Todd Hoff (of the HighScalability fame) sent me a link to an interesting video describing load-balancing mechanisms used at Google and how they evolved over time.

If the rest of the blog post feels like Latin, you SHOULD watch the Load Balancing and Scale-Out Application Architecture webinar.

The beginning of the story resembles traditional enterprise solutions:

Stumbled upon a hilarious description of challenges encountered when trying to scale distributed systems (cluster of controllers running centralized control plane comes to mind).

It starts with “If someone tells you that scaling out a distributed system is easy they are either lying or drunk, and possibly both,” and gets better and better. Enjoy!

In his The Case for Hybrids blog post Mat Mathews described the Hotel California effect of public clouds as: “One of the most oft mentioned issues with public cloud is the difficulty in getting out.” Once you start relying on cloud provider APIs to provide DNS, load balancing, CDN, content hosting, security groups, and a plethora of other services, it’s impossible to get out.

Interestingly, the side effects of public cloud deployments extend into the realm of application programming, as I was surprised to find out during one of my Expert Express engagements.

In my presentation @ SDN Meetup in Stockholm, I tried to answer a simple question: “Should I really program my network?” and obviously had to start with an even simpler one: “What is SDN?”

The video of the presentation is already available on YouTube, and you can watch the slides on my content web site.

Also, make sure you watch other presentations from that event, particularly David Barroso’s SDN Internet Router.

One of my readers is struggling with the aftermath of marketing gimmicks:

We will implement a new network soon, and we're discussing P-routers versus regular routers versus switches. I'm looking for arguments to go one way or the other.

TL&DR: there’s no difference between router and L3 switch.

Someone recently sent me this question:

Is it possible to prepend one IP address from a public IPv4 segment?

I don’t want to know what crazy stunt this engineer was forced to pull off, but just in case you land in a similar quandary here’s how you shoelace yourself out of it.

A third of my readers are celebrating Thanksgiving today, and I’d like to use the opportunity to say what I always wanted to say but somehow never got to it. Let’s make it short: Thank you! Without you, there would be no ipSpace.net.

It was a dark stormy autumn night and three networking engineers had nothing better to do than ponder the heavy topics of transactional consistency in a distributed SDN environment in Episode 16 of Software Gone Wild podcast.

Here are a few of the topics that crossed our minds:

After discussing the basics of MPLS and LDP in our chat, Seamus Gilchrist and myself focused on a concept that perplexes many networking engineers entering the MPLS world: the relationship between Forward Equivalence Classes (FEC), LDP and BGP.

While the industry press deliberates the disaggregation of Arista and Cisco, and Juniper’s new CEO, Juniper launched a virtual version of its vMX router, which is supposed to have up to 160 Gbps of throughput (as compared to 10 Gbps offered by Vyatta 5600 and Cisco CSR). Can Juniper really deliver on that promise?