Building the Network of the Future


Book Description

From the Foreword: "This book lays out much of what we’ve learned at AT&T about SDN and NFV. Some of the smartest network experts in the industry have drawn a map to help you navigate this journey. Their goal isn’t to predict the future but to help you design and build a network that will be ready for whatever that future holds. Because if there’s one thing the last decade has taught us, it’s that network demand will always exceed expectations. This book will help you get ready." —Randall Stephenson, Chairman, CEO, and President of AT&T "Software is changing the world, and networks too. In this in-depth book, AT&T's top networking experts discuss how they're moving software-defined networking from concept to practice, and why it's a business imperative to do this rapidly." —Urs Hölzle, SVP Cloud Infrastructure, Google "Telecom operators face a continuous challenge for more agility to serve their customers with a better customer experience and a lower cost. This book is a very inspiring and vivid testimony of the huge transformation this means, not only for the networks but for the entire companies, and how AT&T is leading it. It provides a lot of very deep insights about the technical challenges telecom engineers are facing today. Beyond AT&T, I’m sure this book will be extremely helpful to the whole industry." —Alain Maloberti, Group Chief Network Officer, Orange Labs Networks "This new book should be read by any organization faced with a future driven by a "shift to software." It is a holistic view of how AT&T has transformed its core infrastructure from hardware based to largely software based to lower costs and speed innovation. To do so, AT&T had to redefine their technology supply chain, retrain their workforce, and move toward open source user-driven innovation; all while managing one of the biggest networks in the world. It is an amazing feat that will put AT&T in a leading position for years to come." —Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation This book is based on the lessons learned from AT&T’s software transformation journey starting in 2012 when rampant traffic growth necessitated a change in network architecture and design. Using new technologies such as NFV, SDN, Cloud, and Big Data, AT&T’s engineers outlined and implemented a radical network transformation program that dramatically reduced capital and operating expenditures. This book describes the transformation in substantial detail. The subject matter is of great interest to telecom professionals worldwide, as well as academic researchers looking to apply the latest techniques in computer science to solving telecom’s big problems around scalability, resilience, and survivability.




Building the Network of the Future


Book Description

From the Foreword: "This book lays out much of what we’ve learned at AT&T about SDN and NFV. Some of the smartest network experts in the industry have drawn a map to help you navigate this journey. Their goal isn’t to predict the future but to help you design and build a network that will be ready for whatever that future holds. Because if there’s one thing the last decade has taught us, it’s that network demand will always exceed expectations. This book will help you get ready." —Randall Stephenson, Chairman, CEO, and President of AT&T "Software is changing the world, and networks too. In this in-depth book, AT&T's top networking experts discuss how they're moving software-defined networking from concept to practice, and why it's a business imperative to do this rapidly." —Urs Hölzle, SVP Cloud Infrastructure, Google "Telecom operators face a continuous challenge for more agility to serve their customers with a better customer experience and a lower cost. This book is a very inspiring and vivid testimony of the huge transformation this means, not only for the networks but for the entire companies, and how AT&T is leading it. It provides a lot of very deep insights about the technical challenges telecom engineers are facing today. Beyond AT&T, I’m sure this book will be extremely helpful to the whole industry." —Alain Maloberti, Group Chief Network Officer, Orange Labs Networks "This new book should be read by any organization faced with a future driven by a "shift to software." It is a holistic view of how AT&T has transformed its core infrastructure from hardware based to largely software based to lower costs and speed innovation. To do so, AT&T had to redefine their technology supply chain, retrain their workforce, and move toward open source user-driven innovation; all while managing one of the biggest networks in the world. It is an amazing feat that will put AT&T in a leading position for years to come." —Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, The Linux Foundation This book is based on the lessons learned from AT&T’s software transformation journey starting in 2012 when rampant traffic growth necessitated a change in network architecture and design. Using new technologies such as NFV, SDN, Cloud, and Big Data, AT&T’s engineers outlined and implemented a radical network transformation program that dramatically reduced capital and operating expenditures. This book describes the transformation in substantial detail. The subject matter is of great interest to telecom professionals worldwide, as well as academic researchers looking to apply the latest techniques in computer science to solving telecom’s big problems around scalability, resilience, and survivability.




