Russ

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Worth Reading: Ops is everyone’s job now

Distributed systems are never “up”; they exist in a constant state of partially degraded service. Accept failure, design for resiliency, protect and shrink the critical path. You can’t hold the entire system in your head or reason about it; you will live or die by the thoroughness of your instrumentation and observability tooling. You need robust service registration and discovery, load balancing, and backpressure between every combination of components. You need to learn to integrate third-party services; many core functions will be outsourced to teams or companies that you have no direct visibility into or influence upon You have to test in production, and you have to do so safely; you cannot spin up a staging copy of a large distributed system. —Charity Majors @ opensource

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Worth Reading: Web archiving and the importance of context

One of the most basic tenants of all data science is that data doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is the result of a massive pipeline of explicit and implicit decisions, yet so much of the output of the data science world proceeds as if data can be cleanly separated from the contexts in which it is created. Nowhere is this more apparent than the world of web archiving. —Kalev Leetaru @ Forbes

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Worth Reading: Making mainstream switches malleable

While the hyperscalers of the world are pushing the bandwidth envelope and are rolling out 100 Gb/sec gear in their Ethernet switch fabrics and looking ahead to the not-too-distant future when 200 Gb/sec and even 400 Gb/sec will be available, enterprise customers who make up the majority of switch revenues are still using much slower networks, usually 10 Gb/sec and sometimes even 1 Gb/sec, and 100 Gb/sec seems like a pretty big leap. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: What we learn in transitioning from card catalogs

When we transition to a new technology, do we lose valuable metadata? Could errors be introduced in the process of transfer of data from one medium to another? It’s an issue society has already had to confront — when the world’s libraries transitioned to digital and online catalogs from their older systems based on paper cards. —David Cassel @ The New Stack

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On the ‘web: Hyperconvergence in the Network

First there is white box; the networking world is already moving in this direction. While network devices, such as firewalls, routers, and switches were once purchased in an “appliance” model, many parts of the networking world are quickly moving towards a disaggregated model, where the hardware and software are purchased as separate “things.” This enables the concept of white box—although the box might not actually be white. The terms “bright box” and “grey box” attempt to capture the reality that you might still buy boxes from brand named vendors, but rather than buying them for their software capabilities, you can now buy them for their hardware capabilities.

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Worth Reading: Speeding up doesn’t help

The evolution then began, first at 1.5x speed, and eventually working up to twice the speed. At first, it made me laugh. Those distinct voices I had grown so accustomed to had turned into high-speed ramblings. Listening to Ira Glass and Terry Gross at 2x speed is like expecting a massage at a spa and getting a defibrillator instead. But you get used to it, and plus: 50-minute podcasts were taking me 25 minutes to get through. Those that were an hour or longer were flying by. I was no longer just getting through my queue; I now had time to discover even more podcasts. —Paolo Uggetti @ The Ringer

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Worth Reading: A code camps getting the boot?

Within the past week, two major learn-to-code boot camp programs have announced that they are going out of business. Iron Yard, a boot camp-style tech and coding school, was founded in 2012 and grew to twenty campuses nationwide (including Las Vegas, baby). Trouble was apparent three months ago when Iron Yard shuttered five of its locations, and the company has now announced that the rest will close by October. —Michelle Gienow @ The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Erasing Tech Debt

I worked on projects based on the following premise: “We’re going to switch to a different technology and everything will get discarded. For now, as long as it works, don’t worry too much about coding standards.” If it doesn’t sound too bad for you, let’s look at it from a different angle: “We’re all going to die at some point, so while you’re alive, do whatever you want and don’t worry about the consequences.” —Gabriel Colombo @ Free Code Camp

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The OSPF Two Part Metric

Looking at the capabilities of any given protocol running in our networks today, it certainly seems there are few use cases left the protocol cannot support. In fact, modern interior gateway protocols have become so capable that it almost seems like we only need one to support everything. This is not reality, of course—there are many places where a specialized protocol would do better than a general purpose one, and there are still many use cases current protocols cannot support. One such use case, for OSPF, illustrated below, uses a two part metric to solve a very specific problem, as illustrated below.

