New Year, New Adventure

I’ll skip the build-up and jump straight to the whole point of this post: a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity has come up and I’m embarking on a new adventure starting in early 2020. No, I’m not changing jobs…but I am changing time zones.

Sometime in the next month or two (dates are still being finalized), I’ll be temporarily relocating to Tokyo, Japan, to help build out VMware’s Cloud Native Field Engineering team to provide consulting and professional services around cloud-native technologies and modern application platforms for customers in Japan. Basically, my charter is to replicate the former Heptio Field Engineering team (now the Cloud Native Field Engineering Practice within VMware) in Japan.

Accomplishing this feat will involve a variety of responsibilities: a pretty fair amount of training/enablement, engaging customers on the pre-sales side, helping lead projects on the post-sales (delivery) side, mentoring team members, performing some project management, probably some people management, and the infamous “other duties as required.” All in about six months (the inital duration of my assignment), and all while learning Japanese! No big deal, right?

I’m both simultaneously excited and scared. I’m excited by the idea of living in Tokyo, but let’s be honest—the language barrier is Continue reading

MNJ Demo Lab Gives Customers an SD-WAN Speed Dating Experience

"Not all SD-WAN is created equal," said Ben Niernberg, EVP at MNJ Technologies. "They are all very...

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Vodafone Australia Blames 5G Delays on Huawei Ban

The deal marks the end of the operator's business with Huawei, which was effectively banned from...

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VMware Folds Pivotal Into New Modern App Biz Unit

Ray O’Farrell will lead the new unit as EVP and GM. O’Farrell previously served as EVP and...

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DENT: An Operating System for Disaggregated Network Switches

The Linux Foundation has launched a project called LF Edge framework early this year, bringing together three existing projects and two new ones in an effort to foster interoperability and collaboration across the development communities for edge computing and the Internet of Things. It added two more projects in September: Arpit Joshipura, general manager of networking at The Linux Foundation. Traditional vendors have sold Continue reading

The Week in Internet News: Worries of a Fragmenting Internet

Fragments: Some activists are raising concerns about a fragmented Internet, with two University of Southampton professors writing about four competing versions of the Internet in Wired. The two professors wrote about the same issues for the World Economic Forum earlier this year. The vision of a coordinated, global network “might change in 2020 as Internet governance will be at the centre of a number of ongoing debates coming to the fore,” they wrote. “What values should the technology support? How should it deal with free speech and association? What about privacy?”

Squirrels on wheels: Mont Belvieu, a city near Houston, Texas, has built its own broadband network after struggling with slow speeds from existing providers, the Dallas Morning News reports. “I believe squirrels run on a wheel for my Internet,” one resident half-joked on a city survey. About half of the city’s households have signed up for the service, offering speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second for $75 a month, since it launched in mid-2018.

Encryption warnings: Chloe Squires, the U.K. Home Office’s head of national security, has weighed in on a U.S. Senate debate on encryption, saying Facebook will undermine her government’s fight against Continue reading

Network Automation and the Lack of Innovation in the Management Plane

Chris Wade Chris Wade serves as the co-founder and CTO of Itential, a network automation software company focused on simplifying and accelerating the adoption of network automation and transforming network operations practices. There has been tremendous innovation in IT infrastructure with the adoption of cloud-scale architecture and a migration towards modern applications. In contrast, Enterprise networking has been viewed over the last 30 years primarily for moving data between client-server applications. This basic premise along with consumer devices drove innovation in the network domain to prioritize “speeds and feeds” as the primary objective for networking vendors. Even with the adoption of cloud-scale infrastructure, most adoption meant a migration from current data centers to cloud platforms for IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) which didn’t dramatically impact networking requirements. For some context on network innovation, it is important to break network devices into their logical components. A simplified view of networks separates general functionality into three primary components: Data Plane — Movement of packets or network data between network elements Control Plane — Decision logic of where to send network data on the data plane Management Plane — Interfaces that allow users & external systems to modify the behavior of the network. Continue reading

SDxCentral’s Top 10 Articles of 2019

Aviatrix's CEO claimed SD-WAN is dead and that AWS killed it; VMware's CEO taunted IBM for paying...

