Christoph Jaggi has just published the third part of his Metro- and Carrier Ethernet Encryptor trilogy: the 2015 market overview. Public versions of all three documents are available for download on his web site:

• Introduction to Metro- and Carrier Ethernet Encryption
• Evaluation Guide for Metro- and Carrier Ethernet Encryptors
• Metro- and Carrier Ethernet Encryptors: 2015 Market Overview

Elisa Jasinska, Bob McCouch and I were scheduled to record a NetOps podcast with a major vendor, but unfortunately their technical director cancelled at the last minute. Like good network engineers, we immediately found plan B and focused on Elisa’s specialty: open-source tools.

Matjaž Straus started the SINOG 2 meeting I attended last week with a great story: during the RIPE70 meeting (just as I was flying home), Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX) crashed.

Here’s how the AMS-IX failure impacted ATLAS probes (world-wide monitoring system run by RIPE) – no wonder, as RIPE uses AMS-IX for their connectivity.

One of the potential attendees of my SDN workshop sent me a long list of questions. Almost every networking engineer, team leader or CIO asks the first one:

What will happen, if we don´t follow the SDN hype (in the short term, in the medium term and in the long term)?

Answering this question is the whole idea of the workshop.

The up-to-date list of scheduled SDN workshops is available on my web site.

Every other week I stumble upon a high-level SDN article that repeats the misleading SDN is centralized control plane mantra (often copied verbatim from the Wikipedia article on SDN, sometimes forgetting to quote the source).

Yesterday, I had enough and decided to respond.

A while ago someone working for an IT-focused media site approached me with a short list of high-level questions. Not sure when they’ll publish the answers, so here they are in case you might find them interesting:

What can enterprises do to ensure that their infrastructure is ready for next-gen networking technology implementations emerging in the next decade?

Next-generation networks will probably rely on existing architectures and forwarding mechanisms, while being significantly more uniform and heavily automated.

A few days ago I stumbled upon an interesting blog post by my friend J Metz in my RSS feeds. As with all blog posts published on Cisco’s web site, all I got in the feed was a teaser (I know, I shouldn’t complain, I’m doing the same ;), but when I wanted to read more, I was greeted with a cryptic 404 (not even a fancy page full of images saying “we can’t find what you’re looking for).

What happens when network engineers with strong programming background and focus on open source tools have to implement network automation in a multi-vendor network? Instead of complaining or ranting about the stupidities of traditional networking vendors and CLI they write an abstraction layer that allows them to treat all their devices in the same way and immediately open-source it.

One of my readers wondered whether one still needs traditional firewalls in microsegmented environments like VMware NSX.

As always, it depends.

The proponents of microsegmentation are quick to explain how the per-VM-NIC traffic filtering functionality replaces the traditional role of subnets as security zones, often concluding that “you can deploy as many tenants as you wish in a flat network, and use VM NIC firewall to isolate them.”

The first batch of the latest materials for my Designing Scalable Web Applications course have been published on my free content web site.

During the Cumulus Linux presentation Dinesh Dutt had at Data Center Fabrics webinar, someone asked an unexpected question: “Do you have In-Service Software Upgrade (ISSU) on Cumulus Linux” and we both went like “What? Why?”

Dinesh is an honest engineer and answered: “No, we don’t do it” with absolutely no hesitation, but we both kept wondering, “Why exactly would you want to do that?”

Network Address Translation (NAT) is one of those stateful services that’s almost impossible to scale out, because you have to distribute the state of the service (NAT mappings) across all potential ingress and egress points.

Midokura implemented distributed stateful services architecture in their Midonet product, but faced severe scalability challenges, which they claim to have solved with more intelligent state distribution.

Packet Pushers podcast is a constant source of inspiration for my blog posts. Recently I stumbled upon Rob Sherwood’s explanation of how they package Big Cloud Fabric:

It’s a vertically integrated solution, from Switch Light OS to our SDN controller and Big Cloud Fabric application.

Really? What happened to openness and disaggregation?

Reinventing the wheels makes little sense. Implementing old solutions with new tools might be in the same category, but at least it shows you the power and shortcomings of the new tools.

Building a VLAN-aware bridge in OpenFlow is thus a mandatory case study, and as you’ll see in the video from the OpenFlow Deep Dive webinar, it’s not as easy as it looks. For more details, watch the whole OpenFlow webinar (6 hours of in-depth videos), which you also get by buying Advanced SDN Training or ipSpace.net subscription.