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packetqueue.net

Musings on computer stuff, and things... and other stuff.

February 28, 2014 Uncategorized

Choice or the Illusion of Choice

Read­ing Time: 1 minute

I recent­ly wrote an arti­cle for searchS­DN at TechTar­get on the sub­ject of choice in the SDN mar­kets.  The gist of the arti­cle was that from a mar­ket­ing per­spec­tive one of the most effec­tive strate­gies in a clut­tered mar­ket is to reduce the con­sumer’s per­ceived choice to a bina­ry state.  It hap­pens all the time, and I used the exam­ple of Coke vs. Pep­si to illus­trate this.  My recent trav­els and ven­dor meet­ings as a del­e­gate to Net­work­ing Field Day 7 only served to solid­i­fy my think­ing in this area, with so many cut­ting edge and estab­lished ven­dors alike push­ing oft com­pet­ing visions for the future of net­work­ing.  I’ll be writ­ing more about Bro­cade, Plexxi, Avaya, and Pluribus Net­works in speci­fici­ty soon, but for now check out my thoughts on the illu­sion of choice and let me know what you think.

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February 25, 2014 Uncategorized

On Buggy Whips and Restlessness

Read­ing Time: 3 min­utes

Two roads diverged in a yel­low wood,
And sor­ry I could not trav­el both
And be one trav­el­er, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the under­growth;

Then took the oth­er, as just as fair,
And hav­ing per­haps the bet­ter claim,
Because it was grassy and want­ed wear;
Though as for that the pass­ing there
Had worn them real­ly about the same,

And both that morn­ing equal­ly lay
In leaves no step had trod­den black.
Oh, I kept the first for anoth­er day!
Yet know­ing how way leads on to way,
I doubt­ed if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Some­where ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less trav­eled by,
And that has made all the dif­fer­ence.

“The Road Not Tak­en” –Robert Frost

It is an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion that when most ear­ly Eng­lish or Lit­er­a­ture majors first read that famous poem by Robert Frost, they ana­lyze the choice the pro­tag­o­nist makes as a pos­i­tive one.  In fact, the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of the choice are nev­er allud­ed to or men­tioned.  It is sim­ply that there was a choice to be made, and while many peo­ple chose one path, the pro­tag­o­nist took a dif­fer­ent one—for bet­ter or for worse—and that affect­ed the out­come of his or her life.  Recent­ly, I made such a choice myself.

I have writ­ten, at times over the years, about the per­ils of IT Man­age­ment.  I have also writ­ten about the var­i­ous bureau­crat­ic idio­syn­crasies of work­ing in the enter­prise space, espe­cial­ly at a multi­na­tion­al defense con­trac­tor.  And most recent­ly, I have writ­ten about my over­all dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the whole lot of it.  Now I am doing some­thing about it.

Yes­ter­day, I resigned my posi­tion as IT Direc­tor of the com­pa­ny I have worked at for near­ly eight years and accept­ed an offer to get back out into the world and change my view for a while.  Begin­ning March 17th, I’ll be a part of the team at World Wide Tech­nol­o­gy (WWT) in a con­sult­ing engi­neer­ing role.  It’s been a tough deci­sion in a lot of ways, but I think it’s the right one for a cou­ple of rea­sons.

The world of IT is chang­ing on all fronts, it’s chang­ing rapid­ly, and I need to be a part of that change. My recent trip to San Jose for Net­work Field Day 7 (a part of the broad­er Tech Field Day orga­ni­za­tion, and some­thing I’ll be writ­ing about more soon) real­ly burned that into my mind, but I’d been rest­less for a while.  Rapid change is some­thing that you have to be in a posi­tion to har­ness and to ben­e­fit from, and the fact is that despite my title and acco­lades, I haven’t been where I need to be for long time.

Sure, I have had incred­i­ble oppor­tu­ni­ties in the last few years, per­son­al­ly knock­ing off a list of accom­plish­ments that I can be proud of: mov­ing to a ful­ly dual-stacked IPv4/v6 envi­ron­ment; learn­ing and per­form­ing a full scale Flex­Pod build-out; restruc­tur­ing the entire world-wide rout­ing and switch­ing infra­struc­ture in a large envi­ron­ment; being at the fore­front of adopt­ing full-scale vir­tu­al­iza­tion begin­ning back in 2005; and build­ing up a com­plete IT team from scratch.  But now that we’re there, and most things are fixed and run­ning smooth­ly, we’re in a main­te­nance mode—there’s no more chal­lenge to be had, noth­ing on the hori­zon, and I’m not a patient per­son.

