This post SHOULD have been published on April 1st, but I need to define the terminology for another upcoming post, so here it is ;)

RFC 2119 defines polite words to use when something really shouldn’t be done. Some network designs I see deserve more colorful terminology.

2014-11-02: Updated with reference to RFC 6919 (/HT to @LapTop006)

A year ago Matthew Stone first heard about Cumulus Linux when I ranted about it on a Packet Pushers podcast (which only proves that any publicity is good publicity even though some people thought otherwise at that time), and when his cloud service provider company started selecting ToR switches he considered Cumulus together with Cisco and Arista… and chose Cumulus.

In the third part of MPLS Tech Talks, we focused on the role of label distribution protocol (LDP) and its operation in frame-mode MPLS.

More than a year ago I wrote a response to a comment Pascal wrote on my Predicting the IPv6 BGP table size blog post. I recently rediscovered it and figured out that it’s (unfortunately) as relevant as it was almost 18 months ago.

Other people have realized we have this problem in the meantime, and are still being told to stop yammering because the problem is not real. Let’s see what happens in a few years.

Every time I’m running a classroom version of my Designing the Cloud Infrastructure workshop, I start with a simple question: “Who has more than 2000 VMs or bare-metal servers in the data center?”

I might see three hands on a good day; 90-95% of the audience have smaller data centers… and some of them get disappointed when I tell them they don’t need more than two ToR switches in their data center.

During his Network Programmability 101 webinar Matt Oswalt described three phases of network programmability. The first level in the pyramid of programmable awesomeness (his words, not mine) is described in today’s video.

The discussion in the comments to my LAG versus ECMP post took a totally unexpected turn when someone mentioned BFD failure detection over port channels (link aggregation groups – LAGs).

What’s the big deal?

Want to know what the difference between Virtual Chassis and Virtual Chassis Fabric is? How Local Link Bias works? How ISSU on QFX 5100 works even though the box doesn’t have two supervisor boards? You’ll find answers to all these questions in new videos describing Juniper data center switches.

People talking about long-distance workload mobility and cloudbursting often forget the physical reality documented in the fallacies of distributed computing. Today we’ll focus on bandwidth, in a follow-up blog post we’ll deal with its ugly cousin latency.

TL&DR summary: If you plan to spread application components across the network without understanding their network requirements, you’ll get the results you deserve.

Several SDN solutions that coexist with the traditional control- and data planes instead of ripping them out and replacing them with the new awesomesauce use BGP to modify the network’s forwarding behavior.

Border6 decided to turn that concept into a commercial product that we dissected in Episode 12 of Software Gone Wild podcast.

Enjoy the show (this time in video format).