Friday, October 2, 2020

Network engineering continued...

This is a continuation of the earlier posts starting with this one: http://ravinote.blogspot.com/2020/09/best-practice-from-networking.html

Cachepoints – Cachepoints are used with consistent hashing. Cachepoints are arranged along the circle depicting the key range and cache objects corresponding to the range. Virtual nodes can join and leave the network without impacting the operation of the ring. 

Stream/Batch/Sequential of packets: Networking products are notorious for queues. And the sliding window processing is not restricted to TCP. There are other ways to process queues which include stream, batch, and sequential processing. 

Strategies – Implementation of a certain network processing logic within a networking product may often have a customized implementation and maintained with the component as it improves from version to version. Very little effort is usually spent on externalizing the strategy across components to see what may belong to the shared category and potentially benefit the components. Even if there is only one strategy every used with that component, this technique allows other techniques to be tried out independent of the product usage. 

Plug and Play architecture – the notion of Plug'n'play may have had some roots in networking. Plugins work irrespective of the components and layers in a networking stack of the host. Yet the standardization of the interface such that it is applicable across implementations is often left pending for later. Instead, the up-front standardization of interfaces promotes the eco-system and adds convenience to the user. 

Interoperability – Most networking products work well when the clients are running on a supported flavor of an operating system. However, this consideration allows the product to expand its usage. Interoperability is not just a convenience for the end-user, it is a reduction in management cost as well.  


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