I recently spoke at CHINOG on the business value of disaggregation, and participated in a panel on getting involved in the IETF.
Over at the Communications of the ACM, Micah Beck has an article up about the hourglass model. While the math is quite interesting, I want to focus on transferring the observations from the realm of protocol and software systems development to network design. Specifically, start with the concept and terminology, which is very useful. Taking a typical design, such as this—
The first key point made in the paper is this—
The thin waist of the hourglass is a narrow straw through which applications can draw upon the resources that are available in the less restricted lower layers of the stack.
DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) released their 2018 Accelerate report on the state of DevOps at the end of 2018; I’m a little behind in my reading, so I just got around to reading it, and trying to figure out how to apply their findings to the infrastructure (networking) side of the world.
DORA found organizations that outsource entire functions, such as building an entire module or service, tend to perform more poorly than organizations that outsource by integrating individual developers into existing internal teams (page 43). It is surprising companies still think outsourcing entire functions is a good idea, given the many years of experience the IT world has with the failures of this model. Outsourced components, it seems, too often become a bottleneck in the system, especially as contracts constrain your ability to react to real-world changes.
One thing we often forget in our drive to “more” is this—context matters. Ivan hit on this with a post about the impact of controller failures in software-defined networks just a few days ago: A controller (or management/provisioning) system is obviously the central point of failure in any network, but we have to go beyond…
Way back in the day, when telephone lines were first being installed, running the physical infrastructure was quite expensive. The first attempt to maximize the infrastructure was the party line. In modern terms, the party line is just an Ethernet segment for the telephone. Anyone can pick up and talk to anyone else who happens to be listening. In order to schedule things, a user could contact an operator, who could then “ring” the appropriate phone to signal another user to “pick up.” CSMA/CA, in essence, with a human scheduler.
This proved to be somewhat unacceptable to everyone other than various intelligence agencies, so the operator’s position was “upgraded.” A line was run to each structure (house or business) and terminated at a switchboard. Each line terminated into a jack, and patch cables were supplied to the operator, who could then connect two telephone lines by inserting a jumper cable between the appropriate jacks.
An important concept: this kind of operator driven system is nonblocking. If Joe calls Susan, then Joe and Susan cannot also talk to someone other than one another for the duration of their call. If Joe’s line is tied up, when someone tries to call him, they will receive a busy signal. The network is not blocking in this case, the edge is—because the node the caller is trying to reach is already using 100% of its available bandwidth for an existing call. Blocking networks did exist in the form of trunk connections, or connections between these switch panels. Trunk connections not only consume ports on the switchboard, they are expensive to build, and they require a lot of power to run. Hence, making a “long distance call” costs money because it consumes a blocking resource. It is only when we get to packet switched digital networks that the cost of a “long distance call” drops to the rough equivalent of a “normal” call, and we see “long distance” charges fade into memory (many of my younger readers have never been charged for “long distance calls,” in fact, and may not even know what I’m talking about).
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…
It was quite difficult to prepare a tub full of bath water at many points in recent history (and it probably still is in some many parts of the world). First, there was the water itself—if you do not have plumbing, then the water must be manually transported, one bucket at a time, from a…
We love layers and abstraction. After all, building in layers and it’s corollary, abstraction, are the foundation of large-scale system design. The only way to build large-scale systems is to divide and conquer, which means building many different component parts with clear and defined interaction surfaces (most often expressed as APIs) and combining these many…
Simplification is a constant theme not only here, and in my talks, but across the network engineering world right now. But what does this mean practically? Looking at a complex network, how do you begin simplifying? The first option is to abstract, abstract again, and abstract some more. But before diving into deep abstraction, remember…