Tag: networking
All the articles with the tag "networking".
One day Peter came to the office
War stories from my first real networking job, at a mobile carrier called CDMA Ukraine. A predecessor named Peter who kept a nation-wide core network entirely in his head, passwords you could guess in one try, eBGP run as an interior protocol for fun, a live server balanced on a three-legged stool, and a pigeon in the wall. No morals, mostly. Just vignettes.
The OVSDB ORM I wasn't allowed to open-source
The seventh and last post in the CertaScale series, and the one I'm still not over. Driving OVN means talking to several databases over the OVSDB wire protocol by hand. So I built a full ORM in Go: every table as a typed object, references as pointers, and an ACL match compiler built on Reverse Polish Notation. I wanted to open-source it. The company said no, and it died with the company.
From 12 to 60 Gbps with DPDK, when we tried to become a 5G-edge box
The sixth post in the CertaScale series. When private cloud proved a hard sell, the owners pivoted to 5G edge, and edge means line-rate on commodity hardware. Our kernel data path topped out around 12 Gbps on 100 Gbps NICs. Taking it out of the kernel with DPDK, hugepages, poll-mode drivers, and userspace-bound NICs got the same servers to roughly 60 Gbps.
A flat network, GCP-style, on early Kubernetes
The fourth post in the CertaScale series, and the idea I'm proudest of: a flat overlay borrowed from how Google Cloud addresses machines. /32 addresses plus routes, an address operator handing out CRDs from a pool, and the reason we built all of it — moving a workload between nodes without it losing its IP.
Giving Kubernetes an enterprise network
The third post in the CertaScale series. Our customer was building a private cloud that had to drop into any enterprise's network, so we spoke the language every enterprise already speaks and extended it to Kubernetes pods: VLANs, static and DHCP addressing, and RFC 4594 QoS.
Finding ovn-kubernetes when it was seven days old
The second post in the CertaScale series. Handed a failed project and a title, I inherited a broken Vagrant file that created a single bridge, panic-googled my way to a week-old repo, learned OVS internals the hard way, and rewrote our side from Python to Go when the team changed.
The private cloud we built before it was cool
From 2016 to 2019 I helped build a private cloud on top of very early Kubernetes, with a drag-and-drop canvas, VMs running inside pods before Kata existed, and an enterprise-grade network layer I led, from GCP-style flat overlays to a 12-to-60 Gbps DPDK data path. The company is gone. The story shouldn't be.