Congestion Avoidance and Control - Jacobson & Karels, 1988 (** corrected spelling of Jacobs_o_n **) It's October 1986 and there's trouble on the internet. A congestion collapse has reduced the bandwidth between LBL and UC Berkeley by a factor of a thousand. These two sites happened to be 400 yds apart. And that drop in ... Continue Reading

FastRoute: A scalable load-aware anycast routing architecture for modern CDNs - Flavel et al. 2015 This is the story of how a team at Microsoft redesigned their CDN that supports 'numerous popular online services.' It's also a great example of mature systems thinking: the team deliberately eschew designs that would give marginally better performance at ... Continue Reading

The Design and Implementation of Open vSwitch - Pfaff et al. 2015 Another selection from this month's NSDI 2015 programme, this time from the operational systems track. What inspired the creation of Open vSwitch? What has most influenced its design? And what's next? As virtualized (or containerized) workloads grew, physically provisioning networks to support them ... Continue Reading

On Distributed Communications Networks - Baran 1962 Way before it became fashionable to build large-scale distributed systems out of relatively unreliable commodity hardware, Baran was investigating the properties a network built in such a way might have. This paper is very much of its time, and all the more enjoyable for it: want to know ... Continue Reading

The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols - Clark 1988 While there have been papers and specifications that describe how the (internet) protocols work, it is sometimes difficult to deduce from these why the protocol is as it is. For example, the Internet protocol is based on a connectionless or datagram mode of service. ... Continue Reading