The real­i­ty is, if you’re not at a com­pa­ny where IT is core to the busi­ness mod­el, a lot of the tech­nol­o­gy out in the world is sim­ply not some­thing you’ll get to see, touch, or know about bar­ring the stan­dard thing all of us in the indus­try do, which is to read and study on our own time. And if you’re in an indus­try based around tech­nol­o­gy that hasn’t changed appre­cia­bly in over 60 years, it can feel at times like work­ing for the prover­bial bug­gy-whip man­u­fac­tur­er and watch­ing the new horse­less car­riages rolling by your win­dow.

At the end of the day, I don’t need to have a team to be hap­py.  I don’t have to have a title to feed my ego.  What I real­ly need is to be involved.  I need to be involved in shap­ing the future, in chang­ing the sta­tus quo, in mov­ing the ball for­ward against a wall of stag­na­tion and staid old polit­i­cal boss­es who have no inter­est in change.  Time will tell if this move gets me clos­er or fur­ther away from that goal, but at this point, today, for me, it’s Frost’s road less trav­eled and I’m going to see where it leads.

 

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February 24, 2014 Uncategorized

Cisco Modeling Labs (CML)

Read­ing Time: 1 minute

The prod­uct for­mer­ly known as VIRL has been rebrand­ed and is slat­ed for release in the first half of 2014. My mon­ey is on it being released just pri­or to, or at, Cis­co Live in May. It is an intrigu­ing prod­uct that I have had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to play with for a few months now. If you haven’t read my TechTar­get write-up, take a look at it here:

CML Review

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February 19, 2014 Uncategorized

Network Field Day Calendar

Read­ing Time: 1 minute

For those of you who under­stand what Tech Field Day is, and want to fol­low this week’s events, feel free to use this cal­en­dar to track the events.

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January 18, 2014 Uncategorized

Burnout Redux

Read­ing Time: 3 min­utes

Late­ly I have been strug­gling with career burnout.  Or maybe it’s exis­ten­tial grief, or bad bur­ri­tos, gas, and too many real­i­ty tele­vi­sion marathon binges.  What­ev­er it is, how­ev­er, I not­ed with some inter­est this arti­cle by Matthew Men­gel (@mengelm) over on the Pack­et Push­ers web­site.  Matthew is push­ing aside his career in the net­work­ing indus­try to pur­sue his true pas­sion in astron­o­my, after win­ning a schol­ar­ship to com­plete a PhD pro­gram in the sub­ject.

It is fair to say that I read his arti­cle with a fair bit of jeal­ousy.  After 22 years in the com­put­er indus­try, I nurse night­ly dreams (or delu­sions) of mov­ing on to oth­er things.  I said as much on Twit­ter, and found a sur­pris­ing num­ber of oth­er folks in my cohort who felt the same.  Long careers and hours had tak­en a toll.

More sur­pris­ing, how­ev­er, was what hap­pened when the dis­cus­sion turned to just what exact­ly we would all do, giv­en the chance.  There were a few out­liers, but far and away the answers were all in the fine arts or gener­i­cal­ly cre­ative space: art, film, writ­ing, and wood­work­ing were men­tioned.  And the num­ber one rea­son why was that these were all pur­suits that were start­ed dur­ing the naïveté of youth, before we all real­ized that the mon­ey was no good.

I know that I nev­er dreamed of a career in com­put­ers when I was a child.  My dreams were all root­ed in writ­ing, art, and music.  I ful­ly expect­ed to be a musi­cian, famous artist, or reclu­sive, well-read writer.  Obvi­ous­ly, that didn’t hap­pen.

I don’t know when I real­ized the imprac­ti­cal­i­ty of the arts as a career, but at some point in my lat­er high school years I decid­ed that the law would be a more prac­ti­cal pro­fes­sion.  Luck­i­ly, my uncle (a very suc­cess­ful attor­ney) talked me out of that, and I acci­den­tal­ly hap­pened into the world of pro­fes­sion­al com­put­er-wran­gling.

