General – The Future of Networking – Russ White

Hello my friends,

Lately I have been thinking a lot about the future of networking and the career paths in this domain. As you probably know I like to guide and mentor people and with everything going on in the industry it can be confusing to find your way and to know what skills to work on to stay ahead of the curve.

I decided to reach out to some of my friends to ask them of their vision of the role of the future networking engineer and how to prepare for the changes that we are now seeing. First out is my friend Russ White who is also the co-author of the book Unintended Features that we wrote together.

Daniel: What are the major skills that people in networking need to learn to stay ahead of the curve?

Russ: Some of these have never changed — for instance, communication and abstraction. Some skills have been more important forever, such as people skills and project manage, but they never seem to really rise to the top in terms of actual demand. I don’t think this is going to change much; companies say they want people skills, and then recruit based Continue reading

LACNOG 2016: Complexity in San Jose

I will be presenting at LACNOG 2016 in San Jose, Costa Rica, the week of the 22nd of September. My two talks are Engineer versus Complexity and a quick update on BGP security.

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Worth Reading: The Cyber Security market mid-life crisis

There are now several hundred security vendors vying for advanced threat “spend” and there continues to be good demand side indicators of investment in these newer areas. There is yet more security spend overall allocated within IT budgets for reallocation from “legacy” Web filtering, AV and firewall renewals to advanced threat technologies as well as increased funding from federal and national governments worldwide on cyber. Yet the cold winds from investors have firmly set in over the past year and with good reason. Many newer security vendors who have IPO’d are having trouble building their businesses to be profitable and set for a firm foundation of growth. The exit paths are less clear and this glut of new security entrants is going to be challenged to cross the chasm from a base of known early adopter verticals and customer segments to a sustainable set of larger organizations. —Arbor Networks

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Worth Reading: The Microsoft Ireland Case

Back in December 2013, federal law enforcement was conducting a criminal narcotics investigation. During the course of this investigation, the government sought a search warrant, pursuant to Section 2703(a) of the SCA, to seize the contents of an email account belonging to a Microsoft customer. Microsoft complied with the warrant to an extent, turning over any account information that was being stored in the United States. However, the actual emails, and their contents, were stored overseas in Dublin, Ireland. Microsoft balked at turning over the overseas content, and the district court held the corporation in civil contempt for its failure to comply with the warrant. —Lawfare

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Net-Centric 2016 (ISOCORE)

I will be speaking at Net-Centric 2016 in the Washington DC area—you can find more information on the ISOCORE web site.

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Worth Reading: Solving network documentation with code

A major issue with network documentation is how to properly explain the policies required to enable a service on the network. In the above diagram, I have a basic application traffic flow overlaid on the network infrastructure the traffic must traverse. Six network device types participate in the handling of traffic for this application all requiring some form of policy definition on them. A change in policy may require a change in any number of network devices to support that change. —route-spf

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Worth Reading: Internet—Quo Vadis (Where are you going?)

I do not believe that the future internet will be a Utopia. Nor do I believe that the future internet will be like some beautiful angel, bringing peace, virtue, equality, and justice. Instead I believe that there are strong, probably irresistible, forces working to lock-down and partition the internet. —CircleID

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On the ‘net: The Foggy Future of Network Engineering

The world of networking tends to be bistable: we either centralize everything, or we decentralize everything. We started with mainframes, passed through Lotus 123 hidden in corners, then to mini’s and middleware, then to laptops, and now to the cloud, to be followed by fog. This particular cycle of centralization/decentralization, however, has produced a series of overlapping changes that are difficult to decipher. You can somehow hear someone arguing about disaggregation and hyperconvergence through the fog — but just barely. —CircleID

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snaproute Go BGP Code Dive (5): Starting a Peer

Last time we looked at the snaproute BGP code, we discovered the peer bringup process is a finite state machine. With this in mind, let’s try to unravel the state machine into a set of calls, beginning from our original starting point, a debug message that prints on the screen when a new peering relationship is established. The key word in the debug message was ConnEstablished, which led to:

func (fsm *FSM) ConnEstablished() {
fsm.logger.Info(fmt.Sprintln("Neighbor:", fsm.pConf.NeighborAddress, "FSM", fsm.id, "ConnEstablished - start"))
fsm.Manager.fsmEstablished(fsm.id, fsm.peerConn.conn)
fsm.logger.Info(fmt.Sprintln("Neighbor:", fsm.pConf.NeighborAddress, "FSM", fsm.id, "ConnEstablished - end"))
}

