Last week, I had the opportunity to attend and speak at Interop ITX 2018, in Las Vegas. It was my first Interop — and an interesting opportunity to see more of the enterprise networking side of things. That’s a space that is growing, and increasing in complexity, even as cloud and software as a service are notionally taking on the heavy lifting of corporate IT.
The refrain that I overheard several times captured that attendees really enjoyed having a vendor-neutral conference to talk about a variety of practical topics. Indeed, it felt a bit like a NOG with an enterprise focus.
I was t
asked with bringing some broad Internet perspective to the “Network Transformation Summit”. I chose to talk through a series of real network illustrations of the importance of collaboration and diversity — both historically, and in terms of “wicked” problems facing the Internet today.
I’ve always found it interesting to note how well the Internet has stood up in the face of disasters — such as 9/11 in New York, and the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011. On the flip side, while Blackberry provided the first usable and (network) efficient mobile mail platform, its lack of diversity and monoculture ultimately lead to multi-day, global service failures.
These are not just historic case studies — they provide important insight into how to grow the Internet and build services that will withstand the pressures of the future.
I’ve posted a version of my slides from the presentation, here: http://www.thinkingcat.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/DaigleLeslie_KeepingTheInter-FinalClear.pdf
Interop was around long before *NOGs. We have Dan Lynch to thank for that.
Sure — and the good news is that 1/ it’s still NOG-like, and 2/ enterprise network operators are interested and engaged 🙂