One of my readers wondered how long my NFV webinar is supposed to take (and I forgot to add that information to my web site), so he sent me this question: “How long is this webinar? An hour? Two hours? If it says "webinar" does that imply a 60 minute duration, so I shouldn't ask?”

Short answer: live webinar sessions usually take between 90 minutes and 2 hours depending on the breadth of the topic, however…

With the advent of layer-3 leaf-and-spine data center fabrics, it became (almost) possible to build pure layer-3-only data center networks… if only the networking vendors would do the very last step and make every server-to-ToR interface a layer-3 interface. Cumulus decided to do just that.

One of my readers sent me a heartfelt email that teleported me 35 years down the memory lane. He wrote:

I only recently stumbled upon your blog and, well, it hurt. It's incredible the amount of topics you are able to talk about extensively and how you can dissect and find interesting stuff in even the most basic concepts.

May I humble ask how on earth can you know all of the things you know, with such attention to detail? Have you been gifted with an excellent memory, magical diet, or is it just magic?

Short answer: hard work and compound interest.

A few weeks ago I decided to join the SDN group on LinkedIn and quickly discovered the biggest problem of SDN – many people, who try to authoritatively talk about it, have no idea what they’re talking about. Here’s a gem (coming from a “network architect”) I found in one of the discussions:

The SDN local controller can punt across to remote datacenters using not only IP, but even UDP over MPLS

Do I have to explain how misguided that statement is?

Whenever you talk to a new startup evaluating whether you’d consider including their products in your network, don’t forget to ask them a fundamental question: “does your product support IPv6?”

If they reply “Nobody has ever asked for it”, it’s time to turn around and run away.

The OSCON keynote by Simon Wardley explains a number of things, including (lack of) enterprise IPv6 adoption. Enjoy!

In May 2015 I invited Dinesh Dutt to talk about Cumulus Linux and its typical use cases on an update session of the Data Center Fabrics Architecture webinar.

As expected, he started with the big picture: what are Cumulus Networks and Cumulus Linux all about?

It’s hard to visit an IT journal web site without stumbling upon an SDN fairy tale. Here’s another one:

The idea is to cut away the manual process of setting up new firewalls, load balancers and other network appliances, and instead open the door to provisioning a new network infrastructure within a few minutes.

And why exactly is it that you can’t do that today?

35 years ago, mainframes, single-protocol networks (be it SNA or DECnet), and centralized architectures that would make hard-core SDN evangelists gloat with unbridled pride were all the rage. If you’re old enough to remember IBM SNA, you know what I’m talking about.

A few years later, everything changed.

I published the second part of my Designing Scalable Web Applications course on my free content web site.

These presentations focus more on the application-level technologies (client- and server side), but I’m positive you’ll find some useful content in the caching and scale-out applications with load balancing sections.