Worth Reading: A brittle and fragile future

While this is not intended to be a dystopian rant, I feel strongly motivated to draw attention to the fragile and interdependent future we are creating through the use of programmable devices and systems. Some of you are, no doubt, rather tired of this theme, but as we equip cyber-physical and virtual systems with programs that animate their functions, it seems inescapable that over time they will become increasingly interdependent and that may produce vulnerabilities and fragilities that will be exploited by inimical parties or will simply create difficult and even unrecoverable failures. —ACM Queue

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Worth Reading: The impact of more specifics in the DFZ

Here I’ll examine the collected statistics of the use of more specific routing advertisements in BGP in further detail, looking at the impact of more specifics on the growth of the routing system and the dynamics of BGP updates in the larger context of scaling BGP to meet the demands of an ever-larger Internet. —potaroo

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Green Doors

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Worth Reading: Subscription based networking

Cisco’s big announcement this week ahead of Cisco Live was their new Intent-based Networking push. This new portfolio does include new switching platforms in the guise of the Catalyst 9000 series, but the majority of the innovation is coming in the software layer. Articles released so far tout the ability of the network to sense context, provide additional security based on advanced heuristics, and more. But the one thing that seems to be getting little publicity is the way you’re going to be paying for software going forward. —Networking Nerd

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Worth Reading: Characterizing IPv6 load balancing

Routers that perform load balancing choose among multiple next-hop routers when forwarding packets. In Figure 1, router R1 chooses among R2 and R3. In general, the next-hop is chosen by computing a hash over a subset of fields in each packet’s IP header. Hashing different subsets of IP header fields allow control of a trade-off between the granularity of load balancing and impact on traffic. Below we describe common load balancing configurations, how well they can load balance traffic, and their possible impact on traffic. —APNIC

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Worth Reading: DevOps is not a security panacea

Many development teams view security as an impediment to agility and innovation, but efforts over the past few years have tried to integrate security controls and testing directly into DevOps workflows without sacrificing development speed and deployment flexibility.Known as DevSecOps, this marriage between security and agile development aims to implement core security tasks like event monitoring, patch management, privilege control and vulnerability assessment directly into DevOps processes. This includes dynamic and static vulnerability testing at all levels of the development cycle, so that major flaws can be discovered early on, before the code makes it into production. —The New Stack

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Worth Reading: Behind the 200g hype

In the run up to NGON 2017 in Nice, the hype machines from optical vendors have been spinning up in anticipation of one of the most reported shows in our industry. In particular, there have been several announcements around 200G recently – many touting “first” or “lowest power” or “best performance”. It is important that reporters, analysts, and customers understand what’s going on behind the hype. —ECI

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Reaction: The End of MPLS?

Jason Wells, over on LinkedIn, has an article up about the end of MPLS; to wit—

MPLS, according to Akkiraju, is old-hat and inefficient – why should a branch office backhaul to get their cloud data, when Internet connections might be faster – and 100X cheaper? Cisco, in acquiring Viptela, has brought Akkiraju, his company, and his perspective back into the fold, perhaps heralding the beginning of the end of Cisco’s MPLS-based offerings (or at least the beginning of the end of the mindset that they should still have an MPLS-based offering).

To being—I actually work with Aryaka on occasion, and within the larger SD-WAN world more often (I am a member of the TAB over at Velocloud, for instance). This is decidedly not a post about the usefulness or future of SD-WAN solutions (though I do have opinions there, as you might have guessed). Rather, what I want to point out is that we, in the networking industry, tend to be rather sloppy about our language in ways that are not helpful.

To understand, it is useful to back up a few years and consider other technologies where our terms have become confused, and how it has impacted our Continue reading

Worth Reading: The blue disco ball

We deal with procurement departments every day. It’s a fact of modern day corporate life. But this week, I’ve had to respond to so many RFPs asking for “blue disco balls,” (my metaphoric name for a specific kind of middle management error that most vendors, suppliers and even solutions providers love most), I’m thinking about hanging one over my desk. What is a “blue disco ball?” Here’s a story I wrote last year about every senior executive’s worst nightmare and every vendor’s holiday bonus all rolled into a budget-busting good time. —Shelly Palmer

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Worth Reading: High performance computing poised for change

There is a lot of change coming down the pike in the high performance computing arena, but it has not happened as yet and that is reflected in the current Top 500 rankings of supercomputers in the world. But the June 2017 list gives us a glimpse into the future, which we think will be as diverse and contentious from an architectural standpoint as in the past. —The Next Platform