From here, we searched for calls to ConnEstablished, and found—

func (fsm *FSM) ChangeState(newState BaseStateIface) {
...
if oldState == BGPFSMEstablished && fsm.State.state() != BGPFSMEstablished {
fsm.ConnBroken()
} else if oldState != BGPFSMEstablished && fsm.State.state() == BGPFSMEstablished {
fsm.ConnEstablished()
}
}

Looking for ChangeState leads us to a lot of different calls, but only one that seems to relate to establishing a new peer, as evidenced by a state that relates to established in some way. This, in turn, leads to—

func (st *OpenConfirmState) processEvent(event BGPFSMEvent, data Continue reading

Worth Reading: How Facebook makes you miss out on life

People spend nearly an hour on Facebook every day. Maybe that doesn’t automatically sound impressive. But when you parse the numbers, the significance becomes clear: as James B. Stewart wrote for the New York Times, “That’s more than any other leisure activity surveyed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, with the exception of watching television programs and movies (an average per day of 2.8 hours). It’s more time than people spend reading (19 minutes); participating in sports or exercise (17 minutes); or social events (four minutes). It’s almost as much time as people spend eating and drinking (1.07 hours).” —The Federalist

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On the ‘Net: Big thinkers leave Cisco

The industry is reeling from Monday’s report that four of Cisco’s best-known executives are leaving the company. An internal memo from Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, announced the resignations of Mario Mazzola, Prem Jain, Luca Cafiero and Soni Jiandani, effective June 17. The four formed a team that many referred to as MPLS — letters that represent the initials of their first names. -Channel Partners

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On the ‘Net: You keep using that SDN word…

Software Defined Networks (SDNs), are everywhere, and everyone is either building one, selling one, or using one. Everyone, that is, except—probably—you. Don’t feel too bad if you’re feeling left out, because it’s hard to know, precisely, what you’re actually being left out of. After all, can you actually define what an SDN is? -ECI

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Worth Reading: Protecting your assets

With emerging trends such as big data, bring-your-own-device (BYOD) mobility and global online collaboration sparking an explosion of data, the data center will only become more important to your organization and will continue to be the target of not only breaches, but advanced malware and other cyberattacks. —Data Center Journal

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Nick

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Worth Reading: Microsoft’s Bid for LinkedIn

It’s time for all organizations and their investors to realize that the tools that they provide to customers — products such as cars, telephones, health-care, or finance — and to their employees in the form of benefits, training, software, and the like — need to be combined with the network to which that group belongs. —MarketWatch

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Worth Reading: Open Internet access on the line

Digital content is king on the net and ISPs have a natural economic incentive to steer you toward their own sports and entertainment content and to charge new fees to the most popular Internet platforms for delivery of movies, music and social media over the same 2-way Internet connection you already pay your ISP for. That’s double selling you capacity while cannibalising your regular Internet access. —CircleID

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Worth Watching: Has SDN lived up to the hype?

This is a recent round table discussion I participated in over at LightReading. My friends over at ECI put this together.

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On the ‘net: What does a control plane do?

To really understand Software Defined Networks (SDNs), we need to start from a place far different than the top of the current hype cycle. Instead, where we need to start is thinking about what a control plane actually does in a packet switched network. There seem to be just a few specific things involved in what a control plane does… —ECI

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Worth Reading: Navigating EU safe harbor

If you’re an organization with trans-Atlantic presence that transmits and stores European citizen data (e.g. employee payroll & HR data, client & prospect data) in the U.S. you will want to pay attention. What we will discuss was administered under the European Union’s Data Protection Directive and a previous EU-U.S. agreement called Safe Harbor. We will cover what happened, what’s next, new rules (and penalties) that are set to go into effect and our recommendations. —Cloud Security Alliance

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Worth Reading: All the Apache streaming projects

The speed at which data is generated, consumed, processed, and analyzed is increasing at an unbelievably rapid pace. Social media, the Internet of Things, ad tech, and gaming verticals are struggling to deal with the disproportionate size of data sets. These industries demand data processing and analysis in near real-time. Traditional big data-styled frameworks such as Apache Hadoop is not well-suited for these use cases. —the New Stack

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