Adopting a new approach to HTTP prioritization

Friday the 13th is a lucky day for Cloudflare for many reasons. On December 13, 2019 Tommy Pauly, co-chair of the IETF HTTP Working Group, announced the adoption of the "Extensible Prioritization Scheme for HTTP" - a new approach to HTTP prioritization.

Web pages are made up of many resources that must be downloaded before they can be presented to the user. The role of HTTP prioritization is to load the right bytes at the right time in order to achieve the best performance. This is a collaborative process between client and server, a client sends priority signals that the server can use to schedule the delivery of response data. In HTTP/1.1 the signal is basic, clients order requests smartly across a pool of about 6 connections. In HTTP/2 a single connection is used and clients send a signal per request, as a frame, which describes the relative dependency and weighting of the response. HTTP/3 tried to use the same approach but dependencies don't work well when signals can be delivered out of order.

HTTP/3 is being standardised as part of the QUIC effort. As a Working Group (WG) we've been trying to fix the problems that non-deterministic ordering Continue reading

Re-Imagining the Network for the Cloud Native Era

Vijoy Pandey Vijoy Pandey is the VP and CTO of Cloud at Cisco, having joined Cisco in August 2018. Vijoy was previously at Google where he has held various leadership roles in the architecture, engineering and operations of Google's global data center networking footprint, Cloud networking, and their two global WAN networks. He also led the development of software and systems for intent-driven zero-touch automation, diagnostic telemetry, data analytics and ML/AI and application-level awareness in the infrastructure. Prior to Google, Vijoy served in numerous CTO capacities including CTO of Networking at IBM Cloud and at IBM Systems and Software Group; CTO of Blade Network Technologies, and has led global engineering teams at Blade Network Technologies, Nortel and Alteon. Vijoy has led the industry’s automation and data analytics efforts for cloud-scale networks, and was instrumental in delivering many industry firsts — including the first intent-driven e2e automation framework at cloud scale, the first Open Source SDN controller; the first VM-aware switch, and the first low-latency HFT/HPC switch. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science, and holds over 60 patents in distributed systems and networking. In the last few years, we have seen application architectures evolve dramatically and become cloud native. Continue reading

Cumulus content roundup: December 2019

We wrapped up December, and really 2019 with some pretty big news! Project DENT was officially announced and we’re excited for the possibilities will bring. Not sure what project DENT is? Luckily for you, we have all the coverage available for your reading pleasure in this month’s content roundup.

In addition to the DENT news, we also brought you another episode of our Kernel of Truth podcast and some great education blogs. Enjoy them all below!

From Cumulus Networks:

Announcing project DENT: We are now proud contributors to the DENT project! Premier members also include Amazon, Delta Electronics Inc, Marvell, Mellanox, and Wistron NeWeb (WNC). Launched by the Linux Foundation, DENT is networking software designed to simplify enterprise edge networking. Roopa Prabhu, our Chief Linux Architect, shares why the chance to enable networking hardware vendors to leverage the same benefits that all Linux hardware technologies do today has got us so excited to join the project.

Network inventory: what do you have, and should it be there?:How do you defend what you don’t know exists? Establishing & maintaining a network inventory is both a technological & a business process problem— we talk about how a modern Continue reading

Most popular tech stories of 2019

Insider Pro subscribers pick the Top 10 articles published in our debut year.

Most popular tech stories of 2019

Insider Pro subscribers pick the Top 10 articles published in our debut year.

MNJ Demo Lab Gives Customers an SD-WAN Speed Dating Experience

Vodafone Australia Blames 5G Delays on Huawei Ban

VMware Folds Pivotal Into New Modern App Biz Unit

DENT: An Operating System for Disaggregated Network Switches

The Linux Foundation has launched a project called LF Edge framework early this year, bringing together three existing projects and two new ones in an effort to foster interoperability and collaboration across the development communities for edge computing and the Internet of Things. It added two more projects in September: Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking at The Linux Foundation. Traditional vendors have sold Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Worries of a Fragmenting Internet

Fragments: Some activists are raising concerns about a fragmented Internet, with two University of Southampton professors writing about four competing versions of the Internet in Wired. The two professors wrote about the same issues for the World Economic Forum earlier this year. The vision of a coordinated, global network “might change in 2020 as Internet governance will be at the centre of a number of ongoing debates coming to the fore,” they wrote. “What values should the technology support? How should it deal with free speech and association? What about privacy?”

