Worth Reading: Lessons from Facebook’s split network backbone

Distributed applications, whether they are containerized or not, have a lot of benefits when it comes to modularity and scale. But in a world of feature creep on all applications, whether they are internally facing ones running a business or hyperscale consumer applications like Google’s search engine or Facebook’s social media network, these distributed applications put a huge strain on the network. This, more than any other factor, is why network costs are rising faster than any other aspect of the datacenter. —The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: Digital advertising takes a hit

But how effectively does that information work to meet advertiser goals? As advertisers including P&G, which spends billions of dollars each year on all its advertising for brands including Crest, Old Spice, and Gillette, have tried to assess the effectiveness of their increasing digital ad budgets, they’ve discovered that hyper-targeting consumers doesn’t always work. —Technology Review

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Worth Reading: Value constrains us

I only take part in a few services, and I’m not consistently active on any of them. Despite however many followers I might have on a given platform, the world doesn’t care what I have to say on those services so much that my contributions especially matter. Therefore, stepping back isn’t harming anyone, nor is it disappointing someone that I’m not saying something or participating in every conversation that I might. No one notices. —Ethan Banks

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Reaction: Offensive Destruction of Attack Assets

It is certainly true that DDoS and hacking are on the rise; there have been a number of critical hacks in the last few years, including apparent attempts to alter the outcome of elections. The reaction has been a rising tide of fear, and an ever increasing desire to “do something.” The something that seems to be emerging is, however, not necessarily the best possible “something.” Specifically, governments are now talking about attempting to “wipe out” the equipment used in attacks—

Berlin was studying what legal changes were needed to allow authorities to purge stolen data from third-party servers, and to potentially destroy servers used to carry out cyber attacks. “We believe it is necessary that we are in a position to be able to wipe out these servers if the providers and the owners of the servers are not ready to ensure that they are not used to carry out attacks,” Maassen said. —Reuters

“Wiping out” (destroying?) a server because the owner cannot ensure the server will be used in a way the government agrees with—sounds like a good idea, right? And how do we make certain such laws are not extended to destroy the servers Continue reading

Worth Reading: Mind the gap

The sheer number of IT departments that are not acknowledging the numerous security gaps for cyber-attackers to exploit is astonishing. The problem is that many of those within the industry believe they have their security posture under control but they haven’t looked at the wider picture. The number of threats is increasing every day and as new technologies and opportunities emerge, companies need new security infrastructure to cope with the modifications of the threat landscape. Currently, C-level executives struggle to keep up with the necessity to approve budget requirements to bring their enterprise security up to the next level of protection. If companies are not up to date with the latest trends, businesses are being left more vulnerable to data breached as a consequence. —Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: Cherry picker

For big data analytics jobs, especially recurring jobs, finding a good cloud configuration (number and type of machines, CPU, memory ,disk and network options) can make a big different to overall cost and runtimes. Likewise, a poor choice can seriously degrade performance and/or increase costs. … How do you find the good configurations though? Just on instance types, Amazon EC2 and Microsoft Azure each offer over 40 (GCP offered 18 at the time of writing, plus the ability to customise VM memory and cores). And that’s before we’ve started to experiment with cluster size… An exhaustive search of the space is clearly way too expensive, especially as each data point requires a run of the job. —The Morning Paper

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Troubleshooting: Models

How well can you know each of these four systems? Can you actually know them in fine detail, down to the last packet transmitted and the last bit in each packet? Can you know the flow of every packet through the network, and every piece of information any particular application pushes into a packet, or the complete set of ever changing business requirements?

Obviously the answer to these questions is no. As these four components of the network combine, they create a system that suffers from combinatorial explosion. There are far too many combinations, and far too many possible states, for any one person to actually know all of them.

How can you reduce the amount of information to some amount a reasonable human can keep in their minds? The answer—as it is with most problems related to having too much information—is abstraction. In turn, what does abstraction really mean? It really means you build a model of the system, interacting with the system through the model, rather than trying to keep all the information about every subsystem, and how the subsystems interact, in your head. So for each subsystem of the entire system, you have a model you are Continue reading

Worth Reading: Who really has fast lanes?

