Gall’s Law and the Network

In Systemantics: How Systems Really Work and How They Fail, John Gall says:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

In the software development world, this is called Gall’s Law (even though Gall himself never calls it a law) and is applied to organizations and software systems. How does this apply to network design and engineering? The best place to begin in answering this question is to understand what, precisely, Gall is arguing for; there is more here than what is visible on the surface.

What does a simple system mean? It is, first of all, an argument for underspecification. This runs counter to the way we instinctively want to design systems. We want to begin by discovering all the requirements (problems to be solved and constraints), and then move into an orderly discussion of all the possible solutions and sets of solutions, and then into an orderly discussion of an overall architecture, then into a nice UML chart showing all the interaction Continue reading

Install the Antidote (NRE Labs) network emulator on a Linux system

Antidote is a network emulator combined with a presentation framework designed to create and deliver networking technology training. Its user interface operates in a web browser, including the terminals that students use to run commands on emulated network devices and servers.

Antidote is the engine that runs the Network Reliability Labs web site. Antidote is an open-source project, released under the Apache license. A standalone version of Antidote may be installed and run on your personal computer using the selfmedicate script. In this post, I will install Antidote on my Linux laptop and make a few changes that improve Antidote performance on my Linux system.

Antidote documentation

The Antidote documentation is being expanded regularly but, at the time I am writing this, the most helpful information is in the NRE Labs blog and in the videos produced by the developers. Most of these are accessible from the NRE Labs Community Resources page.

Also, Antidote is in active development and it is changing quickly as the developers create new features and content. Keep that in mind when following this blog post. Some things may already have changed about the way Antidote installs or operates.

Install prerequisite software

Antidote requires that you Continue reading

When to be concerned about memory levels on Linux

Running out of memory on a Linux system is generally not a sign that there's a serious problem. Why? Because a healthy Linux system will cache disk activity in memory, basically gobbling memory that isn't being used, which is a very good thing.In other words, it doesn't allow memory to go to waste. It uses the spare memory to increase disk access speed, and it does this without taking memory away from running applications. This memory caching, as you might well imagine, is hundreds of times faster than working directly with the hard-disk drives (HDD) and significantly faster than solid-state drives. Full or near full memory normally means that a system is running as efficiently as it can — not that it's running into problems.To read this article in full, please click here

Top auto makers rely on cloud providers for IoT

For the companies looking to implement the biggest and most complex IoT setups in the world, the idea of pairing up with AWS, Google Cloud or Azure seems to be one whose time has come. Within the last two months, BMW and Volkswagen have both announced large-scale deals with Microsoft and Amazon, respectively, to help operate their extensive network of operational technology.To read this article in full, please click here(Insider Story)

A Simple Virtual Network based on proxy ARP and Policy Based Routing

Introduction Choosing a Virtual networking to connect VMs or Containers across Hosts is always a complicated decision. Most of us would have found the virtual networking on a single VM/Container Host to be very simple, easy to implement and debug. Just plug the VM/Container to a bridge and your are done. For access from the … Continue reading A Simple Virtual Network based on proxy ARP and Policy Based Routing

Network Break 234: Windows Adds A Linux Kernel; Cisco Announces An SD-WAN Colo Option

Today's Network Break explores why Microsoft is adding a Linux kernel to Windows, examines a new SD-WAN colo option from Cisco, discusses a new offering from VMware and Dell EMC that lets you get infrastructure on premises but pay for it like the cloud, plus more tech news and a couple of follow-ups.

The post Network Break 234: Windows Adds A Linux Kernel; Cisco Announces An SD-WAN Colo Option appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Week in Internet News: Broadband Project to Nowhere

Dead end: ProPublica has a story about Kentucky’s $1.5 billion broadband expansion program, which the story calls an information highway to nowhere. The program is behind schedule and over budget, with the state’s IT chief directing money to other projects and partnering with commercial ISPs.

Broadband billions: Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture says that bringing broadband to unserved areas of the country would generate $47 billion of new economic activity a year, according to a story at Talkbusiness.net. Broadband in rural areas would enable precision agriculture technologies, which allows high-tech crop management based on sensors and other connected data sources.

I can’t Google: Finally, our broadband access trifecta of stories concludes with a Cronkite News story about the lack of access in many U.S. tribal areas. “Just Google it” has become a bit of a joke among the Hopi tribe in Arizona because many areas don’t have Internet access.

The luxury of privacy: Consumer privacy online can’t be a luxury good that only the rich have access to, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said recently in an opinion piece at the New York Times. Speaking at a conference, Pichai also spoke in favor of privacy legislation Continue reading

Argo and the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone

Argo and the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone
Argo and the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone

Welcome to Speed Week! Each day this week, we’re going to talk about something Cloudflare is doing to make the Internet meaningfully faster for everyone.

Cloudflare has built a massive network of data centers in 180 cities in 75 countries. One way to think of Cloudflare is a global system to transport bits securely, quickly, and reliably from any point A to any other point B on the planet.

To make that a reality, we built Argo. Argo uses real-time global network information to route around brownouts, cable cuts, packet loss, and other problems on the Internet. Argo makes the network that Cloudflare relies on—the Internet—faster, more reliable, and more secure on every hop around the world.

