SDXcentral: Get Smart about Network Architecture
I recently sat with Kireeti Kompella and Gavin Cato to talk about current and future changes in network architecture over at SDXcentral.
NANOG on the Road in Toronto
I will be at the NANOG on the Road in Toronto on the 12th of November giving a short version of the three hour How the Internet Really Works” seminar I give periodically for Pearson. IF you’re in the Toronto area, these one day events are a great place to meet folks in the operator community as well as see some great content.
Site Work
I spent some time this week moving to a new theme, specifically Beaver Builder. It was a bit more work than I expected because of some serious limitations with the way Beaver Builder works—had I known about these limitations, I probably would have worked with another product, but by the time I discovered them, it was either find a way around the limitations, or spend a lot more time and/or money working through them.
In the process, I completely rebuilt the menu, and cleaned up the categories.
The site should be a good bit faster now. I’m not entirely certain the social sharing bits are working, and I will likely find a few things wrong here and there that need to be fixed over the next few weeks. I just discovered, for instance, that I lost all the work on the papers and topical pages I’d done earlier today, so those need to be redone, which will take a good bit of time.
Network Troubleshooting at Safari Books Online
I am giving my network troubleshooting class over at Safari Books Online on the 6th of December for those who are interested. I consider this a foundational session, covering the time components of an outage, a taxonomy of reactions to outages, the half-split method of searching for the root cause, and how models can help you understand the right questions to ask to narrow a problem down quickly. A lot of this course is based on formal methods of troubleshooting I learned in electronic engineering, adapted for the networking world.
This is one of three webinars I give at Safari Books on a periodic basis; I hope to be adding a fourth in the near future.
Ossification and Fragmentation: The Once and Future ‘net
Mostafa Ammar, out of Georgia Tech (not my alma mater, but many of my engineering family are alumni there), recently posted an interesting paper titled The Service-Infrastructure Cycle, Ossification, and the Fragmentation of the Internet. I have argued elsewhere that we are seeing the fragmentation of the global Internet into multiple smaller pieces, primarily based on the centralization of content hosting combined with the rational economic decisions of the large-scale hosting services. The paper in hand takes a slightly different path to reach the same conclusion.
TL;DR
- Networks are built based on a cycle of infrastructure modifications to support services
- When new services are added, pressure builds to redesign the network to support these new services
- Networks can ossify over time so they cannot be easily modified to support new services
- This causes pressure, and eventually a more radical change, such as the fracturing of the network
The author begins by noting networks are designed to provide a set of services. Each design paradigm not only supports the services it was designed for, but also allows for some headroom, which allows users to deploy new, unanticipated services. Over time, as newer services are deployed, the requirements on the network Continue reading
Weekend Reads 190DA
The technology products that drive today’s businesses are increasingly produced through a highly diversified and complex international supply chain. Whether it is standard networking gear or a more specialized device like a human-machine interface or remote terminal unit, equipment is often developed through an elaborate web of OEMs, chip makers, Continue reading