Russ

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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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Worth Reading: The economics of port breakout

Port-breakout deployments have become a popular networking tool and are driving the large industry demand for parallel optics transceivers. Today, port breakout is commonly used to operate 40/100Gbps (40/100G) parallel optics transceivers as four 10/25Gbps (10/25G) links. Breaking out parallel ports is beneficial for multiple applications, such as building large scale spine-and-leaf networks and enabling today’s high-density 10/25G networks. The latter task is the focus of this article. —Jennifer Cline And David Hessong @ the Data Center Journal

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Worth Reading: LinkedIn passes an IPv6 milestone

Since we enabled IPv6 on our mail servers in 2013 and then on our web site in 2014, we have seen increased growth of our external IPv6 traffic. We are currently working on enabling IPv6 on our all of our internal networks and applications in order to begin removing IPv4 internally, beginning in 2018. The external network and public services will still support IPv4 (for compatibility with legacy clients) for years to come, but we anticipate the proportion of our external traffic served over IPv6 to only increase. The community has seen tangible benefits from serving content over IPv6 compared to IPv4. We, too, see some performance improvements on IPv6. —LinkedIn Engineering Blog

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Worth Reading: Is cloud moving too fast for security?

That’s at least five-major cloud application and infrastructure data breach incidents for 2017, and we’re only in July. Add in the number of ransomeware and other attacks during the first half of this year and it’s clear the cloud has a real security problem. By now, most everyone recognizes the benefits of the cloud; bringing new applications and infrastructure online quickly and scaling it to meet ever changing business demands. —Doug Lane @ Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: Do startup employees make more?

Since the average startup founder who makes it to Series A earns more than a large company employee, many believe that early-stage startup employees also earn more (albeit less than founders). Dustin Moskovitz has even claimed that startup early employees have better earnings prospects than founders. We’ve looked at the data, and this does not seem to be true on average. —Ben West @ 80000hours

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Bespoke Processors and the Future of Networks

As I spend a lot of time on Oak Island (not the one on television, the other one), I tend to notice some of those trivial things in life. For instance, when the tide is pretty close to all the way in, it probably is not going to come in much longer; rather, it is likely to start going back out soon. If you spend any time around clocks with pendulums, you might have noticed the same thing; the maximum point at which the pendulum swings is the point where it also begins swinging back. Of course my regular readers are going to recognize the point, because I have used it in many presentations about the centralization/decentralization craze the networking industry seems to go through every few years.

Right now, of course, we are in the craze of centralization. To hear a lot of folks tell it, in ten years there simply are not going to be routing protocols. Instead, we are going to all buy appliances, plug them in, and it is “just going to work.” And that is just for folks who insist on having their own network—for the part of the world that is not completely Continue reading

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