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

Fast Friday- Keeping Up With The Times

We’re at the end of the 2010s. It’s almost time to start making posts about 2020 and somehow working vision or eyesight into the theme so you can look just like everyone else. But I want to look back for a moment on how much things have changed for networking in the last ten years.

It’s true that networking wasn’t too exciting for most of the 2000s. Things got faster and more complicated. Nothing really got better except the bottom lines of people pushing bigger hardware. And that’s honestly how we liked it. Because the idea that we were all special people that needed to be at the top of our game to get things done resonated with us. We weren’t just mechanics. We were the automobile designers of the future!

But if there’s something that the mobile revolution of the late 2000s taught us, it was that operators don’t need to be programmers to enjoy using technology. Likewise, enterprise users don’t need to be CCIEs or VCDXs to make things work. That’s the real secret behind all the of the advances in networking technology in the 2010s. We’re not making networking harder any more. We’re not adding complexity for Continue reading

Top 10 Money Moves of 2019 in SDxCentral’s World

How Valuable Is Your Time?

The last couple of days, there have been a lot of tweets with messages like “You need to work tons of overtime in your 20’s to be successful in your career”. There have been also been plenty of counters to these tweets.

This kind of logic is seriously seriously flawed, and bad bad advice. As readers of this blog, you would know that I always talk about tradeoffs. Firstly though, let’s talk about blindly following others footsteps. If I do everything Russ White does, do I become as smart as Russ White? Of course not. If I do everything Warren Buffet does, do I become as rich? Of course not. If I do everything Ivan Pepelnjak does, will I become as experienced as him? Of course not. There are many many paths that can lead to success, whatever that is, and they are not always straight.

So, following in someone’s footsteps does not equal success. Therefore, blindly following advice about working your ass in your 20’s does not hold any real value. What about doing what successful people do? Some successful people wake up early, some do a lot of reading, some exercise a lot. Will you trying to repeat Continue reading

Who Went Where: The Top Headcount Changes of 2019

Pandas for Network Engineers (Who doesn’t love Pandas? )

The module not the mammal! My original title for this article was going to be *Decomposing Pandas* as a follow on to *Decomposing Data Structures* but I was advised against that name. Go figure. One of the things I love most about Python is that its always waiting for me to get just a little READ MORE

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