Worth Reading: Don’t ask what you can measure

One of the most striking things about the “big data” world of today is the focus on mining data over answering questions. So many projects start with asking what data is easily obtainable and which tools are most easily amenable to working with that dataset, rather than asking what question the analysis is trying to answer. The result is a landscape littered with data-intensive projects that prioritize technical prowess of execution over the robustness of the findings derived from the analysis. What does this mean for the future evolution of the field? -via Forbes

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The Candy Jar Effect

When I first started in Cisco TAC, as a lowly grade 3 engineer taking hardware RMA calls, I didn’t know anyone. I had just moved to North Carolina, we hadn’t found a church yet, I’m not the most social person on the face of the earth (in fact, if anything, I’m antisocial), and I was sitting in a cubicle surrounded by people who’d been working in serious networking for a lot longer than I had. Not only that, but a lot of them were a lot smarter than I was (and still are). These people were really busy; it was hard to sip from the firehose, and I really needed to find my way around. How could I go about building a network?

What to do… ??

I put a candy jar on my desk, and filled it with interesting candy. How would a candy jar work? Well, it attracted all sorts of interesting people to my desk throughout the day, and as I got to know what different people liked, it gave me an excuse to bring stuff to their desk—along with a question about a case I was working on, of course. In a sense, I learned all I Continue reading

Worth Reading: Are we headed to another bust?

I believe it is important to remember this history as we celebrate the rise of the unicorns. There are already some indications the current tech boom may be nearing its end. The media has started commenting “The signs of a new tech bubble are everywhere: easy money, widespread exuberance, hidden leverage, and mass participation by amateur investors.” What turns a bubble into a bust is a change in investors’ psychology. History tells us it does not take much for such a change to occur. The decline of stock markets around the world over the past few months suggests such a change may already be taking place. -via the Communications of the ACM

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Worth Reading: A yot of YANG

The YANG Model Coordination Group has been spending time on the inventory of those YANG models in the industry, the tooling aspects, the help with the compilation, the training & education (NETCONF, YANG, pyang), the coordination across SDOs/opensource, the model coordination with the IETF. On the tooling front, the YANG model extraction and compilation is now integrated in the IETF draft submission tool, thanks to Henrik Levkowetz. So no more excuses for producing YANG models that don’t compile. -via the IETF blog

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Windows in Buenos Aires

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Worth Reading: The road to 200g

The transitions from one network speed to another can be very disruptive and costly, as the move from 1 Gb/sec to 10 Gb/sec speeds was when it started out on routers in 2002 and trickled down to aggregation and top of rack switches in the following years as switch ASIC, adapter card, and transceiver costs all fell. -via The Next Platform

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Worth Reading: The end of Moore’s Law?

Moore’s Law may be nearing its end, however. Tom Simonite at the MIT Technology Review writes that Intel has declared in a regulatory filing what insiders have suspected: The company is slowing the release of new chips in a manner that doesn’t keep pace with the law. The reason is simply that fabricating small transistors, which now are at about 14 nanometers, is increasingly difficult and costly. The insiders suspect that the end is near because the next generation, which aims at 10 nm, has already been delayed. -via IT Business Edge

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The CORD Architecture

Edge provider networks, supporting DSL, voice, and other services to consumers and small businesses, tend to be more heavily bound by vendor specific equipment and hardware centric standards. These networks are built around the more closed telephone standards, rather than the more open internetworking standards, and hence they tend to be more expensive to operate and manage. As one friend said about a company that supplies this equipment, “they just print money.” The large edge providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, however, are not endless pools of money. These providers are in a squeeze between the content providers, who are taking large shares of revenue, and consumers, who are always looking for a lower price option for communications and new and interesting services.

If this seems like an area that’s ripe for virtualization to you, you’re not alone. AT&T has been working on a project called CORD for a few years in this area; they published a series of papers on the topic that make for interesting reading:

• A set of slides covering the concept can be found here
• A recording of a talk on this topic can be found here
• A shorter white paper on the topic can Continue reading

Worth Reading: Yellow journalism on encryption

That’s not how encryption works. Instead, if “encryption” were the one thing the terrorists were using to hide, then you’d certainly find encrypted emails and encrypted messages — ones you couldn’t read without knowing the key. The lack of emails/messages instead hints that the terrorists were meeting in person, passing paper notes to each other, or using telepathy. All of these, even telepathy, are more likely explanation for the lack of evidence than “encryption”. It’s a typical example of yellow journalism. The public isn’t familiar with “encryption”, so it’s easy to sensationalize it, to make it seem like something sinister is going on. -via Errata Security

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Worth Reading: Construction zones on the Ethernet road map

There is never enough bandwidth in a datacenter that is the size of a football field and that is expected to work more or less like a single computer. While 10 Gb/sec Ethernet on the server and 40 Gb/sec Ethernet on the backbone is fine for many enterprises today, hyperscalers, cloud builders, and service providers are pushing up against these limits and crave more bandwidth. -via The Next Platform

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Reaction: Should routing react to the data plane?

