A Network Artist left a lengthy comment on my Brief History of VMware NSX blog post. He raised a number of interesting topics, so I decided to write my replies as a separate blog post.

Using Geneve is an interesting choice to be made and while the approach has it’s own Pros and Cons, I would like to stick to VXLAN if I were to recommend to someone for few good reasons.

The main reason I see for NSX-T using Geneve instead of VXLAN is the need for additional header fields to carry metadata around, and to implement Network Services Header (NSH) for east-west service insertion.

Imagine you want to create a Jinja2 report that includes only a select subset of elements of a data structure… and want to have header, footer, and element count in that report.

Traditionally we’d solve that challenge with an extra variable, but as Jinja2 variables don’t survive loop termination, the code to do that in Jinja2 gets exceedingly convoluted.

Fortunately, Jinja2 provides a better way: using a conditional expression to select the elements you want to iterate over.

A friend of mine sent me a short message including…

There is a number of products that recently arrived or are coming to market using group encryption systems for IP networks, but are (understandably) not using IPsec.

… which triggered an old itch of mine caused by the “We don’t need no IETF standards, code is king” stupidity.

During the last Tech Field Day Extra @ CLEUR, one of the fellow delegates asked me about my opinion on technology X (don’t remember the details, it was probably one of those over-hyped four-letter technologies). As usual, I started explaining the drawbacks, and he quickly stopped me with a totally unexpected question: “Why do you always tend to be so negative?”

That question has been haunting me for months… and here are a few potential answers I came up with.

I don’t remember who pointed me to the excellent How Complex Systems Fail document. It’s almost like RFC1925 – I could quote it all day long, and anyone dealing with large mission-critical distributed systems (hint: networks) should read it once a day ;))

Enjoy!

Years ago Dan Hughes wrote a great blog post explaining how expensive TCP is. His web site is long gone, but I managed to grab the blog post before it disappeared and he kindly allowed me to republish it.

If you ask a CIO which part of their infrastructure costs them the most, I’m sure they’ll mention power, cooling, server hardware, support costs, getting the right people and all the usual answers. I’d argue one the the biggest costs is TCP, or more accurately badly implemented TCP.

One of my subscribers was interested in trying out whitebox solutions. He wrote:

What open source/whitebox software/hardware should I look at if I wanted to build a leaf-and-spine VXLAN/EVPN/BGP data center.

I don’t think you can get a fully-open-source solution because the ASIC manufacturers hide their SDK behind a mountain of NDAs (that strategy must make perfect sense – after all, it generated such awesome PR for NVIDIA). Anyway, the closest you can get (AFAIK) if you're a mere mortal is Cumulus Linux, and you just choose any whitebox hardware off their Hardware Compatibility List.

Seth Godin published an interesting article on the value of hard work (and what hard work really is). Go and read it first, then we’ll translate it into networking terms.

Already back? Good, let’s go.

The first worker is a traditional networking technician (it wouldn’t be fair to call him an engineer) – he’s busy configuring VLANs, ACLs, firewall rules… the whole day.

Everyone is talking about FRRouting suite these days, while hidden somewhere in the background OpenBGPD has been making continuous progress for years. Interestingly, OpenBGPD project was started for the same reason FRR was forked - developers were unhappy with Zebra or Quagga routing suite and decided to fix it.

We discussed the history of OpenBGPD, its current deployments and future plans with Claudio Jeker, one of the main OpenBGPD developers, in Episode 106 of Software Gone Wild.

You probably heard me say “networking engineer encountering a public cloud feels like Alice in Wonderland” - packet forwarding works in a different way in every public cloud, subnets are a mix between routed interfaces and VRFs, you cannot change IP addresses without involving the orchestration system…

We covered the networking aspects of Amazon Web Services and Azure in our cloud webinars, but you might need a bigger picture:

When I first met Cumulus Networks engineers (during NFD9) their focus on simplifying switch configurations totally delighted me (video).

After solving the BGP configuration challenge (could you imagine configuring BGP in a leaf-and-spine fabric with just a few commands in 2015), they did the same thing with EVPN configuration, where they decided to implement the simplest possible design (EBGP-only fabric running EBGP EVPN sessions on leaf-to-spine links), resulting in another round of configuration simplicity.

I got interesting feedback from one of my readers after publishing my REST API Is Not Transactional blog post:

One would think a transactional REST interface wouldn’t be too difficult to implement. Using HTTP1/1, it is possible to multiplex several REST calls into one connection to a specific server. The first call then is a request for start a transaction, returning a transaction ID, to be used in subsequent calls. Since we’re not primarily interested in the massive scalability of stateless REST calls, all the REST calls will be handled by the same frontend. Obviously the last call would be a commit.

I wouldn’t count on HTTP pipelining to keep all requests in one HTTP session (mixing too many layers in a stack never ends well) but we wouldn’t need it anyway the moment we’d have a transaction ID which would be identical to session ID (or session cookie) traditional web apps use.

In the Three Paths of Enterprise IT part of Business Aspects of Networking webinar I covered the traditional networking vendor landscape. Let’s try to do the same for SD-WAN.

It’s clear that we had two types of SD-WAN vendors:

A few months ago Johannes Weber sent me a short email saying “hey, I plan to write a few NTP posts” and I replied “well, ping me when you have something ready”.

In the meantime he wrote a veritable NTP bible - a series of NTP-related blog posts covering everything from Why Should I Run My Own NTP Servers to authentication, security and monitoring - definitely a MUST READ if you care about knowing what time it is.

Listening to (some) industry evangelists you would believe that there’s no future in being a networking engineer. After all, all workloads will move into the cloud, and all clients will connect through a universal 5G network… but even if that utopia eventually comes true, you can’t get away from the laws of physics (and the need networking infrastructure).

TL&DR: our new online course will help you master the shiny new world. You can register right now or keep reading ;)