How do you balance loyalty to yourself and loyalty to the company you work for?
This might seem like an odd question, but it’s an important component of work/life balance many of us just don’t think about any longer because, as Pete Davis says in Dedicated, we live in a world of infinite browsing. We’re afraid of sticking to one thing because it might reduce our future options. If we dedicate ourselves to something bigger than ourselves, then we might lose control of our direction. In particular, we should not dedicate ourselves to any single company, especially for too long.
Software Eats the World?
I’m told software is going to eat the world very soon now. Everything already is, or will be, software based. To some folks, this sounds completely wonderful, but—leaving aside the privacy issues—I still see an elephant in the room with this vision of the future.
Quality.
Let me give you some recent examples.
First, ceiling fans. Modern ceiling fans, in case you didn’t know, don’t rely on the wall switch and pull chains. Instead, they rely on remote controls. This is brilliant—you can dim the light, change the speed of the fan, etc., from a remote control. No unsightly chains hanging from the ceiling.
This last week I was talking to someone at a small startup that intends to eliminate all the complex routing from campus networks. In the past, when reading blog posts about Kubernetes, I’ve read about how it was designed to eliminate routing protocols because “routing protocols are so complex.”
Color me skeptical.
Fear sells. Fear of missing out, fear of being an imposter, fear of crime, fear of injury, fear of sickness … we can all think of times when people we know (or worse, a people in the throes of madness of crowds) have made really bad decisions because they were afraid of something. Bruce Schneier has documented this a number of times. For instance: “it’s smart politics to exaggerate terrorist threats” and “fear makes people deferential, docile, and distrustful, and both politicians and marketers have learned to take advantage of this.”
I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard someone ask these two questions—
- What are other people doing?
- What is the best common practice?
While these questions have always bothered me, I could never really put my finger on why. I ran across a journal article recently that helped me understand a bit better. The root of the problem is this—what does best common mean, and how can following the best common produce a set of actions you can be confident will solve your problem?
Recent research into the text of RFCs versus the security of the protocols described came to this conclusion—
Decision making, especially in large organizations, fails in many interesting ways. Understanding these failure modes can help us cope with seemingly difficult situations, and learn how to make decisions better. On this episode of the Hedge, Frederico Lucifredi, Ethan Banks, and Russ White discuss Frederico’s thoughts on developing a taxonomy of indecision. You can find his presentation on this topic here.
Crossing from the domain of test pilots to the domain of network engineering might seem like a large leap indeed—but user interfaces and their tradeoffs are common across physical and virtual spaces. Brian Keys, Eyvonne Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White as we start with user interfaces and move into a wider discussion around attitudes and beliefs in the network engineering world.
A while back, I was sitting in a meeting where the presenter described switching from a “traditional, hierarchical data center fabric” to a spine-and-leaf (while drawing CLOS, in all capital letters, on the whiteboard). He pointed out that the spine-and-leaf design is simpler because it only has two tiers rather than three.
There is so much wrong with this I almost winced in physical pain. Traditional hierarchical designs are not fabrics. Spine-and-leaf fabrics are not CLOS, but Clos, fabrics. Clos fabrics have three stages, not two—even if we draw them “folded” so you only see two apparent levels to the fabric. In fact, all spine-and-leaf fabrics always have an odd number of stages, and they are stages, not tiers.
BGP is widely used as an IGP in the underlay of modern DC fabrics. This series argues this is not the best long-term solution to the problem of routing in fabrics because BGP is not ideal for this use case. This post will consider the potential harm we are doing to the larger Internet by pressing BGP into a role it was not originally designed to fulfill—an underlay protocol or an IGP.
My last post described the kinds of configuration required to make BGP work on a DC fabric—it turns out that the configuration of each BGP speaker on the fabric is close to unique. It is possible to automate configuring each speaker—but it would be better if we could get closer to autonomic operation.