Most persuasive argument of the week: “Are traffic charges needed to avert a coming capex catastrophe?” by Robert Kenny. This is how you rebut the claims of the greedy Service Providers (and their hired guns), not by hysterical screaming and spitting perfected by some net neutrality zealots.

Most insightful talk: An Attempt to Motivate and Clarify Software-Defined Networking by Scott Shenker. While he’s handwaving across a lot of details, the framework does make sense.

The prime example of eloquent blah blah cloud poetry I came across lately: The Need to Design for Workload Mobility in the Cloud: DR and ROI Considerations. Now I know who’s pushing the idea of inter-DC VM mobility: the consultants who need new engagements (and vendors who are keen to sell new gear).

BTW, anyone who manages to mention 100% available environments and the need for VM mobility to implement them has just proven he has no clue what he’s talking about ... see HA fallacies for more details. The only one way to get more nines is still the same: scale-out applications with redundant local and global load balancing (or significant change in the TCP stack).

And here are the other links that accumulated in my Inbox:

• Are you ready for IPv6 – part 1 and part 2. Getting IPv6 routing and packet forwarding up and running is just part of the solution.
• Multi-path Ethernet and the flying cars. I love the analogy and still hope that the whole thing will quickly become irrelevant.
• Undeletable web cookie. Nasty. The scary part is that it’s so simple to implement (I had working code for years as I had to solve user-specific caching behavior).
• MLAG Lite (active/passive LACP) on a pair of 6500s without VSS. Sort-of interesting ... maybe.
• Another sharding idea from F5. I’m always amazed by what modern load balancers can do.