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So that tweet was misunderstood

I'm currently experiencing the toxic hell that is a misunderstood tweet going viral. It's a property of the social media. The more they can deliberately misunderstand you, the more they can justify the toxicity of their response. Unfortunately, I had to delete it in order to stop all the toxic crud and threats of violence.

The context is how politicians distort everything. It's like whenever they talk about sea level rise, it's always about some city like Miami or New Orleans that is sinking into the ocean already, even without global warming's help. Pointing this out isn't a denial of global warming, it's pointing out how we can't talk about the issue without exaggeration. Mankind's carbon emissions are indeed causing sea level to rise, but we should be talking about how this affects average cities, not dramatizing the issue with the worst cases.

The same it true of health care. It's a flawed system that needs change. But we don't discuss the people making the best of all bad choices. Instead, we cherry pick those who made the worst possible choice, and then blame the entire bad outcome on the system.

My tweet is in response to this Elizabeth Warren Continue reading

2014-2019: In Summary

It's been a while since I last updated my blog. As I'd like to share more in 2020, I thought that a good first post might be to update you all on what I've been working on the last 5 years.

2019 Books

2019 Books

I read at least 32 books in 2019. The high count is due primarily to burning through a bunch of mediocre thriller novels on road trips, but I also read a number of really good books in diverse categories. Here are some highlights:

(Intellectual History) At the Existentialist Cafe - Sarah Bakewell

I love wide-ranging intellectual histories, and this fits that description completely. While I am not a huge fan of existentialism as a philosophical movement, its history and personalities are fascinating, and this book does justice to all of it. I particularly enjoyed the chapters about Simone de Beauvoir, Iris Murdoch, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

(Mystery) The Infinite Blacktop - Sara Gran

I don’t read a lot of mysteries, but Sara Gran’s Claire DeWitt series is certainly one of my all-time favorites. Detective noir with a touch of magical realism. This is the latest; I recommend reading them in order. I hope there are more to come.

(Micro History) Lady on the Beach - Norah Berg

This memoir is out of print, but worth finding if you have any interest in Pacific Northwest history. Battling alcoholism during the Great Depression, the author Continue reading

Top 5 Cybersecurity Predictions for 2020

Grab your tinfoil hat and a champagne cocktail, snuggle up in front of a warm fireplace, and check...

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Technology Short Take 122

Welcome to Technology Short Take #122! Luckily I did manage to get another Tech Short Take squeezed in for 2019, just so all my readers could have some reading materials for the holidays. I’m kidding! No, I mean I really am kidding—don’t read stuff over the holidays. Spend time with your family instead. The investment in your family will pay off in later years, trust me.

Networking

Servers/Hardware

Security

Cloud Computing/Cloud Management

‘What’s Dead May Never Die’ — SD-WAN’s Undying Story

Aviatrix CEO Steve Mullaney raised eyebrows earlier this month when he predicted the demise of the...

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Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays!

I joined Cloudflare in July of 2019, but I've known of Cloudflare for years. I always read the blog posts and looked at the way the company was engaging with the community. I also noticed the diversity in the names of many of the blog post authors.

There are over 50 languages spoken at Cloudflare, as we have natives from many countries on our team, with different backgrounds, religions, gender and cultures. And it is this diversity that makes us a great team.

A few days ago I asked one of my colleagues how he would say "Happy Holidays!" in Arabic. When I heard him say it, I instantly got the idea of recording a video in as many languages as possible of our colleagues wishing all of you, our readers and customers, a happy winter season.

It only took one internal message for people to start responding and sending their videos to me. Some did it themselves, others flocked in a meeting room and helped each other record their greeting. It took a few days and some video editing to put together an informal video that was entirely done by the team, to wish you all the best Continue reading

Huawei Battles Reigned in 2019

Huawei struck back at a report claiming the Chinese vendor benefitted from government subsidies...

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