Come meet me at Cloud Partners

I’m moderating a panel called Cloud Builders at the upcoming Cloud Partners show in Boston! If you’re going to be there, look me up.

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HL: Talk to the Dummy

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Liskov Substitution and Modularity in Network Design

Furthering the thoughts I’ve put into the forthcoming book on network complexity…

One of the hardest things for designers to wrap their heads around is the concept of unintended consequences. One of the definitional points of complexity in any design is the problem of “push button on right side, weird thing happens over on the left side, and there’s no apparent connection between the two.” This is often just a result of the complexity problem in its base form — the unsolvable triangle (fast/cheap/quality — choose two). The problem is that we often don’t see the third leg of the triangle.

The Liskov substitution principle is one of the mechanisms coders use to manage complexity in object oriented design. The general idea is this: suppose I build an object that describes rectangles. This object can hold the width and the height of the rectangle, and it can return the area of the rectangle. Now, assume I build another object called “square” that overloads the rectangle object, but it forces the width and height to be the same (a square is type of rectangle that has all equal sides, after all). This all seems perfectly normal, right?

Now let’s say Continue reading

Worth Reading: Labellio

Labellio is the world’s easiest deep learning web service for computer vision. It aims to provide a deep learning environment for image data where non-experts in deep learning can experiment with their ideas for image classification applications. via NVidia

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Worth Reading: Another Salvo in the Crypto War

For most of human history, surveillance has been expensive. Over the last couple of decades, it has become incredibly cheap and almost ubiquitous. That a few bits and pieces are becoming expensive again isn’t a cause for alarm. via Bruce Schneier

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Worth Reading: Knowledge and Power

For centuries we have all known that knowledge is power. … Over the past couple of decades we’ve begun to see this premise evolve. It’s now not as much that knowledge is power, but the speed of knowledge is power. via fistful of talent

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Engineering Lessons, IPv6 Edition

Yes, we really are going to reach a point where the RIRs will run out of IPv4 addresses. As this chart from Geoff’s blog shows —

Why am I thinking about this? Because I ran across a really good article by Geoff Huston over at potaroo about the state of the IPv4 address pool at APNIC. The article is a must read, so stop right here, right click on this link, open it in a new tab, read it, and then come back. I promise this blog isn’t going anyplace while you’re over on Geoff’s site. But my point isn’t to ring the alarm bells on the IPv4 situation. Rather, I’m more interested in how we got here in the first place. Specifically, why has it taken so long for the networking industry to adopt IPv6?

Inertia is a tempting answer, but I’m not certain I buy this as the sole reason for lack of deployment. IPv6 was developed some fifteen years ago; since then we’ve deployed tons of new protocols, tons of new networking gear, and lots of other things. Remember what a cell phone looked like fifteen years ago? In fact, if we’d have started fifteen years ago Continue reading

Worth Reading: Vagrant and Cumulus

Cumulus recently announced their CumulusVX platform, which is a virtualized instance of their operating system typically found on network switches. They’ve provided a few options to run this, and in this blog post, I’ll be exploring the use of Vagrant to set up a topology with Cumulus virtual devices. via keeping it classless

Matt has a greater starter up on running Cumulus IX on a Vagrant installation — since Vagrant is available on a few widely deployed machines, this is a great tool for learning the environment. As soon as I can get one of my Ubuntu machines local, or figure out how to get enough drive space on one of my laptops to install this, I’ll be getting Vagrant set up to use on a few different things.

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Greenland

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HL: You are not a widget

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Worth Reading: The Crisis of Attention

Recently, my father, who has worked in technology education for a long time, texted me a picture from an airport restaurant in which he was eating. In the picture, a waiter stood at a table waiting for a family of six to finish looking at their iPads. Each person had bent his or her head to stare at the iPad screen, ignoring one another and the waiter. via the Washington Free Beacon

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IT/IT: The Future of Network Engineering

Two different articles caught my attention this last week. They may not seem to be interrelated, but given my “pattern making mind,” I always seem to find connections. The first is an article from Network Computing discussing the future of network engineering skill sets.

It’s a new day in enterprise technology, with Chuck Robbins at the helm of Cisco. But John Chambers left a lasting dark impression with the audience at Cisco Live in June. He essentially dropped a hand grenade, predicting the end of IT as we know it, and walked offstage.

Patrick Hubbard goes on to talk about the hand grenade John Chambers left in the room 3 that there would be major mergers, failures, and acquisitions in the next twenty years, leaving the IT industry a very different place. The takeaway? That individual engineers need to “up their game,” learning new technologies faster, hitting the books and the labs on a more regular basis. Given the view in the industry of Cisco as a “safe harbor” for IT skills, this is something of a hand grenade in the room, coming from Chambers at Cisco Live.

The second article predicts a hand grenade, as well, though of a Continue reading

Worth Reading: Anti-Design Patterns

If you don’t want to risk your immortal API then be sure to avoid… via High Scalability

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Worth Reading: SDN Controller Benchmarking

But as useful as pondering the theoretical picture is, and as useful as individual tests are, there’s a middle ground that often needs to be filled and isn’t. The middle ground? How should we go about testing SDN controllers? via Packet Pushers

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Clear Writing

For most of us most of the time, our dense writing indicates not the irreducible difficulty of a work of genius, but the sloppy thinking of a writer indifferent to his readers.
The Craft of Research, Kindle Location 2392

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HL: Navigating Network Complexity

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Worth Watching: IPv6 Intro

If you want to understand more on IPv6, we’ve made a number of resources available. You can choose from a range of video interviews with leading industry experts as well as tutorials on different transition mechanisms. We also provide links to more information on these topics. via RIPE NCC

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Worth Reading: Discovering PlugX Campaigns Automatically

One of the hardest things to do when you are receiving malware that have “anonymized” (e.g. name-is-hash) names or general samples that lack any indication of the infection vector is to determine the origin of the file and its intended target. via Arbor

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Engineering Sense

Why didn’t they ask Evans?

For those who haven’t read the famous Agatha Christie novel, the entire point revolves around a man uttering these words just before dying. Who is Evans? What does this person know that can lead to the murderer of the man on the golf course? Bobby and Frankie, the heroes of the story, are led on one wild goose chase after another, until they finally discover it’s not what Evans knows but who Evans knows that really matters.

Okay… But this isn’t a blog about mysteries, it’s about engineering. What does Evans have to do with engineering? Troubleshooting, as Fish says, is often like working through a mystery novel. But I think the analogy can be carried farther than this. Engineering, even on the design side, is much like a mystery novel. It’s often the context of the question, or the context of the answer to the question, that solves the mystery. It’s Poirot straightening the items sitting on a mantelpiece twice, it’s the dog that didn’t bark, and it’s the funny footprints and the Sign of Four.

Just like the detective in a mystery novel, the engineer can only solve the problem if they can Continue reading

Worth Reading: Shareholder Value

Maximizing shareholder return has given us our corporate malaise of today when profits are high (but are they real?) stocks are high, but few investors, managers, or workers are really happy or secure. Maximizing shareholder return is bad policy both for public companies and for our society in general. via Cringely

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