Internet Association members sometimes say that they could actually afford to pay more for fast lanes but they are worried about the little guys, the startup, who may not be able to pay more and whose websites, therefore, won’t be as zippy as they need to be. They’re worried about innovation. They’re worried about you. In fact, however, the web giants like Google and Amazon have private networks which connect to the Internet in many locations. They have data caches (think of them as content warehouses) around the world. Their websites DO pop up faster than yours because their bits travel mostly on their private networks and avoid Internet backbone and interchange congestion. In other words, they have private fast lanes. You can’t achieve this speed for your website unless you A) build a private network of your own (unlikely); B) host your website on Amazon or Google in which case they MAY share some of their private access network. —CircleID

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Worth Reading: Be careful what you wish for

After a few minutes of hyperventilating into an empty Dunkin Donuts bag, though, I calmed down enough to appreciate that the guy is trying to provide exactly what I’ve been complaining about the lack of for quite some time now: some kind of logical progression, a path to follow to go from Point BootCamp to Point GotAJob. It’s a helpful roadmap that lays clearly lays out the (many, oh so many) technologies we should be aware of as we work toward professional web dev status. —The New Stack

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What Skill Should I Learn Next?

The perrienial question in network engeineering—or any engineering, really—is “what skill should I learn next? I take a shot at answering this question in this week’s video.

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Worth Reading: Coding is hard

Of course, sitting in front of a computer writing code isn’t going to improve your physical health. JavaScript is great for building apps, not abs. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch, though, to suggest that learning how to program is healthy for your brain. Healthier, at least, than bingeing Iron Fist or thumbing through celebrity Instagram accounts. —Free Code Camp

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Worth Reading: Commodifying words

Words (and by extension their constituent letters) are as free to utter and use as is the air sustaining life. No one owns them. There is no toll fee to be paid to dictionary makers who curate them. There are, however, two carve-outs from this public domain, namely words and letters businesses use as designations of origin for their marketplace presence, protected by trademark law; and words and letters arranged expressively by authors, protected by copyright law. The rights accruing to persons under these carve-outs — trademark more ancient than copyright (circa 1610) — have their roots in statutory and common law. —CircleID

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Bird Reef

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Worth Reading: Hackers use drones and lasers to bypass air gap

When hackers infect computers with malware, they generally communicate with their code over the internet via a command-and-control server. But firewalls and intrusion detection systems can block communication going to and from suspicious domains and IP addresses. To bypass these normal detection methods, researchers in Israel have devised a novel way to communicate covertly with malware. The technique uses a flatbed scanner as the gateway through which an attacker can send commands to their malware on a victim’s network. —Motherboard

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Worth Reading: Domain names fade

The internet has changed and evolved ever since it’s ancestors first came to life in the late 1960’s. Some technology fades away and is forgotten; other aspects continue but are overlaid, like geological sediments, so that they are now longer visible but are still present under the surface. The Domain Name System — both the technology of DNS and the deployed naming hierarchy we all use — are among those aspects of the internet that, although they feel solid and immutable, are slowly changing underneath our feet. —CircleID

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Design Resource: Shared Workspace Infrastructure

This white paper outlines solutions that can provide secure connectivity for Public Sector agencies over shared wired and wireless network infrastructures. This guide is targeted at network professionals and other personnel who assist in the design of Public Sector office networks and compliments the design patterns and principles issued by GDS Common Technology Services (CTS).

This design guide includes—

• DMVPN
• MPLS over DMVPN
• Wireless and wired access control
• 802.1x
• Federated RADIUS

note to readers: From time to time I like to highlight solid case studies and design guides in the network engineering space; you can find past highlighted resources under design/resources in the menu.

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Worth Reading: Test Strategy for Samza/Kafka Services

Over a decade ago, test strategies invested heavily in UI-driven tests. Backend and mid-tier services were tested using automated UI-based tests. While UI-based tests have certain merits, such as testing user flows, they are also time-consuming and fragile. The strong coupling of tests with UI caused several problems … —LinkedIn Engineering Blog

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Upcoming Webinar: Open Networking

I’m doing a webinar over at IP Space next week—

Most modern data centers are still using vendor-driven “future proof” routers and switches with offering lots of (often unnecessary) capabilities. To build large, however, it is often better to build simple—radically simple. This webinar will cover the design components involved in building a data center or cloud fabric using a single, disaggregated device—the way some hyperscale and web scale operators build their networks. The first live session of the webinar will consider the benefits of disaggregated switch, focusing on the components, sources, and challenges in using disaggregated hardware and software in data center fabrics. The second live session will focus on the topologies and design concepts used in large scale data center fabrics using a single switching device as a leaf, spine and superspine switch.

This should be a fun time, and a good introduction to the disaggregation space.

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Worth Reading: A trillion edge graph on a single node

Efficiently and quickly chewing through one trillion edges of a complex graph is no longer in itself a standalone achievement, but doing so on a single node, albeit with some acceleration and ultra-fast storage, is definitely worth noting. There are many paths to processing trillions of edges efficiently and with high performance as demonstrated by companies like Facebook with its distributed trillion-edge scaling effort across 200 nodes in 2015 and Microsoft with a similar feat as well. —The Next Platform

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Whack a Static

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