The Hedge

Many network operators think the idea of building rather than buying is something that’s out of reach–but is it? Join Steve Dodd, Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ as we discuss the positive and negative aspects of build versus buy, what operators get wrong, and what operators don’t often expect.

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There are (at least) three different aspects of AI in network engineering: network design to support AI, AI for development, and AI for operations. J.P. Vassuer joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss AI for understanding and operating networks. What are the possibilities? What are the pitfalls? What can we expect to see?

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The massive failure resulting from a failed update to 8.5 million Windows hosts by Crowdstrike will live in Internet history for years to come. The failure will be studied by engineering teams and college classes to understand what went wrong and how we can stop this from happening in the future. Derick Winkworth (@cloudtoad), Eyvonne Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White hang out at the hedge to talk about what happened and lessons learned from a network engineering perspective.
 

 
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Crowdstrike released a detailed description of the problematic update here.

Looking at changes in the market in the last ten years, it certainly seems like vendors work less toward innovation and more towards locking customers in to revenue streams. Chris Emerick, Dave Taht, and Russ White decided it’s time to talk about. What’s wrong with vendors? And since everything can’t be wrong with vendors, where are they doing the right thing?
 

 
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Eyvonne and Russ catch up with Greg Ferro one last time to talk about the permissionless Internet–a thing of the past–vendor lock in, and many other random topics on this episode of the Hedge. Greg–here’s to a grand time in the future. We’ll miss you.

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Join us as Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ hang out for another roundtable. We start the show talking about Tom’s plant (is it real or … ??). What does copyright have to do with Internet Service Providers? Should the two topics be related at all? What can the IETF do about Internet centralization?

Thanks for listening—and please reach out if you have a topic you’d like to hear about, or a guest you’d like to hear.

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We often hear about how there simply aren’t enough tech people out there–especially in cybersecurity. Rex Booth, CISO at Sailpoint, joins Tom and Russ to discuss the problem, and why we should be looking in unconventional places to find the right people.

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Data centers turn large amounts of electricity into heat. Is it possible to recover even some part of this heat rather than throwing it off into the local environment? David Krebs of masterresource.org brings his vast experience with using heat from engines to bear on the problem to propose solutions.

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If you’ve ever wondered what the process of creating and publishing a book is like, listen in as Aninda joins Tom and Russ to discuss the trials and rewards of publishing his first book, Deploying Juniper Data Centers with EVPN VXLAN.
 

 
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We often think of decoupling, or modularization in network engineering speak, as a primary tool for scaling networks, but it also one of the best tools network engineers have to increase security. In this roundtable, Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ discuss an article by Bruce Schneier on decoupling, and how it applies to networking engineering.
 

 
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You will probably be laid off at least once in your career–we no longer live a world of “permanent positions,” or even a world where people are in complete control of their “work destiny.” It’s important, then, to prepare to be laid off, made redundant, or impacted by a RIF, today. Mike Bushong joins Eyvonne Sharp, Tom Ammon, and Russ White in a wide-ranging discussion about preparing to be laid off.

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What is QUIC? Where did it come from? Why has it been successfully deployed where so many other protocols have either taken forever or flat-out failed? George Michaelson (of APNIC fame) joins Tom Ammon and Russ White on this episode of the Hedge to (quickly) talk about QUIC.

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Miscommunication between techies and business leaders are often caused by misunderstanding. Listen in as Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ discuss these misunderstandings and how we can address them.
 

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Europe and the United States are completely different landscapes of Internet service providers. Which provides better service for customers, and which direction should these different markets go? Luke Kehoe joins Tom Ammon, Eyvonne Sharp, and Russ White to discuss the European market specifically, and why the European market needs consolidation.

Luke’s article on this topic is here.

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Alexis Bertholf joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss how we can make network engineering cool again—and to talk about how we got into network engineering.

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The CCNA has a long history as an important certification for network engineers. While the CCST has been created by Cisco “below” the CCNA, or as a different starting point, many network engineers begin their career with the CCNA. Join Jason Gooley, Wendell Odom, Tom, and Russ as we discuss the most recent updates to the CCNA, the way updates to the program are changing, and Jason’s and Wendell’s updated book on the CCNA.

