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  • Human Infrastructure 350: Low-Latency Trading, Microservices, Wi-Fi Surveys & More

Human Infrastructure 350: Low-Latency Trading, Microservices, Wi-Fi Surveys & More

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Ethan Banks & Drew Conry-Murray
April 18, 2024

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

High frequency trading shops have highly specific network requirements. In this article, Andrew Taylor thinks about what would happen if a securities exchange moved to the cloud, blowing up the existing network paradigm. If the network had been a competitive advantage where microseconds counted, how would you claw those advantages back if you had to move your trading operations into the cloud to remain close to the exchange? It gets nasty. Related—listen to this Heavy Networking podcast episode with Jeremy Filliben and Marc Washco of Jump Trading if you’d like to know more about the world of HFT networks. - Ethan

Michał Kosmulski of e-commerce site Allegro recounts the journey to microservices. I found several quotes well-aligned with other content I’ve read by folks who’ve gone down the microservices road.

“While microservices themselves may be simple, the glue that holds them together is not.”

“Make a service huge, and it becomes too hard for a single team to maintain and develop, or scaling issues arise similar to those you could experience with a monolith. Make it very small, and you might get overwhelmed by the overhead of having your logic split between too many places, issues with debugging, and the performance penalty of the system being distributed to the extreme.”

“I think much of the anti-microservice sentiment you see around the internet today stems from treating microservices as a silver bullet that you can apply to any problem regardless of whether they actually make sense in given situation, or from not being aware that they can bring huge payoffs but also require great investments.”

“Probably the most recent really significant change related to our microservice ecosystem was the migration to service mesh. From developers’ perspective it did not seem all that radical, but it required a lot of work from infrastructure teams.”

The entire post is verbose, but worth the read if microservice architecture is interesting to you. - Ethan

This well-researched piece tells the tale of the Ocean Link, a ship that cruises in the Pacific for the primary purpose of repairing the undersea fiber optic cables that connect the Earth’s landmasses. This is a job fraught with danger and complexities far beyond what you might think. The ocean floor is at times a busy place with dramatic topography that changes as a result of earthquakes and landslides. The tension on cables hauled up for repair can kill people and destroy ship components if not handled competently.

Transoceanic cables break with some frequency for lots of reasons beyond natural causes, and yet we don’t hear much about the unsung heroes that keep these cables connected. Many pictures and illustrations accompany this first-class production by The Verge. - Ethan

Will Daly shares a network troubleshooting story. Will was unable to connect to a resource at Bunny CDN, despite the rest of the Internet working just fine as far as he could tell. He’d posted on this previously and fielded many suggestions from the Internet. With some assistance from a helpful engineer at Bunny and a final acknowledgement of the problem from local IT, the problem was clearly identified—asymmetric routing.

Asymmetric routing where a firewall is involved is a bad thing. You’re gonna feel it when the firewall kills the session when it doesn’t see the TCP state behavior it’s expecting. As an aside, the folks at Bunny have a track record of being excellent humans. Back in 2021, we recorded a podcast with them about an outage, part of their willingness to make their downtime a learning experience the rest of us could benefit from. - Ethan

This post provides a lot of helpful information about conducting an active WLAN survey using Ekahau. It reviews multiple survey methods including stop-and-go, continuous, and GPS; different survey types; and what to expect when using ping or throughput modes during the survey. It also provides visual examples of survey output with explanations. - Drew

Tim O’Reilly (yes, of the ubiquitous O’Reilly books) takes aim at venture capitalists who aim to “blitzscale” their way to dominance rather than compete in the market. The idea is to pour so much money into a startup that it can gobble up more customers than anyone else. He writes that this strategy is “a map to suboptimal outcomes rather than the true path to competition, innovation and the creation of robust companies and markets.” 

We’ve seen it happen before, like the ride-hailing market: Tim writes “in the Central Committee version of Silicon Valley, Uber and Lyft, backed by billions of dollars of venture capital, drove out the competition rather than defeating it, subsidizing customer acquisition and an unsustainable business model—and in the case of Uber, continuing to attract new capital with promises of speculative future cost savings via self-driving cars. Instead, once the market had consolidated, Uber and Lyft only reached profitability through massive price increases. What might have happened if there had been true competition in this market? We will never know.”

