Todd Hoff (of the HighScalability fame) sent me a link to an interesting video describing load-balancing mechanisms used at Google and how they evolved over time.
If the rest of the blog post feels like Latin, you SHOULD watch the Load Balancing and Scale-Out Application Architecture webinar.
The beginning of the story resembles traditional enterprise solutions:
Read more ...“Presentations are just a waste of time.”
“Powerpoint stinks.”
“Can’t we do something other than another long, boring, presentation?”
“We should just ban Powerpoint.”
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard someone complain about Powerpoint, or presentations, I’d be rich enough to quit work and stop blogging. 
Isn’t it about time we were honest with ourselves, though? Isn’t it about time we told the truth about this particular problem? Blaming Powerpoint for bad presentations is like blaming word processors for badly written books.
The problem isn’t Powerpoint. The problem is the person you see every morning looking at you in the mirror. The problem isn’t the tool, it’s that we stink at organizing and presenting our thoughts in any sort of reasonable way. So let’s talk about how to build a better presentation.
To begin: forget everything you’ve ever read in a book about making elevator pitches, making a presentation that impacts, with dash, flair, or whatever. There is a set of presentations that present as a story, with flair and dash, and there is another set that just doesn’t.
As an example, I was the Routing Protocols SGM for Cisco Live for Continue reading
We’re approaching Christmas, and for many of us, that means we’re about to enter an extended change freeze. This means an extended period when we shouldn’t change anything, hoping to improve stability. ITIL Change Management tells us this is good. I’m not convinced.
Many businesses impose some form of change freeze across all production systems during the Christmas/New Years period. In theory, all network/compute/storage changes are deferred until January. In practice, high priority changes will still be made if you jump up and down enough. The rate of change should still be lower during this period though.
Some change freezes may only run from just before Christmas until early January. Other businesses will go into a change freeze for as long as five weeks. My experience is that Southern Hemisphere businesses have a longer change freeze than Northern Hemisphere ones. I assume this is because many staff take extended leave over the Austral summer.
There are differing opinions about the usefulness Continue reading
Stumbled upon a hilarious description of challenges encountered when trying to scale distributed systems (cluster of controllers running centralized control plane comes to mind).
It starts with “If someone tells you that scaling out a distributed system is easy they are either lying or drunk, and possibly both,” and gets better and better. Enjoy!
The internet has been buzzing about Facebook’s redesigned datacenter architecture. Facebook, which is used by more than 1.35 billion people, recently restructured their infrastructure to increase flexibility and agility to rapidly adjust to application requirements. Our own Marten Terpstra shared his take on the redesigned infrastructure this week on the Plexxi blog—it’s definitely worth a read. Below we share some of the articles that covered Facebook’s new datacenter architecture, as well as other happenings in the networking space this week.
In this week’s PlexxiTube of the week, Dan Backman explains how much fiber is required to connect datacenters using Plexxi’s datacenter transport fabric solution.
Gigaom: Facebook Redesigned the Data Center Network: 3 Reasons It Matters
By Derrick Harris
Earlier this month, Facebook announced a new data center networking architecture that it calls, fittingly, “data center fabric.” The company explained the design and the rationale in an engineering blog post, and Gigaom’s Jonathan Vanian covered the news, but it’s a big enough deal that we had Facebook Director of Network Engineering Najam Ahmad on the Structure Show podcast this week to talk about the new fabric in more detail.
CIO: How (and Why) Facebook Excels at Data Center Continue reading
Please Join us in congratulating the following iPexpert clients who have passed their CCIE lab!
Have you passed your CCIE lab exam and used any of iPexpert’s or Proctor Labs self-study products, or attended a CCIE Bootcamp? If so, we’d like to add you to our CCIE Wall of Fame!
In his The Case for Hybrids blog post Mat Mathews described the Hotel California effect of public clouds as: “One of the most oft mentioned issues with public cloud is the difficulty in getting out.” Once you start relying on cloud provider APIs to provide DNS, load balancing, CDN, content hosting, security groups, and a plethora of other services, it’s impossible to get out.
Interestingly, the side effects of public cloud deployments extend into the realm of application programming, as I was surprised to find out during one of my Expert Express engagements.
Read more ...What makes a good API? A device providing an API is only the start of the story; if its unusable, or unreliable its useless. This post is a response to one of a couple of points I made about Kirk Byers’ recent post on Arista’s API and the comments that followed. Much respect to (and admiration for) Arista […]
The post The Attributes of a Great Network Device API appeared first on Packet Pushers Podcast and was written by Steven Iveson.
