Interesting links (2011-12-18)

The coolest tool of the week: mxtommy/Cisco-SSH-Client. Thomas St. Pierre did a fantastic job - he modified SSH client to colorize the printouts generated by Cisco routers (similar to what VIM is doing to source code). Download his SSH client patches, recompile your SSH client, and enjoy!

And here are the other links accumulated in my Inbox, this time in somewhat more structured format ... and a (hopefully interesting) surprise at the end.

Clouds

ASCII by Jason Scott / FUCK THE CLOUD: A very accurate view of the reliability of cloud services (and how much you should depend on them).

Redux: Patching the Cloud | Rational Survivability: A 2-year old blog post from @beaker predicting the Amazon Reboot Fiesta. His crystal ball is crystal clear ;)

VMware: Rethink IT: Avoiding Chaos Monkeys -- clouds that proactively avoid customer downtime: A very relevant article after the Amazon Reboot Fiesta

High Scalability - High Scalability - Netflix: Developing, Deploying, and Supporting Software According to the Way of the Cloud: Using VMs in the Amazon EC2 cloud allows Netflix to deploy new software versions to production way easier that it's possible in a traditional data center.

Data Center

Fragmentation Needed: Thinking about sizing the broadcast domain: There's only one answer to the "when is my broadcast domain too big" question - It depends. In his blog post, Chris Marget discusses some of the less obvious parameters that I clearly missed.

Coding Relic: Requiem for Jumbo Frames: Another excellent article by Denton Gentry, describing the problems jumbo frames tried to solve, and why they're largely irrelevant today.

F5 Friday: Load Balancing MySQL with F5 BIG-IP: F5 just removed another obstacle to scaling-out existing craplications. Even if the app developers never heard of master/slave database servers, BIG-IP can load balance a single IP address between R/W and R/O servers based on SQL requests ... if only they'd implement support for transactions. But I guess that would be just a few more tweaks to the iRules ;)

Virtualization and Cloud Computing: A Technological El Nino: Virtualization is changing traffic patterns from N-S to E-W and causing traffic trombones. A nice overview by Lori MacVittie. Conclusion: you have to understand the infrastructure you work on. Couldn't agree more.

Gigamon Side Story - The Data Center Overlords: Another great description of the Gigamon product. If you're designing a new data center, definitely consider including Gigamon in the design.

Why Becoming A CCIE Doesn’t Fix Being Inexperienced: Passing a CCIE exam doesn't make you an experienced networking engineer. The fantastic Ethan Banks at his best.

Internet

RFC 6458 - Sockets API Extensions for the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP): I hoped they would figure out a way to make SCTP appear like TCP to the socket API (allowing it to be used by existing applications without source code modifications). Fat chance, socket API remains as broken as ever.

OpenFlow

HP OpenFlow capable firmware is now GA: OpenFlow-enable firmware for HP switches is publicly available. Great move, HP!

Virtualization

Open vSwitch Kernel Code Moves Upstream | Silicon Loons: Open vSwitch became part of standard Linux kernel distribution. Huge congrats to the Nicira team!

Other topics

I Don't Understand What Anyone Is Saying Anymore - Dan Pallotta - Harvard Business Review: A fantastic advice from Dan Pallotta from HBR - when faced with a barrage of bullshit bingo winners, tell them "I have no idea what you just told me" A hilarious must-read.

Interesting links are now available as a shared Evernote notebook. Enjoy!

1 comments:

  1. REF your first link ::: On Cisco Nexus platform type <terminal> : i LOLed the first time i saw it. never occurred to me that this would be helpful(it isn't really if you're already used to the CLI). I feel like I'm playing an old Atari video game.</terminal>
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