Shaping the Future of Power


Book Description

China’s rise to power is one of the biggest questions in International Relations theory (IRT) and foreign policy circles. Although power has been a core concept of IRT for a long time, the faces and mechanisms of power as it relates to Chinese foreign policymaking has changed the contours of that debate. The rise of China and other powers across the global political arena sparks a new visibility for different kinds of encounters between states, particularly between China and other Global South states. These encounters are more visible to IR scholars because of the increasing influence that rising powers have in the international system. This book shows that foreign policy encounters between rising powers and Global South states do not necessarily exhibit the same logics, behaviors, or investment strategies of Euro-American hegemons. Instead, they have distinctive features that require new theoretical frameworks for analysis. Shaping the Future of Power probes the types of power mechanisms that build, diffuse, and project China’s power in Africa. One must take into account the processes of knowledge production, social capital formation, and skills transfers that Chinese foreign policy directs toward African states to fully understand China’s power-building mechanisms. The relational power framework requires these elements to capture both the material aspects and ideational people-centered aspects to power. By examining China’s investments in human resource development programs for Africa, the book reveals a vital, yet undertheorized, aspect of China’s foreign policy making.




Forge Your Future with Open Source


Book Description

Free and open source is the foundation of software development, and it's built by people just like you. Discover the fundamental tenets that drive the movement. Take control of your career by selecting the right project to meet your professional goals. Master the language and avoid the pitfalls that typically ensnare new contributors. Join a community of like-minded people and change the world. Programmers, writers, designers, and everyone interested in software will make their mark through free and open source software contributions. Free and open source software is the default choice for the programming languages and technologies which run our world today, and it's all built and maintained by people just like you. No matter your skill level or area of expertise, with this book you will contribute to free and open source software projects. Using this practical approach you'll understand not only the mechanics of contributing, but also how doing so helps your career as well as the community. This book doesn't assume that you're a programmer, or even that you have prior experience with free and open source software. Learn what open source is, where it came from, and why it's important. Start on the right foot by mastering the structure and tools you need before you contribute. Choose the right project for you, amplifying the impact of your contribution. Submit your first contribution, whether it's code, writing, design, or community organising. Find out what to do when things don't go the way you expect. Discover how to start your own project and make it friendly and welcoming to contributors. Anyone can contribute! Make your mark today and help others while also helping yourself.




Impact Networks


Book Description

This practical guide shows how to facilitate collaboration among diverse individuals and organizations to navigate complexity and create change in our interconnected world. The social and environmental challenges we face today are not only complex, they are also systemic and structural and have no obvious solutions. They require diverse combinations of people, organizations, and sectors to coordinate actions and work together even when the way forward is unclear. Even so, collaborative efforts often fail because they attempt to navigate complexity with traditional strategic plans, created by hierarchies that ignore the way people naturally connect. By embracing a living-systems approach to organizing, impact networks bring people together to build relationships across boundaries; leverage the existing work, skills, and motivations of the group; and make progress amid unpredictable and ever-changing conditions. As a powerful and flexible organizing system that can span regions, organizations, and silos of all kinds, impact networks underlie some of the most impressive and large-scale efforts to create change across the globe. David Ehrlichman draws on his experience as a network builder; interviews with dozens of network leaders; and insights from the fields of network science, community building, and systems thinking to provide a clear process for creating and developing impact networks. Given the increasing complexity of our society and the issues we face, our ability to form, grow, and work through networks has never been more essential.




