Hedge 100: Supply Chain Diversity with Brooks Westbrook and Mike Bushong
Most network engineers don’t spend a lot of time thinking about their supply chain—you must call your favorite vendor, order, and a few weeks later the hardware shows up on your loading dock. It’s not so simple any more. If you disaggregate, you need to manage your software and hardware supply chains separately. You need to think about security in your supply chain—is that software package backdoored? Moving to the cloud might seem to solve these problems, but they don’t. Even virtual networks have physical limits.
Russ’ Rules of Network Design
We have the twelve truths of networking, and possibly Akin’s Laws, but is there a set of rules for network design? I couldn’t find one, so I decided to create one, containing 18 laws I’ve listed below.
Hedge 99
Two things have been top of mind for those who watch the ‘net and global Internet policy—the increasing number of widespread outages, and the logical and physical centralization of the ‘net. How do these things relate to one another? Alban Kwan joins us to discuss the relationship between centralization and widespread outages. You can read Alban’s article on the topic here.
Hedge 098: DRIP with Stuart Card
Drones are becoming—and in many cases have already become—an everyday part of our lives. Drones are used in warfare, delivery services, photography, and recreation. One of the problems facing the world of drones, however, is the strong tie-in between the controller and the drone; this proprietary link limits innovation and reduces the information available to public officials to manage traffic, and even to protect the privacy of drone operators. The DRIP working group is building protocols designed to standardize the drone-to-controller interface, advancing the state of the art in drones and opening up the field for innovation. Stuart Card joins Alvaro Retana and Russ White to discuss DRIP.
Marketing Wins
Off-topic post for today …
In the battle between marketing and security, marketing always wins. This topic came to mind after reading an article on using email aliases to control your email—
Hedge 97: Low Context DevOps
Language is deeply contextual—one of my favorite sayings from the theological world is if you take the text out of its context, you are just left with the con. What does context have to do with development and operations, though? Can there be low and high context situations in the daily life of building and running systems? Thomas Limoncelli joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss the idea of low context devops, and the larger issue of context in managing projects and teams, on this episode of the Hedge.
It always takes longer than you think
Everyone is aware that it always takes longer to find a problem in a network than it should. Moving through the troubleshooting process often feels like swimming in molasses—you’re pulling hard, and progress is being made, but never fast enough or far enough to get the application back up and running before that crucial deadline. The “swimming in molasses effect” doesn’t end when the problem is found out, either—repairing the problem requires juggling a thousand variables, most of which are unknown, combined with the wit and sagacity of a soothsayer to work with vendors, code releases, and unintended consequences.
Hedge 96: Mark Nottingham and the Future of Standardization
It often seems like the IETF is losing steam—building standards, particularly as large cloud-scale companies a reducing their participation in standards bodies and deploying whatever works for them. Given these changes, what is the future of standards bodies like the IETF? Mark Nottingham joins Tom Ammon and Russ White in a broad-ranging discussion around this topic.
The Centralization of the Internet
My article on Internet centralization just published over at The Public Discourse—
Hedge 95: Mike Bushong and Agile
We’ve all been told agile is better … but as anyone who’s listened here long enough knows, if you haven’t found the tradeoffs, you haven’t looked hard enough. What is agile better for? Are there time when agile is better, and times when more traditional project management processes are better? Mike Bushong joins Tom Ammon, Eyvonne Sharp, and Russ White on this, the 95th episode of the Hedge, to discuss his experience with implementing agile, where it works, and where it doesn’t.