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On the ‘net: Interview on my network career

I was recently interviewed for a new network career site—

I started out building small networks on a lot of different technologies in the USAF, primarily Banyan Vines and Novell Netware, over Token Bus, Thicknet, and other technologies. We implemented a fiber backbone, and I helped replace the old physical switch telephone system main frame with a modern (at that time) SS7 based design. After this, I worked for a small Value Added Reseller around New York City, and then the ASME as a network administrator, then at BASF in the Advanced Technology Group. At this point my wife and I moved to Raleigh, and I started at Cisco TAC in the hardware team. From there I moved to the Routing Protocols team, then Global Escalation, and then into engineering in various roles around Cisco IOS Software and XR. After Cisco, I moved to Verisign Labs, where I primarily focused on security in a more research oriented role, then to Ericsson, working on IPOS, and now LinkedIn.

This looks like a great resource, worth following.

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Worth Reading: What if we designed differently?

Imagine if the design of your electrical supply was optimised to apply the biggest possible voltage and current to anything that was plugged in. That would clearly be ridiculous! Imagine if the design of your kitchen tap was optimised to deliver as much water as possible at the highest possible pressure the moment you turned it on. That would clearly be ridiculous! Imagine if the design of your gas cooker was optimised to burn everything to a crisp as fast as possible in a white hot inferno. That would clearly be ridiculous! So, why have we optimised broadband to deliver as much bandwidth as possible? That’s clearly ridiculous! —CircleID

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Worth Reading: A different kind of bubble

If you visit San Francisco, you will find it difficult to walk more than a few blocks in central S.F. without encountering a major construction project. It seems that every decrepit low-rise building in the city has been razed and is being replaced with a gleaming new residential tower. Parking lots have been ripped up and are now sprouting condos and luxury rental flats. This boom is not overly surprising, given the centrality of San Francisco and the S.F. Bay Area in the Hipster-Techie Mental Map which I have sketched here for those who may still suffer from delusions that Washington D.C. and New York matter–(hint: they don’t.) —of two minds

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Disaggregated, Hyperconverged, and Composed (part 2)

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Worth Reading: A lesson on cloud agility

As first reported by CNBC on Wednesday, retail and e-commerce giant Wal-Mart notified some of its technology partners that they need to move their information assets away from Amazon Web Services if they want to continue doing business. This move certainly comes as no surprise to many, as the two companies are long-standing rivals in their respective quests to dominate the world of retail. It comes just days after the company’s CEO, Doug McMillon, told his company’s annual associates’ meeting, “Looking ahead, we will compete with technology, but win with people. We will be people-led and tech-empowered.” —The New Stack

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Worth Reading: The root of a robust Internet

On 26 December 2006, a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck off the southwest coast of Taiwan. This was the Hengchun earthquake, and the quake and its aftershocks resulted in six of the seven submarine cables serving Hong Kong being cut, severely disrupting Internet services on the Special Administrative Region. PCCW, the largest Internet operator in Hong Kong, reported a reduction of 50% in data capacity, neighbouring Taiwan had a 100% outage to Hong Kong and South-East Asia, while China’s two main operators reported over 90% outages. —APNIC

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Mickey Rope

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Worth Reading: The revival of standards

Standards… what a boring, old fashioned and backwards oriented term. How can the representative of a vendor that claims to be open, elastic and forward thinking use it in a headline? Be honest… this was one of the thoughts that ran through your mind while reading the title. Now relax and sit back, the following blog might surprise you. — ECI

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Worth Reading: Token Effects

Tokens are a new business model that’s emerging for open source. It’s a new way to raise capital by selling tokens through an ICO (initial coin offering). If the project succeeds, its token will appreciate in value, giving early adopters a nice return. … The token is a cryptocurrency that is used to both improve the product and compensate all participants in the network. —Free Code Camp

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Worth Reading: Four lessons in multicloud storage

Multicloud deployments are a major IT focus, with a whopping 85 percent of enterprises reporting that they have a multicloud strategy in 2017. That’s up from 82 percent in 2016 (RightScale 2017 State of the Cloud Report, February 2017). A big difficulty in pursuing a multicloud strategy is the complexity of managing different storage implementations, each with its own features, user interface, access methods and terminology. If that storage requires proprietary formats or protocols that are rare or unavailable elsewhere, the challenge increases. —Data Center Journal

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