On the left side of this diagram you can see the “typical” broadcast network. Originally common in what used to be called local area networks, these sorts of broadcast segments are actually more common on metro edges and wireless networks today than in a campus or data center. Anyone familiar with OSPF should already know what the problem is with this sort of configuration—if you build an adjacency between every pair of routers illustrated here, you end up with just too much state. For instance—

  • Each pair of routers in the network will form an adjacency, and hence Continue reading

Worth Reading: AMD Thread Ripper

The AMD Ryzen Threadripper processor offers higher core and thread counts, which equates to more capability and performance than any other consumer-level processor for high-end computing functionality. By doubling the core count found in the Ryzen chip that launched late in the first quarter, AMD can address different markets that requires higher levels of performance, including video editing, rendering, software development and others. AMD even paints this chip as being able to handle “mega-tasking,” the ability to run two complex workloads (video transcoding and gaming, for example) without the same kind of performance drop you would find on other processors. —Ryan Shrout @ Market Watch

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Worth Watching: The big four

Worth more than $2.3 trillion combined, the Big Four (Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google) continue to grab share from media companies, brands, and retailers. Scott Galloway, Professor of Marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business and Founder of L2, will showcase how the traditional rules of business don’t apply to the Big Four and identify ways that brands and companies can fight back. —Scott Galloway @ YouTube

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Worth Reading: Google rewires the Internet

When all of your business is driven by end users coming to use your applications over the Internet, the network is arguably the most critical part of the infrastructure. That is why search engine and ad serving giant Google, which has expanded out to media serving, hosted enterprise applications, and cloud computing, has put a tremendous amount of investment into creating its own network stack. —Timothy Prickett Morgan @ The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: The observer effect

What is needed in any monitoring system is the ability to increase or reduce the level of polling and data collection as system needs dictate. If you are actively debugging a system, then you probably want to turn the volume of data up to 11, but if the system is running well, you can dial the volume back down to 4 or 5. The volume can be thought of as the polling frequency times the amount of data being captured. —George V. Neville-Neil @ Communications of the ACM

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History of Networking: Quality of Service with Fred Baker

Some folks over at the Network Collective thought it would be cool to sit around with folks who invented various networking technologies and just talk about the where, why, and how of those technologies were invented. Donald Sharp and I, while not officially a part of the collective, are hosting this new video cast, and the first edition just published.

For this videocast, we’re sitting down with Fred Baker to talk about the origins of Quality of Service. Hopefully we will have Fred on again in the future to talk about Raven and some of the history around network surveillance. You can watch it here, or you can jump over to the main Network Collective site and watch it there.

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Worth Reading: Encryption substitutes

Policy experts have suggested that the rise of encrypted data is not the end of intelligence collection because law enforcement can look to substitutes other sources of intelligence, such as metadata that prove to be just as valuable or more valuable than decrypting encrypted data. This paper focuses on the other side of that insight: on the substitutes available for privacy-seekers beyond encryption, such as placing one’s data in a jurisdiction that is beyond the reach of law enforcement. This framework puts encryption in context: there are many ways to keep one’s data private, just as there are many ways that the government might get access to that data. While encryption is typically treated as a stand-alone computer security issue, it is a piece of a larger debate about government access to personal data. —Andrew Keane Woods @ Scirbd

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On the ‘web: Getting Involved with the IETF

I sat with Greg, Kathleen, and Alia to talk about “ordinary engineers” getting involved in the IETF while we were in Prague. Believe it or not, this time I didn’t get out into the city at all other than walking between the hotel I was staying at and the venue hotel. I try to always take “one day off” and do something around the city we are in, but the schedule didn’t allow it this time. Anyway, here is the link—

Greg Ferro attended the IETF 99 meeting in Prauge in July 2017. In this Priority Queue show, he sits down with Kathleen Moriarty, an IETF Security Area Director; Alia Atlas, a Routing Area Director; and Russ White, a co-chair of a variety of working groups and all-around community leader; to discuss opportunities for IT professionals to get directly involved with the IETF in networking, security, and other areas. —Packet Pushers

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