I had been pro­gram­ming and hack­ing since the age of eight, so when some­one offered me a job at what seemed like incred­i­ble pay back in 1992, I didn’t think twice.  In ret­ro­spect, it’s amaz­ing how low the ask­ing price for a person’s soul turns out to be.  Fast for­ward to the present, and we’re back to the con­ver­sa­tion about burnout and choic­es.

In talk­ing to the good folks on Twit­ter, and friends and cowork­ers, it seems as if there are a tremen­dous num­ber of peo­ple who would do some­thing else, if the mon­ey was left out of the equa­tion.  One of my best friends and I were talk­ing over the hol­i­days on this very top­ic, and it seems as if we’re all vic­tims of our own suc­cess.  “I’d move and change careers, “ he said, “but I can’t afford to start over.”

And there’s the prob­lem.  The same prob­lem every­thing always boils down to: mon­ey, or, more real­is­ti­cal­ly, food and shel­ter.  In all of human his­to­ry, we’re still slaves to our own abil­i­ty to sur­vive.  It used to be a cli­mate, or food-source, or shel­ter that drove us to wher­ev­er we end­ed up in life.  All we’ve done in the whole of our species is man­age to abstract that con­cept in the form of mon­ey.

Maybe I’m read­ing too much in to all of this, or being too dra­mat­ic, I don’t know.  All I do know is there are a hell of a lot of us out there, it seems, doing things for mon­ey that we wish we didn’t have to do any more.  I don’t know what that means, and I’m hes­i­tant to project my own anx­i­eties on the rest of you, but I think it at least begs a cou­ple of ques­tions:

(1) If the mon­ey was equal to what you do now, or what your career will ulti­mate­ly bring you in terms of earn­ing poten­tial, would you do some­thing dif­fer­ent?

(2) When were you the hap­pi­est in your life?  What were you doing?  Was it what you do now?

Feel free to send me answers and feed­back via my twit­ter han­dle (@someclown) or here in the com­ments.

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November 16, 2013 Network

Ruminations on Software Programming

Read­ing Time: 4 min­utes

Soft­ware pro­gram­ming is a chal­leng­ing endeav­or.  I know, because it’s how I start­ed my career, and it’s still some­thing I do for fun and to keep my net­work engi­neer­ing skills sharp.  Writ­ing soft­ware is also very tedious, which is why I quick­ly moved on to oth­er things and now haven’t writ­ten code pro­fes­sion­al­ly for over 18 years or so.  It takes a par­tic­u­lar kind of per­son who wants to real­ly learn the syn­tax and thought process need­ed to be tru­ly skilled at cod­ing.

It is also a par­tic­u­lar type of per­son who wants to know the lev­el of detail in how a large-scale net­work oper­ates.  Most IT pro­fes­sion­als are con­tent to know the basics of networking—enough to do their day jobs—and leave the hard-core net­work knowl­edge to that spe­cial sort of masochist breed known as net­work engi­neers.  The hard­core net­work folks who are obsessed with per­for­mance tun­ing even the small­est details of how pack­ets move around and between dat­a­cen­ters, the intri­cate dif­fer­ences between rout­ing pro­to­cols, tun­nels, under­lays and over­lays, and bit-twid­dling for fun and prof­it.

In the past, those two sides of what I’ll loose­ly call the IT world have typ­i­cal­ly been dif­fer­ent func­tions.  The soft­ware types write the code for the sys­tems, the sys­tems peo­ple deliv­er the ser­vices, and the net­work folks tie it all togeth­er.  From the out­siders’ point of view look­ing in, we’re all “com­put­er nerds” and any dif­fer­ences between us are large­ly seman­tic at best.  But peel back the vale and you’ll see that we’ve all decamped to our respec­tive cor­ners of the play­room and start­ed our own lit­tle fief­doms.

To hear some tell the tale the loose alliances and unsteady truces that have kept us func­tion­ing for so long are about to col­lapse under the weight of a new tech­nol­o­gy par­a­digm: Soft­ware Defined Net­work­ing.  While I hope the cur­rent crop of shrill screeds about net­work engi­neers dying off if they don’t learn to pro­gram will slow­ly start to fade away as the real­i­ty of things sets in, I’m not hold­ing my breath.  SDN brings changes to the play­room of IT, for sure, but as I’ve writ­ten many times before, it is incre­men­tal, not whol­ly dis­rup­tive, change that’s com­ing on the back of SDN.

