Every so often, while browsing the web, you run into a web page that asks if you would like to allow the site to push notifications to your browser. Apparently, according to the paper under review, about 12% of the people who receive this notification allow notifications. What, precisely, is this doing, and what are…
Until about 2017, the cloud was going to replace all on-premises data centers. As it turns out, however, the cloud has not replaced all on-premises data centers. Why not? Based on the paper under review, one potential answer is because containers in the cloud are still too much like “serverfull” computing. Developers must still create…
Microservices architectures probably will not “take over the world,” in terms of solving every application you can throw at them, but they are becoming more widespread. Microservices and related “staged” design patterns are ideal for edge facing applications, where the edge facing services, in particular, need to scale quickly across broad geographical regions. Supporting microservices…
In networks, we tend to think of Quality of Service (QoS) relating primarily to classes of traffic. These classes of traffic, in turn, are grounded in application behavior driven by user expectations. For instance, users expect voice communications to be near real time so conversation can take place “normally,” which means delay must be held…
Much like most other problems in technology, securing the reachability (routing) information in the internet core as much or more of a people problem than it is a technology problem. While BGP security can never be perfect (in an imperfect world, the quest for perfection is often the cause of a good solution’s failure), there…
The BGP specification suggests implementations should have three tables: the adj-rib-in, the loc-rib, and the adj-rib-out. The first of these three tables should contain the routes (NLRIs and attributes) transmitted by each of the speaker’s peers. The second table should contain the calculated best paths; these are the routes that will be (or are) installed…
A common complaint I hear among network engineers is that the lessons and techniques used by truly huge scale networks simply are not applicable to more “standard scale” networks. The key point, however, is balance—to look for the ideas and concepts that are interesting and at least somewhat novel, and then see how they might…
The little green lock—now being deprecated by some browsers—provides some level of comfort for many users when entering personal information on a web site. You probably know the little green lock means the traffic between the host and the site is encrypted, but you might not stop to ask the fundamental question of all cryptography:…
Of the 4.2 billion IPv4 addresses available in the global space, how many are used—or rather, how many are “alive?” Given the increasing usage of IPv6, it might seem this is an unimportant question. Answering the question, however, resolves to another question that is actually more important: how can you determine whether or not an…
The security of the global Default Free Zone DFZ) has been a topic of much debate and concern for the last twenty years (or more). Two recent papers have brought this issue to the surface once again—it is worth looking at what these two papers add to the mix of what is known, and what…