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Is Open Source Software (OSS) a market failure? What does OSS add to the market that cannot be accomplished in other ways? What happened to the F (Free)? Join us for this roundtable episode of the Hedge.

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Listen in as Geoff Huston, Tom, and Russ discuss how the IETF, governments, and political movements interact when creating standards and guiding the future of the Internet.

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Eric Chou joins Tom and Russ to talk about the importance of creating content, and the many tools and ideas you can use to get out there and publish. You’ve heard us talk about this a lot–now it’s time to get out there and publish.

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A lot of people are spending time thinking about how to make transport and control plane protocols more energy efficient. Is this effort worth it? What amount of power are we really like to save, and what downside potential is there in changing protocols to save energy? George Michaelson joins us from Australia to discuss energy awareness in protocols.

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Cloud services are all the rage right now, but are they worth it? There are many aspects to the question, and the answer is almost always going to be “it depends.” Do you really need to spin up capacity more quickly than you can buy hardware and get it running? Do you really need to be able to spin capacity down without leaving any hardware behind? Is cloud really the best use of your team’s time and talent?

David Heinemeier Hansson joins Tom and Russ to talk about the economics and uses of cloud, and why his company has moved away from public cloud services.

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We’ve been talking about many of the same things in networking since the late 1980s–autonomous, self-driving, autonomic, etc.–and yet … those things all still seem like some sort of Jetson’s cartoon episode. Why aren’t we there yet? Are these even the right goals?

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Most providers will only accept a /24 or shorter IPv4 route because routers have always had limited amounts of forwarding table space. In fact, many hardware and software IPv4 forwarding implementations are optimized for a /24 or shorter prefix length. Justin Wilson joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to discuss why the DFZ might need to be expanded to longer prefix lengths, and the tradeoffs involved in doing so.

 
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We hear a lot about BGP security incidents–but what is really going on? How often do these happen, and how much damage do they do? Doug Madory, who monitors these things for Kentik, joins Russ White and Tom Ammon to talk about BGP security in the wild.

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One thing we often hear about automation is that its hard because there are so many different interfaces. On this episode of the Hedge, Daniel Teycheney joins Ethan Banks and Russ White to discuss how they started from a simple idea and ended up building an automation system that does cross vendor boundaries within a larger discussion about automation and APIs.

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Reading people from the past can sometimes show us where today’s blind spots are–but sometimes we can just find the blind spots of the people who lived then. In this episode of the Hedge, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ finish going through a selection of quotes from an engineering book published in 1911. This time, we find there are some things to agree with, but also some to disagree with.

Network operators increasingly rely on generic hosts, rather than specialized routers (appliances) to forward traffic. Much of the performance on hosts relies on offloading packets switching and processing to specialized hardware on the network interface card. In this episode of the Hedge, Krzysztof Wróbel and Maciej Rabęda join Russ and Tom to talk about hardware offloading.

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You can find out more about hardware offloading here.

Network configuration analysis has always been the domain of commercial-grade software. Batfish changes all that with an open source, community-supported tool that can find errors and guarantees the correctness of planned or current network configurations. Ratul Mahajan joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about this new tool, its capabilities, and the importance of network configuration analysis.
 

 
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You can find out more about Batfish at the project home page, and in this paper by Ratul.

How many times have you heard you should “shift left” in the last few years? What does “shift left” even mean? Even if it had meaning once, does it still have any meaning today? Should we abandon the concept, or just the term? Listen in as Chris Romeo joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about the origin, meaning, and modern uselessness of the term “shift left.”
 

 
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How much have you thought about the way you learn–or how to effectively teach beginners? There is a surprising amount of research into how humans learn, and how best to create material to teach them. In this roundtable episode, Tom, Eyvonne, and Russ discuss a recent paper from the Communications of the ACM, 10 Things Software Developers Should Learn about Learning.

 

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transcript (machine generated)