1st Post Comparing Open Source BGP Stacks 2nd Post Follow-up Measuring BGP Stacks Performance 3rd Post Comparing Open Source BGP stacks with internet routes 4th Post Bird on Bird, Episode 4 of BGP Perf testing 5th Post BGP Performance 5 – 1000 full internet neighbors 6th Post BGP Performance testing...
1st Post Comparing Open Source BGP Stacks 2nd Post Follow-up Measuring BGP Stacks Performance 3rd Post Comparing Open Source BGP stacks with internet routes 4th Post Bird on Bird, Episode 4 of BGP Perf testing 5th Post BGP Performance 5 – 1000 full internet neighbors The number one request I...
1st Post Comparing Open Source BGP Stacks 2nd Post Follow-up Measuring BGP Stacks Performance 3rd Post Comparing Open Source BGP stacks with internet routes 4th Post Bird on Bird, Episode 4 of BGP Perf testing In the 3rd post I compared these open source BGP stacks with up to 50...
This is a joint post with David Sinn, who’s worked on some of the biggest networks in the world This past week saw a major outage of Facebook. In this post, we tackle the question of updating a fleet of devices without running into the problems that Facebook ran into,...
1st Post Comparing Open Source BGP Stacks 2nd Post Followup Measuring BGP Stacks Performance 3rd Post Comparing Open Source BGP stacks with internet routes After the last post, I thought the this post would be either adding interesting BGP policy. But that’s tricky. It’s going to take some rethinking about...
1st Post Comparing Open Source BGP Stacks 2nd Post Followup Measuring BGP Stacks Performance I hope it’s clear by now that these posts are something of my lab notes as I explore how to test BGP stacks. I’m learning how to test as well as I’m learning how these perform....
After I published the post on measuring open source BGP stacks, I was embarrassed after I realized how haphazard the testing was. I was not very systematic about the way I tried different test parameters. So I hacked on bgperf, added some more reporting and created a new batch feature...
You’ve probably heard people say that networks are too complex and need to be made simpler. I certainly believe that. I think people build too complicated networks and not enough consider how hard it will be to operate those over time. There are many reasons: people believe vendor hype, like...
Open source BGP stacks are very important, but I don’t think they get the love they deserve. There’s lots going on in open source BGP stacks and I can’t keep up. So I thought I’d like to quantitatively compare them. This is one, often tiny, aspect of evaluating a BGP...
I started in networking at Amazon in the fall of 2002. When we were paged for a problem it was because one of the users/services on the network was having problems and they thought it was the network. We never knew ourselves that the network was broken until somebody told...
Do you ask “Is my network healthy?” Do you know how to answer that question well? This is a critical question, but a hard and confusing one to answer well. It’s also one that I think most people don’t explicitly ask and should. As a network engineer, what does it...
“..the best way to guard against error is to design systems with layered and overlapping defenses…like slices of Swiss cheese being layered on top of one another until there were no holes you could see through” - from The Premonition, Michael Lewis Network changes, such as adding a rack, adding...
In data science there is a concept called Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA). When I have a big bunch of data, what’s in it? How do I make sense of it? Where do I even start? Just simple statistics about the dataset are not enough. In data analysis, this led to...
What does Network Validation mean practically? Of course, there’s no official description of what it means, but we can talk about what we would like it to mean so that it can be useful. What we are trying to get to is a network that is trustworthy. If the business...
Getting the network out of the way has been very important for me in my thinking about networks, and is an easy way to help talk about a bunch of very important concepts, decisions, and arguments. This can sound trite, obvious, or insulting. In this post I’ll try to describe...
A new year, a new medium. One of the fringe benefits of choosing Streamlit is that it natively supports creating screencasts. For me, a toddler at best when it comes creating video content (my dad is better than I am at this), this was a useful feature as it allowed...
We haven’t blogged for three months. We’ve been busy working on Suzieq, adding features and figuring out where we want it to go. We haven’t blogged about Suzieq for even longer. Since we last blogged about Suzieq, we’ve added tons of new features and platforms. In no specific order, we’ve...
[This post is jointly written by Justin Pietsch and Dinesh Dutt]. Observability is an important concept in distributed systems these days. It is taken from control systems, which has a very precise mathematical definition. From Wikipedia: “It is a measurement of how much of the internal state of the system...
There is a lot going on in the field of the highest speed network ASICs. These are focused on very high speed, less features, and lower buffers, driven by the hyperscalers and the Financial industry which desires the lowest latency switching. This is a rich area that I can’t cover...
In Suzieq, we needed to select a python library to fetch data from network devices (and servers) via SSH. This led us to a search for and evaluation of five SSH libraries, which I thought were the most suitable for the task at hand. Requirements We had a fairly simple...
The Elegant Network