Building a Future-Proof Cloud Infrastructure


Book Description

Prepare for the future of cloud infrastructure: Distributed Services Platforms By moving service modules closer to applications, Distributed Services (DS) Platforms will future-proof cloud architectures—improving performance, responsiveness, observability, and troubleshooting. Network pioneer Silvano Gai demonstrates DS Platforms’ remarkable capabilities and guides you through implementing them in diverse hardware. Focusing on business benefits throughout, Gai shows how to provide essential shared services such as segment routing, NAT, firewall, micro-segmentation, load balancing, SSL/TLS termination, VPNs, RDMA, and storage—including storage compression and encryption. He also compares three leading hardware-based approaches—Sea of Processors, FPGAs, and ASICs—preparing you to evaluate solutions, ask the right questions, and plan strategies for your environment. Understand the business drivers behind DS Platforms, and the value they offer See how modern network design and virtualization create a foundation for DS Platforms Achieve unprecedented scale through domain-specific hardware, standardized functionalities, and granular distribution Compare advantages and disadvantages of each leading hardware approach to DS Platforms Learn how P4 Domain-Specific Language and architecture enable high-performance, low-power ASICs that are data-plane-programmable at runtime Distribute cloud security services, including firewalls, encryption, key management, and VPNs Implement distributed storage and RDMA services in large-scale cloud networks Utilize Distributed Services Cards to offload networking processing from host CPUs Explore the newest DS Platform management architectures Building a Future-Proof Cloud Architecture is for network, cloud, application, and storage engineers, security experts, and every technology professional who wants to succeed with tomorrow’s most advanced service architectures.




Building the Future of Food Safety Technology


Book Description

Building the Future of Food Safety Technology: Blockchain and Beyond focuses on evaluating, developing, testing and predicting Blockchain's impact on the food industry, the types of regulatory compliance needed, and other topics important pertaining to consumers. Blockchain is a technology that can be used to record transactions from multiple entities across a complex network. A record on a blockchain cannot be altered retroactively without the alteration of all preceding blocks and the consensus of the network. Blockchain is often associated with cryptocurrency, but it is being looked at more and more as a solution to food-supply problems. - Presents the latest information on Blockchain's impact in the food industry - Bridges food technology and food safety - Provides guidance and expert insights on the food supply chain




Building the Future Internet Through Fire


Book Description

The Internet as we know it today is the result of a continuous activity for improving network communications, end user services, computational processes and also information technology infrastructures. The Internet has become a critical infrastructure for the human-being by offering complex networking services and end-user applications that all together have transformed all aspects, mainly economical, of our lives. Recently, with the advent of new paradigms and the progress in wireless technology, sensor networks and information systems and also the inexorable shift towards everything connected paradigm, first as known as the Internet of Things and lately envisioning into the Internet of Everything, a data-driven society has been created. In a data-driven society, productivity, knowledge, and experience are dependent on increasingly open, dynamic, interdependent and complex Internet services. The challenge for the Internet of the Future design is to build robust enabling technologies, implement and deploy adaptive systems, to create business opportunities considering increasing uncertainties and emergent systemic behaviors where humans and machines seamlessly cooperate.




Network Sovereignty


Book Description

In 2012, the United Nations General Assembly determined that affordable Internet access is a human right, critical to citizen participation in democratic governments. Given the significance of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to social and political life, many U.S. tribes and Native organizations have created their own projects, from streaming radio to building networks to telecommunications advocacy. In Network Sovereignty, Marisa Duarte examines these ICT projects to explore the significance of information flows and information systems to Native sovereignty, and toward self-governance, self-determination, and decolonization. By reframing how tribes and Native organizations harness these technologies as a means to overcome colonial disconnections, Network Sovereignty shifts the discussion of information and communication technologies in Native communities from one of exploitation to one of Indigenous possibility.




Designing an Internet


Book Description

Why the Internet was designed to be the way it is, and how it could be different, now and in the future. How do you design an internet? The architecture of the current Internet is the product of basic design decisions made early in its history. What would an internet look like if it were designed, today, from the ground up? In this book, MIT computer scientist David Clark explains how the Internet is actually put together, what requirements it was designed to meet, and why different design decisions would create different internets. He does not take today's Internet as a given but tries to learn from it, and from alternative proposals for what an internet might be, in order to draw some general conclusions about network architecture. Clark discusses the history of the Internet, and how a range of potentially conflicting requirements—including longevity, security, availability, economic viability, management, and meeting the needs of society—shaped its character. He addresses both the technical aspects of the Internet and its broader social and economic contexts. He describes basic design approaches and explains, in terms accessible to nonspecialists, how networks are designed to carry out their functions. (An appendix offers a more technical discussion of network functions for readers who want the details.) He considers a range of alternative proposals for how to design an internet, examines in detail the key requirements a successful design must meet, and then imagines how to design a future internet from scratch. It's not that we should expect anyone to do this; but, perhaps, by conceiving a better future, we can push toward it.