The Elegant Network

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…

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…

Network Simulation for Design Validation using Vagrant on Cloud Computing

Simulation for Design…

Gaining Intuition with Network Designs

I care a lot about network design. I think it’s too hard to design networks well and I think that all the tools necessary to do it well don’t exist. At least I haven’t seen them. The lack of tools affects the biggest networks, but it affects all networks. I am…

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…

Simplifying networks (and lessons in Engineering tradeoffs)

You’ve probably heard people say that networks are too complex and need to be made simpler. I certainly believe that. I think people build too complicated networks and not enough consider how hard it will be to operate those…