And it’s happening again with AI. VCs and existing tech giants are looking to consolidate markets and pick winners before there’s a chance for startups to experiment and for market forces (not deep-pocketed VCs and tech giants) to choose winners. Tim calls this “betting on premature consolidation and the wisdom of a few large investors to choose a future everyone else will be forced to live in.” - Drew

Join industry leaders, tech visionaries and cybersecurity professionals for an insightful experience at the intersection of security and innovation. Register now for Intersect 2024.

TECH NEWS 📣

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is aiming to have 3,232 communications satellites in LEO by 2029. The service will compete with Starlink, providing broadband to underserved populations globally. The schedule is fuzzy, as delivery dates keep slipping. Initially, satellites were to be in the air now, but that’s looking more like the second half of 2024 with Internet service provided sometime in 2025. Blue Origin launches have been reserved to hoist the birds into orbit. - Ethan

Add another to the Google graveyard. Makes sense for them to kill it if no one was using it, though. If there’s no user data coming through for them to mine, what would be the point, really? - Ethan

Someone tweeted something—hardly news. What’s interesting is that it highlights an ongoing discussion about data center networking around AI workloads. In this case, the issue is more specific, zooming in to how NVIDIA is interconnecting the two compute processors in their GB200 GPU. They’re using NVLink, which keeps the entire solution NVIDIA magic. Could they have used Ethernet and saved $1B as the snarky tweet suggests? I don’t know (or care, really).

The growing “anything but NVIDIA” sentiment we see in groups like the Ultra Ethernet Consortium is the thing to keep an eye on. As always, follow the money. NVIDIA has incomprehensible amounts of it, and everyone else wants to claw some back. As the UEC and Ethernet generally gain traction for AI use cases (which I suspect they will due to economics), NVIDIA will need to react aside from building a proprietary stack as a moat around their enormous castle. - Ethan

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Wendell Odom has released a YouTube series that provides companion videos to the official Cisco Press CCNA certification books. Wendell uses the video medium to explain essential concepts from the books in bite-sized chunks. He also has a few videos dedicated to study tips, including how to make and use mind maps. If you’re on the CCNA journey, this is a free resource from a well-known instructor. - Drew

Rich Mogull is running an instructional course on cloud security essentials. There’s no certification tied to this course, but it will give you a solid grounding in cloud security essentials. Basically, you sign up to get the CloudSLAW newsletter, and each week you’ll get mailed a hands-on lab and a companion YouTube video. You can also go to the blog page linked above and see everything that’s already been posted if you just want to skip around (but Rich recommends starting at the beginning because the lessons start with setting up a secure management account). Right now the course is focused on AWS. You’ll have to pay to set up an AWS account to do the labs, but every lesson in the course is free. JJ Minella and I recorded a Packet Protector episode with Rich to get more details on the course, what it covers, and why he’s doing this.  - Drew

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

FRR version 10.0 has been released, with many changes and feature enhancements. Some of the changes are breaking changes, so take a moment to parse the release notes where all the details are carefully listed. - Ethan

Palo Alto Networks is adding capabilities to its SOC product to incorporate Cloud detection and response capabilities, along with on-prem,  into one platform. From the press release: “Many organizations now run a large portion of their business in the cloud, yet traditional SOC security tools weren't designed for the cloud. Palo Alto Networks new Cortex XSIAM for Cloud innovations delivers cloud security operations capabilities through one platform for faster, better security outcomes. It incorporates the unique architecture of cloud-based applications, understands the distinct characteristics of cloud-related threats, and provides the necessary real-time monitoring and response capabilities for SOC analysts.” - Drew 

IP Infusion makes a network operating system used in a variety of white box networking gear. It has now tested and certified optics from Ciena for use with IP Infusion’s OcNOS. From the press release: “Customers can now purchase Ciena’s 400G ZR/ZR+ pluggables directly from IP Infusion and receive 24/7 support for the entire white box solution through a single point of contact.” - Drew

LAST LAUGH 😆