One of my subscribers trying to figure out how to improve his career choices sent me this question:

I am Sr. Network Engineer with 12+ Years’ experience. I was quit happy with my networking skills but will all the recent changes I’m confused. I am not able to understand what are the key skills I should learn as a network engineer to keep myself demandable.

Before reading the rest of this blog post, please read Cloud and the Three IT Geographies by Massimo Re Ferre.

In previous blog posts in this series we discussed whether it makes sense to invest into fast failover network designs, the topologies you can use in such designs, and the fault detection techniques. I also hinted at different fast failover implementations; this blog post focuses on some of them.

Hardware-based failover changes the hardware forwarding tables after a hardware-detectable link failure, most likely loss-of-light or transceiver-reported link fault. Forwarding hardware cannot do extensive calculations; the alternate paths are thus usually pre-programmed (more details below).

A while ago (eons before AWS introduced Gateway Load Balancer) I discussed the intricacies of AWS and Azure networking with a very smart engineer working for a security appliance vendor, and he said something along the lines of “it shows these things were designed by software developers – they have no idea how networks should work.”

In reality, at least some aspects of public cloud networking come closer to the original ideas of how IP and data-link layers should fit together than today’s flat earth theories, so he probably wanted to say “they make it so hard for me to insert my virtual appliance into their network.”

Tom Hollingsworth wrote another must-read blog post in which he explained what one should do before asking for help:

If someone comes to me and says, “I tried this and it failed and I got this message. I looked it up and the response didn’t make sense. Can you tell me why that is?” I rejoice. That person has done the legwork and narrowed the question down to the key piece they need to know.

After explaining why you should focus on defining the problem before searching for a magic technology that will solve it, I continued the Focus on Business Challenges First presentation with another set of seemingly simple questions:

• Who are your users/customers?
• What do they really need?
• Assuming you’re a service provider, what are you able to sell to your customers… and how are you different from your competitors?

In the blog post introducing fast failover challenge I mentioned several typical topologies used in fast failover designs. It’s time to explore them.

The Basics

Fast failover is (by definition) adjustment to a change in network topology that happens before a routing protocol wakes up and deals with the change. It can therefore use only locally available information, and cannot involve changes in upstream devices. The node adjacent to the failed link has to deal with the failure on its own without involving anyone else.

A Network Artist sent me a long list of OSPF-related questions after watching the Routing Protocols section of our How Networks Really Work webinar. Starting with an easy one:

From historical perspective, any idea why OSPF guys invented their own transport protocol instead of just relying upon TCP?

I wasn’t there when OSPF was designed, but I have a few possible explanations. Let’s start with the what functionality should the transport protocol provide reasons:

In the introductory fast failover blog post I mentioned the challenge of fast link- and node failure detection, and how it makes little sense to waste your efforts on fast failover tricks if the routing protocol convergence time has the same order of magnitude as failure detection time.

Now let’s focus on realistic failure detection mechanisms and detection times. Imagine a system connecting a hardware switching platform (example: data center switch or a high-end router) with a software switching platform (midrange router):

From AI is wrestling with a replication crisis (HT: Drew Conry-Murray)

Last month Nature published a damning response written by 31 scientists to a study from Google Health that had appeared in the journal earlier this year. Google was describing successful trials of an AI that looked for signs of breast cancer in medical images. But according to its critics, the Google team provided so little information about its code and how it was tested that the study amounted to nothing more than a promotion of proprietary tech (emphasis mine).

After (hopefully) agreeing on what routing, bridging, and switching are, let’s focus on the first important topic in this area: how do we get a packet across the network? Yet again, there are three fundamentally different technologies:

• Source node knows the full path (source routing)
• Source node opens a path (virtual circuit) to the destination node and uses that path to send traffic
• The network performs hop-by-hop destination-address-based packet forwarding.

More details in the Getting Packets Across the Network video.