Squirrels on wheels: Mont Belvieu, a city near Houston, Texas, has built its own broadband network after struggling with slow speeds from existing providers, the Dallas Morning News reports. “I believe squirrels run on a wheel for my Internet,” one resident half-joked on a city survey. About half of the city’s households have signed up for the service, offering speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second for $75 a month, since it launched in mid-2018.

Encryption warnings: Chloe Squires, the U.K. Home Office’s head of national security, has weighed in on a U.S. Senate debate on encryption, saying Facebook will undermine her government’s fight against Continue reading

Network Automation and the Lack of Innovation in the Management Plane

Chris Wade Chris Wade serves as the co-founder and CTO of Itential, a network automation software company focused on simplifying and accelerating the adoption of network automation and transforming network operations practices. There has been tremendous innovation in IT infrastructure with the adoption of cloud-scale architecture and a migration towards modern applications. In contrast, Enterprise networking has been viewed over the last 30 years primarily for moving data between client-server applications. This basic premise along with consumer devices drove innovation in the network domain to prioritize “speeds and feeds” as the primary objective for networking vendors. Even with the adoption of cloud-scale infrastructure, most adoption meant a migration from current data centers to cloud platforms for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) which didn’t dramatically impact networking requirements. For some context on network innovation, it is important to break network devices into their logical components. A simplified view of networks separates general functionality into three primary components: Data Plane — Movement of packets or network data between network elements Control Plane — Decision logic of where to send network data on the data plane Management Plane — Interfaces that allow users & external systems to modify the behavior of the network. Continue reading

SDxCentral’s Top 10 Articles of 2019

2019 Books

2019 Books

I read at least 32 books in 2019. The high count is due primarily to burning through a bunch of mediocre thriller novels on road trips, but I also read a number of really good books in diverse categories. Here are some highlights:

(Intellectual History) At the Existentialist Cafe - Sarah Bakewell

I love wide-ranging intellectual histories, and this fits that description completely. While I am not a huge fan of existentialism as a philosophical movement, its history and personalities are fascinating, and this book does justice to all of it. I particularly enjoyed the chapters about Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

(Mystery) The Infinite Blacktop - Sara Gran

I don’t read a lot of mysteries, but Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt series is certainly one of my all-time favorites. Detective noir with a touch of magical realism. This is the latest; I recommend reading them in order. I hope there are more to come.

(Micro History) Lady on the Beach - Norah Berg

This memoir is out of print, but worth finding if you have any interest in Pacific Northwest history. Battling alcoholism during the Great Depression, the author Continue reading

2014-2019: In Summary

It's been a while since I last updated my blog. As I'd like to share more in 2020, I thought that a good first post might be to update you all on what I've been working on the last 5 years.

Top 5 Cybersecurity Predictions for 2020

Weekly Top Posts: 2019-12-29

1. 5G Gains US Foothold in 2019
2. Cisco Warns About Ongoing Security Exploit
3. The Saga of T-Mobile US and Sprint’s Quest to Merge
4. Chipmakers’ Biggest Buys and Sells of 2019
5. Is AI the Antidote to Network Complexity?

Travelling amateur

Short post today. I made a tool to make it easier to know the rules when operating amateur radio overseas.

Pull requests welcome, both on the data and design/functionality.

‘What’s Dead May Never Die’ — SD-WAN’s Undying Story

Happy Holidays!

I joined Cloudflare in July of 2019, but I've known of Cloudflare for years. I always read the blog posts and looked at the way the company was engaging with the community. I also noticed the diversity in the names of many of the blog post authors.

There are over 50 languages spoken at Cloudflare, as we have natives from many countries on our team, with different backgrounds, religions, gender and cultures. And it is this diversity that makes us a great team.

A few days ago I asked one of my colleagues how he would say "Happy Holidays!" in Arabic. When I heard him say it, I instantly got the idea of recording a video in as many languages as possible of our colleagues wishing all of you, our readers and customers, a happy winter season.

It only took one internal message for people to start responding and sending their videos to me. Some did it themselves, others flocked in a meeting room and helped each other record their greeting. It took a few days and some video editing to put together an informal video that was entirely done by the team, to wish you all the best Continue reading

Huawei Battles Reigned in 2019