We only have to look to the changes that have hap­pened in the sys­tems space over the last 8–10 years or so to see what the future looks like.  When the first wave of sys­tem vir­tu­al­iza­tion start­ed to make inroads, there was a tremen­dous amount of push­back from all cor­ners of the IT estab­lish­ment.  Ven­dors refus­ing to sup­port any­thing installed on a vir­tu­al­ized OS was the norm, and there were all sorts of opined pieces float­ing around the trade mag­a­zine cir­cuit, bemoan­ing the death of the sys­tems and appli­ca­tions folks.

In this brave new vir­tu­al­ized world, so went the rea­son­ing, there would be no need for sys­tems admin­is­tra­tors.  They would all go away in favor of this new spe­cial­ty.  In real­i­ty what hap­pened was that the sys­tems peo­ple kept right on doing what they’d always done, which was to learn the new tech­nol­o­gy… incre­men­tal change pre­vailed.  Now any self-respect­ing sys­tems admin knows and under­stands at least one hyper­vi­sor sys­tem at a pret­ty sol­id lev­el.   The tools changed, the par­a­digm shift­ed, and the sys­tems admin­is­tra­tors changed in par­al­lel.

Did every­one sud­den­ly become soft­ware pro­gram­mers?  Nope.  They just kept on adapt­ing with the times and instead of using the tools they had been using, or per­haps in addi­tion to those tools, they start­ed using new tools like Microsoft’s Pow­er­Shell.  Now most big appli­ances in the sys­tems world are acces­si­ble via Pow­er­Shell com­mands and the sys­tems peo­ple can do more than ever.  In fact, they can do it more quick­ly and accu­rate­ly than in years past.

The same thing is going to hap­pen on the net­work side.  Instead of being con­fined to a pre-built OS, pur­pose built for one device, we’ll be able to access all of our devices using var­i­ous new meth­ods.  Some of us will use off-the shelf solu­tions wrapped up as man­age­ment packages—does any­one doubt that the big-boys of the net­work world will come out with soft­ware for SDN con­trollers that is pre-built, pre-pack­aged, and ready to use with no pro­gram­ming knowl­edge required?  Oth­ers will use more advanced tech­niques and script our own tools to do spe­cial­ized tasks as we need.

Giv­en the changes com­ing in the next few years, I will say that any net­work engi­neers out there who haven’t been exposed to basic pro­gram­ming pre­cepts; things like loops and basic log­ic flow, algo­rithms, and gen­er­al­ized prob­lem solv­ing using a pro­gram­ming-like syn­tax, should prob­a­bly pick up a book and start play­ing around a lit­tle.  Pow­er­Shell is a good place to start, as would Unix shell script­ing (start with bash), but if you real­ly want to learn a pro­gram­ming lan­guage, and you want some­thing that will be use­ful in the net­work­ing world over the next few years, I’d high­ly rec­om­mend start­ing with Python.  It’s easy to learn, easy to use, easy to get things done, and you get some imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion.  Also, out­side of pure script­ing lan­guages, Python real­ly seems to be where every­one seems to be coa­lesc­ing when it comes to SDN con­trollers and APIs for net­work pro­gram­ming.  Jen­nifer Rex­ford writes about the Fre­net­ic Project and Pyret­ic in this arti­cle at Tech Tar­get and it is well worth a read.

At the end of the day, the IT game is one where the rules are always chang­ing, the skillsets always evolv­ing, and quite hon­est­ly if you’re still doing the same thing you learned 5 years ago you’re already behind the curve.  SDN may shake up the world of net­work engi­neer­ing in a way we haven’t seen in a while, but it is noth­ing more than the con­tin­ued march of progress.  If you’re not read­ing at least one whitepa­per or book on a new tech­nol­o­gy at all times, I per­son­al­ly don’t see how you’ve stayed in the game this long.  SDN is just more of the same.  Adapt or quit now.

Soft­ware pro­gram­ming is always going to be a spe­cial­ized skillset, as is net­work engineering—at least at the high­est lev­els.  That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t embrace the com­ing change and learn to play with the kids on the oth­er side of the play­room a bit, though.  If you ven­ture over to the oth­er side, you might find that some of the toys they have are the miss­ing pieces from your play set, and that you have more in com­mon with one anoth­er than you orig­i­nal­ly thought.

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