We launched Argo two years ago, and it now carries over 22% of Cloudflare’s traffic. On an average day, Argo cuts the amount of time Internet users spend waiting for content by 112 years!

As Cloudflare and our traffic volumes have grown, it now makes sense to build our own private backbone to add further security, reliability, and speed to key connections between Cloudflare locations.

Today, we’re introducing the Cloudflare Global Private Backbone. It’s been in operation for a while now and links Continue reading

HPE’s CEO lays out his technology vision

Like Microsoft's Satya Nadella, HPE CEO Antonio Neri is a technologist with a long history of leading initiatives in his company. Meg Whitman, his former boss at HPE, showed her appreciation of Neri’s acumen by promoting him to HPE Executive Vice President in 2015 – and gave him the green light to acquire Aruba, SimpliVity, Nimble Storage, and Plexxi, all of which added key items to HPE’s portfolio.To read this article in full, please click here

HPE’s CEO lays out his technology vision

Like Microsoft's Satya Nadella, HPE CEO Antonio Neri is a technologist with a long history of leading initiatives in his company. Meg Whitman, his former boss at HPE, showed her appreciation of Neri’s acumen by promoting him to HPE Executive Vice President in 2015 – and gave him the green light to acquire Aruba, SimpliVity, Nimble Storage, and Plexxi, all of which added key items to HPE’s portfolio.To read this article in full, please click here

Automating Brownfield Environments (Using an 802.1x Example)

This is a guest blog post by Albert Siersema, senior network and cloud engineer at Mediacaster.nl. He’s always busy broadening his horizons and helping his customers in (re)designing and automating their infrastructure deployment and management.

This is the second post in a series focused primarily on brownfield automation principles using 802.1x deployments as an example (you might want to read part 1 first).

Before diving into the specifics of the next 802.1x automation phase, let’s take a step back and think about why we’re going through this effort. Automation is a wonderful tool, but it’s not a goal… and neither is 802.1x a goal - it’s just another tool that can help us realize business benefits like:

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An open-source benchmark suite for microservices and their hardware-software implications for cloud & edge systems

An open-source benchmark suite for microservices and their hardware-software implications for cloud & edge systems Gan et al., ASPLOS’19

Microservices are well known for producing ‘death star’ interaction diagrams like those shown below, where each point on the circumference represents an individual service, and the lines between them represent interactions.

Systems built with lots of microservices have different operational characteristics to those built from a small number of monoliths, we’d like to study and better understand those differences. That’s where ‘DeathStarBench’ comes in: a suite of five different microservices-based applications (one of which, a drone coordination platform called Swarm has two variations – one doing most compute in the cloud, and one offloading as much as possible to the edge). It’s a pretty impressive effort to pull together and make available in open source (not yet available as I write this) such a suite, and I’m sure explains much of the long list of 24 authors on this paper.

The suite is built using popular OSS applications and representative technologies, deliberately using a mix of languages (C/C++, Java, Javascript, node.js, Python, Ruby, Go, Scala, …) and both RESTful and RPC (Thrift, gRPC) style service interfaces. There’s a nice Continue reading

Welcome to Speed Week!

Welcome to Speed Week!
Welcome to Speed Week!

Every year, we celebrate Cloudflare’s birthday in September when we announce the products we’re releasing to help make the Internet better for everyone. We’re always building new and innovative products throughout the year, and having to pick five announcements for just one week of the year is always challenging. Last year we brought back Crypto Week where we shared new cryptography technologies we’re supporting and helping advance to help build a more secure Internet.

Today I’m thrilled to announce we are launching our first-ever Speed Week and we want to showcase some of the things that we’re obsessed with to make the Internet faster for everyone.

How much faster is faster?

When we built the software stack that runs our network, we knew that both security and speed are important to our customers, and they should never have to compromise one for the other. All of the products we’re announcing this week will help our customers have a better experience on the Internet with as much as a 50% improvement in page load times for websites, getting the  most out of HTTP/2’s features (while only lifting a finger to click the button that enables them), finding the optimal route across Continue reading

The Linux Migration: Preparing for the Migration

As far back as 2012, I was already thinking about migrating away from Mac OS X (now known as macOS). While the migration didn’t start in earnest until late 2016, a fair amount of work happened in advance of the migration. Since I’ve had a number of folks ask me about migrating to Linux, I thought I’d supplement my Linux migration series with a “prequel” about some of the work that happened to prepare for the migration.

In the end—and I imagine some folks may get upset or offended at this—an operating system (OS) is really just a vehicle to deliver applications to the user. While users like myself have strong preferences about their OS and how their OS works, ultimately it is the ability to “get things done” that really matters. This is why I ended up suspending my Linux migration in August 2017; I didn’t have access to the applications I needed in order to do what I needed to do. (Though, to be fair, part of that was a lack of growth on my part, though that’s a different blog post for a different day.)

To that end, most of the work I did in Continue reading

Worth Reading: Nothing Fails Like Success

I hope I'm still allowed to quote a paragraph from someone else's article (thank you, EU, you did a great job). Here's what Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about startup business models:

A family buys a house they can’t afford. They can’t make their monthly mortgage payments, so they borrow money from the Mob. Now they’re in debt to the bank and the Mob, live in fear of losing their home, and must do whatever their creditors tell them to do.

Read the article and think about how it applies to unicorn-based networking technologies ;)

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