In mid-June I started another pet project - a series of webinars focused on networking fundamentals. In the first live session on June 18th we focused on identifying the challenges one has to solve when building an end-to-end networking solution, and the role of layered approach to networking.

Not surprisingly, we quickly went down the rabbit holes of computer networking history, including SCSI cables, serial connections and modems… but that’s where it all started, and some of the concepts developed at that time are still used today… oftentimes heavily morphed by recursive application of RFC 1925 Rule 11.

We’ll continue the journey into networking fundamentals in October 2019 (I’ll spend most of September talking about Azure networking) and the list of topics currently includes:

• Addressing
• Getting across the network (aka routing)
• Transmitting bits and messages (from asynchronous transport and clock recovery to escaping, zero-insertion and quoting)
• Layer-2 line disciplines
• Cell-mode versus packet-mode transport
• Connection-oriented versus connectionless transport
• Virtual circuits versus hop-by-hop forwarding
• The intractability of QoS
• Congestion detection
• In-band versus out-of-band signaling

Is there anything you’d like to add to the list? Write a comment or send me an email.