On the ‘net: The Art of Conviction
I was recently a guest on The Art of Conviction podcast, where we covered a bit of my background, some of the challenges I’ve faced in getting where I am, and then we moved into a discussion around my recently finished dissertation. I’m working to find places to publish more in the area of worldview and culture; I’ll point to those here as I can find a “home” for that side of my life.
Rethinking BGP on the DC Fabric (part 3)
The fist post on this topic considered some basic definitions and the reasons why I am writing this series of posts. The second considered the convergence speed of BGP on a dense topology such as a DC fabric, and what mechanisms we normally use to improve BGP’s convergence speed. This post considers some of the objections to slow convergence speed—convergence speed is not important, and ECMP with high fanouts will take care of any convergence speed issues. The network below will be used for this discussion.
The Hedge 70: FR Routing Update
FR Routing is a widely used and supported open source routing stack. In this episode of the Hedge, Alistair Woodman, Quentin Young, Donald Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White discuss recent updates, additions to the CI/CD system, the release process, and operating system support. If you’re looking for a good open source, containerized routing stack for everything from route servers to DC fabrics and labbing to production, you should check out FR Routing.
It is Easier to Move a Problem than Solve it (RFC1925, Rule 6)
Early on in my career as a network engineer, I learned the value of sharing. When I could not figure out why a particular application was not working correctly, it was always useful to blame the application. Conversely, the application owner was often quite willing to share their problems with me, as well, by blaming the network.
Rethinking BGP on the DC Fabric (part 2)
In my last post on this topic, I laid out the purpose of this series—to start a discussion about whether BGP is the ideal underlay control plane for a DC fabric—and gave some definitions. Here, I’d like to dive into the reasons to not use BGP as a DC fabric underlay control plane—and the first of these reasons is BGP converges very slowly and requires a lot of help to converge at all.
The Hedge 69: Container Networking Done Right
Everyone who’s heard me talk about container networking knows I think it’s a bit of a disaster. This is what you get, though, when someone says “that’s really complex, I can discard the years of experience others have in designing this sort of thing and build something a lot simpler…” The result is usually something that’s more complex. Alex Pollitt joins Tom Ammon and I to discuss container networking, and new options that do container networking right.
Rethinking BGP on the DC Fabric
Everyone uses BGP for DC underlays now because … well, just because everyone does. After all, there’s an RFC explaining the idea, every tool in the world supports BGP for the underlay, and every vendor out there recommends some form of BGP in their design documents.
I’m going to swim against the current for the moment and spend a couple of weeks here discussing the case against BGP as a DC underlay protocol. I’m not the only one swimming against this particular current, of course—there are at least three proposals in the IETF (more, if you count things that will probably never be deployed) proposing link-state alternatives to BGP. If BGP is so ideal for DC fabric underlays, then why are so many smart people (at least they seem to be smart) working on finding another solution?
The Hedge 66: Daniel Migault and the ADD Working Group
The modern DNS landscape is becoming complex even for the end user. With the advent of so many public resolvers, DNS over TLS (DoT) and DNS over HTTPS (DoH), choosing a DNS resolver has become an important task. The ADD working group will, according to their page—
In this episode of the Hedge, Daniel Migault joins Alvaro Retana and Russ White to discuss Requirements for Discovering Designated Resolvers, draft-box-add-requirements-02.
Agglutinating Problems Considered Harmful (RFC2915, Rule 5)
In the networking world, many equate simplicity with the fewest number of moving parts. According to this line of thinking, if there are 100 routers, 10 firewalls, 3 control planes, and 4 management systems in a network, then reducing the number of routers to 95, the number of firewalls to 8, the number of control planes to 1, and the number of management systems to 3 would make the system “much simpler.” Disregarding the reduction in the number of management systems, scientifically proven to always increase in number, it does seem that reducing the number of physical devices, protocols in use, etc., would tend to decrease the complexity of the network.
Focus is a Virtue
The modern world craves our attention—but only in short bursts. To give your attention to any one thing for too long is failing, it seems, because you might miss out on something else of interest. We have entered the long tail of the attention economy, grounded in finding every smaller slices of time in which the user’s attention can be captured and used.