Networking

I’ve been noticing something lately when I read about new infrastructure projects. Not the specific technologies, those change constantly, but the shape of the problems they’re solving. It’s like watching reruns of a show you half-remember: the set design is different, the actors have changed, but you know exactly how this episode goes. The more time I spend in this industry, the more I see these patterns. Not because the people building new systems lack imagination, but because certain problems seem to be fundamental, built into the physics and economics of computation itself. We keep encountering them, solving them for our specific moment, and then watching them resurface a decade later in a different context. ...

Some sections of this post were written with the assistance of AI to clarify ideas and improve readability. All opinions and conclusions are my own. Zero-Trust Is Already Happening Your VPN goes down at 2 AM. Half your engineering team is locked out. The on-call engineer can’t access the database to diagnose the outage that triggered the VPN failure in the first place. You’re now troubleshooting infrastructure access during an infrastructure incident, a recursion problem that would be funny if it weren’t costing you money and sleep. ...

Scaling internet infrastructure was a significant challenge before concepts like cloud computing, DevOps, and SDN emerged. In the late 1990s, Alteon Networks revolutionized the industry with some of the first gigabit Ethernet switches and hardware-based load balancers. These devices, equipped with failover capabilities, filtering, and various layer 3/4 functionalities, became the backbone of many major web platforms of the time. The Alteon load balancer stood out as a unique solution in the pre-standard gigabit Ethernet era. While the name is now closely associated with load balancing, Alteon was a pioneer in NIC and switch innovation throughout the 1990s. As John Hayes described it, networking at the time was as groundbreaking as AI is today. ...