With the passing of Steve Jobs, it is timely to observe that many people have declared him a hero or villain depending on their own perspective. Whilst many fans of apple revere him as the saviour of the company, there are others who saw him as leading the development of popular but closed pieces of technology – and resent him for that.
But I would like to pick up on one point with which both sides of the fence have to agree: he mastered the art of making things simple.
Whether it is the design of a complex piece of technology, a process that needs following or a blog posting, the simplest option is often the best. In the world of networks, this is even more obvious. With the evolution of Ethernet we have been able to eradicate complex interfaces, achieve simple framing types and push costs down – all great strides towards a simpler network.
Going up a level in the networking stack, many network designers fall under the spell of the feature-list handed by their hardware vendor of choice or are otherwise swayed by the extravagant demands of the end-customer.
But I say STOP! Go back a step and start with the basics:
- Consider a simple MPLS network with no QoS, failover, VLANs or anything else
- Think static routing before you get carried away with the work of Edsger Dijkstra
- Use the smallest IP subnet sizes possible
- Forget anything proprietary, experimental or unratified
You’ve now got a useless network that is very easy to trouble shoot. So what good is that? Thinking from this angle immediately makes you question what you really need and how you can best deploy it. Adding a second circuit for resilience here and there makes perfect sense. Using a known and non-proprietary protocol like VRRP flows naturally from that decision. Dynamic routing protocols such as BGP will protect against failures and make changes easier at the expense of increased support and configuration complexity. And so on.
You’ll be able to explore that feature-set in the same way a discerning diner selects the tastes they want to experience from the menu they peruse. Or a music-lover, choosing what music to put on their MP3 player.
But whatever you do, don’t make up the requirements. Be honest. Does your customer really need that? Shouldn’t you really have some of this? Don’t be greedy.
When you’ve built it in this constructive, bottom-up style, test it against the applications, users and geography. Temper the whole thing with a keen eye on the budget and a focus on what the successful network will do and how it will behave.
The result will be simple elegance. And we know from the work of Mr Jobs, that will always have a certain appeal.
