Although this post is nearly a year old, it is still gold. Ken Duda, the CTO of Arista Networks described five lessons learned along the way of supporting Enterprise Operating System (EOS), the Linux-based switching operating system. They are listed as:
Definitely worth a read.
Earlier this week, the world’s leading drugmaker Johnson and Johnson (J & J) announced that it would join hands with rival GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to develop a vaccine to combat the Ebola disease. Apparently, both companies had been working on a vaccine, but now they are collaborating.
Yawn. Tech companies have been doing that for decades, since the early days of Linux. It’s called Open Source, people. And it’s a beautiful thing. When competitors get together to come up with solutions, obviously much of it is for publicity, but much good does come out of it. The world would be a much better place if other major corporations would follow suit for a change, and come up with ideas together to solve real world problems.
This week Network World laid out some details of the work the IEEE group, the Ethernet Alliance, is doing with respect to new data rates. As mentioned in this blog post, while there are 5 shipping speeds of Ethernet (100 Mbps, 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 40 Gbps, and 100 Gbps), there are 5 new speeds that are currently being worked on (2.5 Gbps, 5 Gbps, 25 Gbps, 50 Gbps, and 400 Gbps). The last time Ethernet got this sexy was when promiscuous mode was introduced.
Some of the drivers for these new speeds are adoption rates of the older speeds. As detailed in the July 2014 IEEE Call for Interest , while the initial adoption for 10G, 40G, and 100G was in 2004, 2012, and 2015 (anticipated) respectively, because these speeds are turning out to be cost prohibitive, the transition to higher speeds has been slower than previously forecasted. For example, the 1G -> 10G transition has repeatedly moved out (from 2012 to 2014 to 2016 now). This creates a window where new technology can provide the higher port speed at lower cost. So, as an example, the SFP+ technology can be leveraged in 25 Gbps as a single lane and 50 Gbps as two lanes.
The 2.5 and 5 Gbps speeds (known as MGBASE-T) address the growing demands of BYOD in campus networks. Many of the newer APs nowadays ship with 802.11ac. This Wifi standard will have a second wave in 2015 whereby the uplinks (or backhauls) between the APs and the access switches will be multi-gigabit rates. The key requirement here is to be able to reuse the existing cabling infrastructure. So Cat 5e and Cat 6 would still be supported over the usual 100 meters and there would be no need to rip and replace cables.
Ethernet has come a long way since the days of the 2.94 Mbps flavor that Bob Metcalfe had invented. There is very little in common between the types of Ethernet standards we have today from the IEEE and the original specification. One thing that is common, however, is the ability to evolve according to market needs, from single-pair vehicular Ethernet to four-pair PoE and in between. More on this in another post.
Recently news broke out about Windows Server introducing support for Docker. This is significant because the ultra hot company had previously only been supported on Linux (and Azure). One of the major complaints about it was the lack of flexibility when it came to host operating system support. With this news Microsoft also announces that it will be contributing to Docker’s open source APIs. What a remarkable change from a company that epitomized closed systems.
I’m excited to announce today that Microsoft is partnering with Docker, Inc to enable great container-based development experiences on Linux, Windows Server and Microsoft Azure. Docker is an open platform that enables developers and administrators to build, ship, and run distributed applications. Consisting of Docker Engine, a lightweight runtime and packaging tool, and Docker Hub, a cloud service for sharing applications and automating workflows, Docker enables apps to be quickly assembled from components and eliminates the friction between development, QA, and production environments. Earlier this year, Microsoft released support for Docker containers with Linux on Azure. This support integrates with the Azure VM agent extensibility model and Azure command-line tools, and makes it easy to deploy the latest and greatest Docker Engine in Azure VMs and then deploy Docker based images within them. – Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of the Microsoft Cloud and Enterprise group.
Ivan Pepeljnak’s makes an important point in his webinar on Cloud Computing Networking: as a customer, understand the QoS and SLA Guarantees that your public cloud provider offers. Whatever Tenant A does should not impact the performance of Tenant B. At a very minimum, there should be some guarantees on bandwidth, IO operations, and CPU cycles for every tenant. You don’t want to have the noisy neighbor who hogs up resources that leaves you no choice but to reboot your VM with the hope of getting reassigned to a physical server with less load. An AWS Small Instance is an example of an environment where you might encounter this scenario.
Musings on How to Build Modern Applications in the Cloud and Onprem
Umair Hoodbhoy - Multi-Cloud, Networking, and Kubernetes 