The Hedge 73: Daniel Teycheney and Open Source in Networking
Combining, or stitching together, open source projects to build something unique for your network is becoming more common. What does this look like in the real world? What are some of the positive and negative aspects of building things this way? How do open source projects interact with the commercial world? Daniel Teycheney joins Tom Ammon, Jett Tantsura, and Russ White to discuss open source software in networking, particularly around network monitoring and management.
Rethinking BGP on the DC Fabric (part 5)
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.
The Hedge 72: Lisa Caywood and Marketectures
The open source world is not much different than the commercial world in terms of building marketectures rather than useable software—largely because open source projects still rely on sources of funding and material support to build and maintain a product. Many times, however, the focus on these marketectures get in the way of real work. Join Tom Ammon, Russ White, and Lisa Caywood as we discuss the problem of marketectures and the broader world of open source software.
Technologies that Didn’t: Directory Services
One of the most important features of the Network Operating Systems, like Banyan Vines and Novell Netware, available in the middle of the 1980’s was their integrated directory system. These directory systems allowed for the automatic discovery of many different kinds of devices attached to a network, such as printers, servers, and computers. Printers, of course, were the important item in this list, because printers have always been the bane of the network administrator’s existence. An example of one such system, an early version of Active Directory, is shown in the illustration below.
Rethinking BGP on the DC Fabric (part 4)
Before I continue, I want to remind you what the purpose of this little series of posts is. The point is not to convince you to never use BGP in the DC underlay ever again. There’s a lot of BGP deployed out there, and there are lot of tools that assume BGP in the underlay. I doubt any of that is going to change. The point is to make you stop and think!
Why are we deploying BGP in this way? Is this the right long-term solution? Should we, as a community, be rethinking our desire to use BGP for everything? Are we just “following the crowd” because … well … we think it’s what the “cool kids” are doing, or because “following the crowd” is what we always seem to do?
In my last post, I argued that BGP converges much more slowly than the other options available for the DC fabric underlay control plane. The pushback I received was two-fold. First, the overlay converges fast enough; the underlay convergence time does not really factor into overall convergence time. Second, there are ways to fix things.
The Hedge 71: Nick Russo and Automating Productivity
When we think of automation—and more broadly tooling—we tend to think of automating the configuration, monitoring, and (possibly) the monitoring of a network. On the other hand, a friend once observed that when interviewing coders, the first thing he asked was about the tools they had developed and used for making themselves more efficient. This “self-tooling” process turns out to be important not just to be more efficient at work, but to use time more effectively in general. Join Nick Russo, Eyvonne Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White as we discuss self-tooling.
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.