towering racks—not to mention procurement processes that stretched for months and load estimates that erred on the side of surplus. Then came the virtual machine revolution, which made the infrastructure, well, virtual—and the world has never been the same. We no longer need to manage brick-and-mortar boxes. We can create and destroy, start and stop, upgrade and downgrade machines with just a few clicks. — Girish Managoli @ opensource.com

Worth Reading: Route Leaks

Route leaks are a fact of life on the Internet. According to one ISP’s observations, on any given day of the week, between 10-20% of announcements are actually leaks. Type 6 route leaks can be alleviated in part by technical and/or operational measures. For internal prefixes never meant to be routed on the Internet, one suggestion is to use origin validation to filter leaks, but this requires adoption of RPKI and only deals with two specific types of leak.– Brenden Kuerbis @ CircleID

Learning to Ask Questions

One thing I’m often asked in email and in person is: why should I bother learning theory? After all, you don’t install SPF in your network; you install a router or switch, which you then configure OSPF or IS-IS on. The SPF algorithm is not exposed to the user, and does not seem to really have any impact on the operation of the network. Such internal functionality might be neat to know, but ultimately–who cares? Maybe it will be useful in some projected troubleshooting situation, but the key to effective troubleshooting is understanding the output of the device, rather than in understanding what the device is doing.

In other words, there is no reason to treat network devices as anything more than black boxes. You put some stuff in, other stuff comes out, and the vendor takes care of everything in the middle. I dealt with a related line of thinking in this video, but what about this black box argument? Do network engineers really need to know what goes on inside the vendor’s black box?

Let me anser this question with another question. Wen you shift to a new piece of hardware, how do you know what you are Continue reading

Weekend Reads 2017-05-11

We’re quietly replacing an open web that connects and empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. We need to stop it. I quit Facebook seven months ago. Despite its undeniable value, I think Facebook is at odds with the open web that I love and defend. This essay is my attempt to explain not only why I quit Facebook but why I believe we’re slowly replacing a web that empowers with one that restricts and commoditizes people. And why we should, at the very least, stop and think about the consequences of that shift. –Parimal Satyal @ Neustadt.fr

Two clocks are ticking for US tech companies in the power centers of the modern world. In Washington, lawmakers are working to reform FISA Section 702 before it expires on December 31st, 2017. Section 702 is the main legal basis for US mass surveillance, including the programs and techniques that scoop up the data transferred by non-US individuals to US servers. Upstream surveillance collects communications as they travel over the Internet backbone, and downstream surveillance (better known as PRISM) collects communications from companies like Google, Facebook, and Yahoo. –Danny O’Brien @ EFF

Arguably, a good deal of Americans are in Continue reading

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