Software Gone Wild by ipSpace.net

In autumn 2016 I embarked on a quest to figure out how TCP really works and whether big buffers in data center switches make sense. One of the obvious stops on this journey was a chat with Thomas Graf, Linux Core Team member and a founding member of the Cilium project . Read more …

Last year Cisco launched a new series of Nexus 9000 switches with table sizes that didn’t match any of the known merchant silicon ASICs. It was obvious they had to be using their own silicon – the CloudScale ASIC. Lukas Krattiger was kind enough to describe some of the details last November, resulting in Episode 73 of Software Gone Wild . For even more details, watch the Cisco Nexus 9000 Architect...

In 2013, large-scale cloud providers and ISPs decided they had enough of the glacial IETF process of generating YANG models used to describe device configuration and started OpenConfig – a customer-only initiative that quickly created data models covering typical use cases of the founding members (aka “What Does Google Need”). Read more …

When I recorded the first podcast with Thomas Graf we both found it so much fun that we decided to do it again. Thomas had attended the NetDev 1.2 conference so when we met in November 2016 we warmed up with What’s NetDev and then started discussing the hot new networking stuff being added to Linux kernel: Read more …

A while ago I decided it's time to figure out whether it's better to drop or to delay TCP packets , and quickly figured out you get 12 opinions (usually with no real arguments supporting them) if you ask 10 people. Fortunately, I know someone who deals with TCP performance for living, and Juho Snellman was kind enough to agree to record another podcast. Update 2017-03-31: Added More information se...

From the moment Cisco and VMware announced VXLAN some networking engineers complained that they'd lose visibility into the end-to-end path. It took a long while, but finally the troubleshooting tools started appearing in VXLAN environment: NVO3 working group defined Fault Managemnet framework for overlay networks and Cisco implemented at least parts of it in recent Nexus OS releases. You'll find m...

In Software Gone Wild Episode 52 Katerina Barone-Adesi explained how Igalia implemented 4-over-6 tunnel termination (lwAFTR) with Snabb Switch . Their solution focused on very fast data plane and had no real control plane. No problem – there are plenty of stable control planes on the market, all we need is some glue. Read more …

A few weeks ago Matt Oswalt wrote an interesting blog post on principles of automation , and we quickly agreed it’s a nice starting point for a podcast episode. In the meantime Matt moved to StackStorm team so that became the second focus of our chat… and then we figured out it would be great to bring in Matt Stone (the hero of Episode 13 ). Read more …

During our summer team-building podcast we agreed it would be fun to record a few episodes along the “ how do I become a programmer ” theme and figured out that Elisa Jasinska would be a perfect first candidate. A few weeks ago we finally got together and started our chat with campfire stories remembering how we got started with networking and programming. Read more …

We did a podcast describing NAPALM , an open-source multi-vendor abstraction library, a while ago, and as the project made significant progress in the meantime, it was time for a short update. NAPALM started as a library that abstracted the intricacies of network device configuration management . Initially it supported configuration replace and merge; in the meantime, they added support for diffs...

We did several podcasts describing how one could get stellar packet forwarding performance on x86 servers reimplementing the whole forwarding stack outside of kernel ( Snabb Switch ) or bypassing the Linux kernel and moving the packet processing into userspace ( PF_Ring ). Now let’s see if it’s possible to improve the Linux kernel forwarding performance. Thomas Graf , one of the authors of Cilium...

In March 2016 my friend Matt Oswalt announced a distributed network testing framework that he used for validation in his network automation / continuous integration projects. Initial tests included ping and DNS probes, and he added HTTP testing in May 2016. The project continues to grow (and already got its own Github and documentation page) and Matt was kind enough to share the news and future pl...

