91–100 of 158 posts
Is it just me getting older / less smart, or did articles about products really start to sound like a jumbled mess or buzzwords lately? What is "Hardware transport", what is "the ecosystem"? And then there is dozens of random products and technologies that I've never heard of... This sounds more like a humble brag, than an article trying to inform people about technologies that might actually be useful to them.
I guarantee that there will eventually be a vaguely similar (but different!) stack published by each of: NetFlix, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. Just kidding, Apple won't publish anything. The IT ecosystem has fragmented into mutually incompatible cliques. You are either in the Google ecosystem, the Amazon ecosystem, or some other one, but there are no more truly open and industry-wide standards. Look at WebAuthN: it…
They haven't said much lately about sending content updates to their CDN nodes, but I think the throughput requirements on that isn't as high.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not upside down. RDMA and NVMe run on top of Falcon which runs on top of UDP.
RDMA is a low-level physical transport. You are saying that they are going to emulate RDMA on top of Falcon. Are they going to run Ethernet and then IP on top of that? The diagram is confusing since it upside down to layering direction, but the article is clear. Falcon is a hardware transport protocol, replacing Ethernet. Like Ethernet, it runs on top of physical transport like RDMA. And IP runs on top of Falcon and…
The point is: RDMA is just a term for a computer reading memory on another computer without involving the operating system. The interconnect hardware and physical transport must support RDMA but that doesn't mean it is RDMA, as there are several different implementations of RDMA, and each kind of hardware supports a different subset of those implementations.
Is it just me getting older / less smart, or did articles about products really start to sound like a jumbled mess or buzzwords lately? What is "Hardware transport", what is "the ecosystem"? And then there is dozens of random products and technologies that I've never heard of... This sounds more like a humble brag, than an article trying to inform people about technologies that might actually be useful to them.
"The ecosystem" is The Open Compute Project [1], a trade association which mostly puts together quasi-standards that provide targets so computer manufacturers can produce bleeding-edge gear with some hope that it will be interoperable. An example OCP production is the newer 21" racks that are starting to appear in datacenters.
I guarantee that there will eventually be a vaguely similar (but different!) stack published by each of: NetFlix, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. Just kidding, Apple won't publish anything. The IT ecosystem has fragmented into mutually incompatible cliques. You are either in the Google ecosystem, the Amazon ecosystem, or some other one, but there are no more truly open and industry-wide standards. Look at WebAuthN: it…
This criticism is a little weird. This is an internal protocol in Google’s datacenters. Why should it have to be compatible with anything?
Oh, I was hoping this would be something built more directly over Ethernet, rather than on top of UDP/IP (if I'm understanding the layer diagram correctly). I've been working with Ethernet devices a lot lately, using the network as a communication bus, essentially. I find that there's a lot of complexity that we simply don't need: ARP, DHCP, DNS... So many points of failure. We know all the devices on our LAN and the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But you can't route MACs... you can't associate domain names to MACs... Maybe for a LAN that's fine, but for connecting devices between broadcast domains, it just doesn't cut it.
Why though? You can't route MAC because... ? Because ipv4 provides a higher entropy address? Because MAC is self-assigned and reduplication would require a higher level system? or just because we just don't use MAC addresses that way? I'm certain there are reasons IP came to live alongside/on top of MAC, but saying you can't do multi-hop routing with it just isn't true. If all the technologies of the Internet were re…
There were different teams/universities working on what today we would call LAN and WAN. I forget the details and history (I'm sure someone here, who was involved, could chime in, hah) and might have this wrong, but the result is LAN networking is MAC based while WAN networking is IP based.
It's one of those accidents of history that things are just the way they are and many don't question it. I run into it a lot describing basic networking concepts or early cisco material when people ask _why_ both MACs and IP addresses exist and its just... not always the correct time to explain those details to them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IP addresses have structure because a single ISP buys a contiguous block, like 123.234.*.*. A simple routing table sends that whole block to a single network port. The table required for the whole Internet is large, but not gigabytes. You can't route by MAC-address because it's effectively random. You'd have to store the port number for every device separately. This works fine at LAN scale, but not for the whole Inte…
MAC addresses being random is a historical accident (because of hardware limitations). today we can define them in software. and just like we have link-local addresses we could self-assign link-local MAC addresses. and i think the self assigning protocol in link-local could even go a step further. instead of hard coding a subnet, it could detect the subnet by copying the one from its nearest neighbor. so start with a…
The only thing blocking these from becoming standard is that it means userland has direct control of hardware.