A summary of High Speed Ethernet ASICs

There is a lot going on in the field of the highest speed network ASICs. These are focused…

What I’ve learned about scaling OSPF in Datacenters

The Effect of Switch Port Count in Clos Topology

Lessons from load balancers and multicast

In general I dislike operating load balancers and IP multicast: I’m a network engineer. Load balancers and IP multicast are very complicated, have a large amount of state, and they are hard to understand and debug. They lead to a lot of operational issues…

Implementing IP LPM in Pandas

Longest Prefix Match (LPM) is the algorithm used in IP networks to forward packets. The algorithm is used…

Network Validation

What does Network Validation mean practically? Of course, there’s no official description of what it means, but we can talk about what we would like it to mean so that it can be useful. What we are trying to get to is a network that is trustworthy. If the business or organization using the…

Get the Network Out of the Way

Getting the network out of the way has been very important for me in my thinking about networks, and is an easy way to help talk about a bunch of very important concepts, decisions, and arguments. This can sound trite, obvious, or insulting. In this post I’ll try to describe…