When LinkedIn announced their Project Falco I knew exactly what one of my future Software Gone Wild podcasts would be: a chat with Russ White (Mr. CCDE, now network architect @ LinkedIn). It took us a long while (and then the summer break intervened) but I finally got it published: Episode 62 is waiting for you. Listen to the podcast

Does it make sense to run OpenStack on top of VMware infrastructure? How well does NSX work as a Neutron plug-in? Marcos Hernandez answered these questions (and a lot of others) in the Episode 61 of Software Gone Wild (admittedly after a short marketing pitch in the first 10 minutes). Listen to the podcast

Software Gone Wild podcast is well into its toddler years and it was time for a teambuilding exercise . Just kidding – we wanted to test new tools and decided to discuss the vacation experiences and podcast ideas while doing that. On a more serious note: we’re always looking for cool projects, implementations and ideas. Contact us at podcast (-the weird sign-) ipspace.net. Listen to the podcast

A few days after I published a blog post arguing that most service providers cannot possibly copy Google’s ideas Giacomo Bernardi wrote a comment saying “ well, w e managed to build our own gear. ” Initially I thought they built their own Linux distribution on top of x86 server, but what Giacomo Bernardi described in Episode 59 of Software Gone Wild goes way beyond that: Read more …

A while ago Big Switch Networks engineers realized there’s a cool use case for their tap aggregation application (Big Tap Monitoring Fabric) – an intelligent patch panel traffic steering solution used as security tool chaining infrastructure in DMZ… and thus the Big Chain was born. Curious how their solution works? Listen to Episode 58 of Software Gone Wild with Andy Shaw and Sandip Shah. Listen t...

A few weeks after I published Docker Networking podcast, Brent Salisbury sent me an email saying “hey, we have experimental Macvlan and Ipvlan support for Docker ” – a great topic for another podcast. It took a while to get the stars aligned, but finally we got Brent, Madhu Venugopal, John Willis and Nick Buraglio on the same Skype call resulting in Episode 57 of Software Gone Wild . Listen to the...

The Model-driven Networking seems to be another buzzword riding on top of the SDN wave. What exactly is it, how is it supposed to work, will it be really vendor-independent, and has anyone implemented it? I tried to get some answers to these questions from Jeff Tantsura, chair of IETF Routing Area Working Group, in Episode 55 of Software Gone Wild . Read more …

After listening to Open-Source Network Engineer Toolbox Nick Buraglio sent me an email saying “ we should do another podcast on open-source network management tools …” and so we did. In Episode 56 of Software Gone Wild Nick, Elisa Jasinska and myself discussed a whole range of network management challenges and open-source tools you can use to address them. Read more …

A few months ago I met a number of great engineers from Avaya and they explained to me how they creatively use Shortest Path Bridging (SPB) to create layer-2, layer-3, L2VPN, L3VPN and even IP Multicast fabrics – it was clearly time for another deep dive into SPB. It took me a while to meet again with Roger Lapuh , but finally we started exploring the intricacies of SPB, and even compared it to MP...

A while ago Christer Swartz explained how a Palo Alto firewall integrates with VMware NSX . In the meantime, Palo Alto announced integration with Cisco ACI and OpenStack, and it was time for another podcast with Christer deep-diving into the technical details of these integrations. Spoiler: It’s not OpFlex. For more details, listen to Episode 53 of Software Gone Wild Listen to the podcast

Imagine you want to have an IPv6-only access network and transport residual IPv4 traffic tunneled across it. Sounds great, but you need to terminate those tunnels and encapsulate/decapsulate IPv4 traffic at multi-gigabit rate. There are plenty of reassuringly-expensive hardware solutions that can do that, or you could work with really smart people and get software-based solution that can do 20 Gbp...

Imagine you get a routing outage in your network resulting in three minutes of traffic blackholing. After a few tense minutes it goes away and life is good, but you desperately want to know what went wrong. Can you figure it out? Well, you could if you were using PacketDesign tools, as Cengiz Alaettinoglu explained on Episode 51 of Software Gone Wild . Listen to the podcast

A few months ago VMware launched NSX version 6.2, and I asked my friend Anthony Burke to tell us more about the new features. Not surprisingly, we quickly started talking about troubleshooting, routing problems, and finished with route-health-injection done with a Python script. The end result: Episode 50 of Software Gone Wild . Enjoy! Listen to the podcast