Category: worth reading

New: Network Infrastructure as Code Resources

While I was developing Network Automation Concepts webinar and the network automation online course, I wrote numerous blog posts on the Network Infrastructure as Code (NIaC) concepts, challenges, implementation details, tools, and sample solutions.

In March 2023 I collected these blog posts into a dedicated NIaC resources page that also includes links to webinars, sample network automation solutions, and relevant GitHub repositories.

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Worth Reading: Was MPLS TE Worth the Effort?

Bruce Davie continues documenting the tradeoffs we had to make in networking, this time with Was MPLS Traffic Engineering Worthwhile? I found this bit particularly familiar:

It wasn’t hard to make a theoretical argument that MPLS-TE could improve network performance and average link utilization, by moving traffic from congested links to uncongested ones. The hard part was proving that it would actually do a better job in practice than the more traditional methods such as using link weights and multipath routing to achieve the same ends.

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New: High Availability Clusters in Networking

Years ago I loved ranting about the stupidities of building stretched VLANs to run high-availability network services clusters with two nodes (be it firewalls, load balancers, or data center switches with centralized control plane) across multiple sites.

I collected pointers to those blog posts and other ipSpace.net HA cluster resources on the new High Availability Service Clusters page.

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Worth Reading: The Dangers of Knowing Everything

Another interesting take on ChatGPT in networking, this time by Tom Hollingsworth in The Dangers of Knowing Everything:

In a way, ChatGPT is like a salesperson. No matter what you ask it the answer is always yes, even if it has to make something up to answer the question.

To paraphrase an old joke: It’s not that ChatGPT is lying. It’s just that what it knows isn’t necessarily true. See also: the difference between bullshit and lies.

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Worth Reading: The War on Expertise

Jeff McLaughlin published an excellent blog post perfectly describing what we’ve been experiencing for decades: the war on expertise.

On one hand, the “business owners” force us to build complex stuff because they think they know better, on the other they blame people who know how to do it for the complex stuff that happens as the result of their requirements:

I am saying that we need to stop blaming complexity on those who manage to understand it.

Enjoy!

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Worth Reading: On ChatGPT

One of the best descriptions of what ChatGPT does and what it cannot do I found so far comes from an ancient and military historian. The what is ChatGPT and what is an essay parts are a must-read, the preparing to be disrupted conclusion is pure gold:

I do think there are classrooms that will be disrupted by ChatGPT, but those are classrooms where something is already broken.

I can’t help but think of the never-ending brouhaha about exam brain dumps.

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MUST READ: Machine Learning for Network and Cloud Engineers

Javier Antich, the author of the fantastic AI/ML in Networking webinar, spent years writing the Machine Learning for Network and Cloud Engineers book that is now available in paperback and Kindle format.

I’ve seen a final draft of the book and it’s definitely worth reading. You should also invest some time into testing the scenarios Javier created. Here’s what I wrote in the foreword:


Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been around for decades. It was one of the exciting emerging (and overhyped) topics when I attended university in the late 1980s. Like today, the hype failed to deliver, resulting in long, long AI winter.

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Real-Life Not-Exactly-Networking AI Use Case

I get several emails every week1 from people I never heard of telling me what a wonderful job they could do writing guest blog posts on a range of topics of interest to my audience.

I’m positive you must be pretty intelligent to be a successful scammer, so I’m sure the good ones are using ChatGPT to generate the “unique” content they’re promising. I felt it was high time to return the favor.

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Response: Nothing Works (in Enterprise IT)

Dmitry Perets left a thoughtful comment on my Nothing Works blog post describing why enterprise IT might be even worse than consumer world.

I think another reason for the “Nothing Works” world is that the only true Management Plane separation that exists in our industry is that of the real “human” management. In the medium/large enterprises they (and their interests, KPIs and so on) are very much separated from the technical workforce. And increasingly so, because today the technical workforce might not even be the employees of the same enterprise. They are likely to come from some IT consultancy outsource – degree of separation which makes a true SDN evangelist envious.

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