Over at Packet Pushers, there’s an interesting post asking why we don’t use actual user traffic to detect network failures, and hence to drive routing protocol convergence—or rather, asking why routing doesn’t react to the data place.

I have been looking at convergence from a user perspective, in that the real aim of convergence is to provide a stable network for the users traversing the network, or more specifically the user traffic traversing the network. As such, I found myself asking this question: “What is the minimum diameter (or radius) of a network so that the ‘loss’ of traffic from a TCP/UDP ‘stream’ seen locally would indicate a network outage FASTER than a routing update?”

This is, indeed, an interesting question—and ones that’s highly relevant in our current software defined/drive world. So why not? Let me give you two lines of thinking that might be used to answer this question.

First, let’s consider the larger problem of fast convergence. Anyone who’s spent time in any of my books, or sat through any of my presentations, should know the four steps to convergence—but just in case, let’s cover them again, using a slide from my forthcoming LiveLesson on IS-IS:

There Continue reading

Worth Reading: Microservices

In this post, I’ll talk about how and why a microservices architecture can help with application development and lifecycle tasks, and describe the capabilities that platforms can provide to support those architectures. Then I’ll list some of the platforms commonly used by developers as the foundation for their microservice based applications. . . -via Azure

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Worth Reading: Trademarking hashtags

Now companies are trademarking hashtags in the same way they trademark logos, catchphrases and other designs, to keep other entities from using them to market or sell certain goods or services. In 2010, four years after Twitter first launched, just seven companies applied to trademark specific hashtags, according to a report from Thomson Reuters CompuMark. Five of the seven trademarks were granted. -via MarketWatch

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The Design Mindset (3)

So you’ve spent time asking what, observing the network as a system, and considering what has actually been done in the past. And you’ve spent time asking why, trying to figure out the purpose (or lack of purpose) behind the configuration and design choices made in the past. You’ve followed the design mindset to this point, so now you can jump in and make like a wrecking ball (or a bull in a china shop), changing things so they’re better, and the new requirements you have can fit right in. Right?

Wrong.

As an example, I want to take you back to another part of a story I told here about my early days in the networking world. Before losing the war over Banyan Vines, I actually encountered an obstacle that should have been telling—but I was too much of a noob at the time to recognize it for the warning it really was. At the time, I had written a short paper comparing Vines to Netware; the paper was, perhaps, ten pages long, and I thought it did a pretty good job of comparing the two network operating systems. Heck, I’d even put together a page showing how Vines Continue reading

Worth Reading: Building a (human) network, part 2

There are endless ways of building a network and the ways I describe here are based on my personal experience. That said, I do believe that there are some common factors regardless of what approach you take. -via Lost in Transit

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Worth Reading: Free market needs some sunshine

This week is Sunshine Week, and lots of people are writing about government transparency, which is very important. From federal agencies stiff-arming Freedom of Information Act requests, to government agencies punishing whistleblowers, to the Obama Administration’s new record in withholding public information, there’s a lot to talk about. But it’s not just the government that matters. Plenty of private companies that deal with the public could do better with transparency than they do, and they’d be a lot more trusted if they did. The question is whether they care more about being trusted, or about what they can get away with. At the moment, it’s looking as if they’re more concerned with the latter. -via USA Today

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CAP Theorem and Routing

In 2000, Eric Brewer was observing and discussing the various characteristics of database systems. Through this work, he observed that a database generally has three characteristics—

• Consistency, which means the database will produce the same result for any two readers who happen to read a value at the same moment in time.
• Availability, which means the database can be read by any reader at any moment in time.
• Partionability, which means the database can be partitioned.

Brewer, in explaining the relationship between the three in a 2012 article, says—

The easiest way to understand CAP is to think of two nodes on opposite sides of a partition. Allowing at least one node to update state will cause the nodes to become inconsistent, thus forfeiting C (consistency). Likewise, if the choice is to preserve consistency, one side of the partition must act as if it is unavailable, thus forfeiting A (availability).

The CAP theorem, therefore, represents a two out of three situation—yet another two out of three “set” we encounter in the real world, probably grounded someplace in the larger space of complexity. We’ll leave the relationship to complexity on the side for the moment, however, and just look at how Continue reading

Worth Reading: The IANA transition so far

Since the creation of ICANN in 1998, the community has fervently supported this transition. For more than 10 years, APNIC and the RIR communities have actively advocated for the end of a special role by a single government. Here are some historical highlights of the last 10 years of the IANA stewardship transition from an APNIC and number community perspective. -via APNIC

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Worth Reading: Scrutinizing the Cisco-Arista legal battles

The legal battle between Cisco and Arista has heated up in a big way. Earlier this month, Judge David Shaw of the International Trade Commission (ITC) released the public version of the findings in the case. The findings reveal curious aspects of this case that raise questions about Cisco’s intentions and put a spotlight on Silicon Valley work culture. -via Network Computing

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Yokohama

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