Perspectives on how the future might come out

Science Fiction

Charles Stross
John Scalzi
Jo Walton
Alistair Reynolds
Richard Morgan
Iain Banks (aka Iain M Banks)
Vernor Vinge
Neal Stephenson
William Gibson
Ann Leckie

Fantasy

Terry Pratchett
Neil Gaiman

Was reminded that Marc Andreesen posted his SF author list in 2007- some of the authors listed above were new to me then.

Google cars sing

Numbers from July 2016
We are still walking around Los Altos, on much the same routes. It continues to be usual to see 6 Teslas in an hour, 3 or 4 Honda Fits, and 1 or 2 Ford Focus hatchbacks. On one exceptional Friday we counted 17 Tesla Ss. There's the occasional Tesla X, about 2 per week. The list of electric cars we have seen is now much longer.

- 3 sorts of Tesla ( the original Roadster, the S, and the X)
- electric Fiats (the 500e)
- Nissan Leafs (2 or 3 a day of these)
- electric Honda Fit
- electric Focus
- Chevy Spark
- Google car
- Smart electric
- BMW i3 (fewer than 1 per day) , i8 (rare)
- Rav4
- electric Golf
- electric Mercedes

At least once every weekday, sometimes several times, a little Google car drives by the house. Sometime earlier this year they acquired a distinctive noise, multiple tones which together form a minor key chord, loud enough to be heard from 100 meters away on a quiet street.

Tesla HQ and the Ford Research Center are both a short cycle ride away in Palo Alto. Looking round their parking lots early on a Sunday morning, the Tesla lot had 20 or so vehicles, from a variety of other manufacturers. The Ford lot had one each of every current Ford model, still with their 'new car' stickers, and nothing else at all.

Numbers from June 2015
Having been counting for another year, here's the update on the numbers. Taking much the same routes with the same frequencies, the number of Teslas we see hasn't increased by much - there was one day when we counted 12, but that was unusual. The number of Fits has also increased. What has changed is that we are seeing more diversity - one or two BMW i3s most days, the same number of electric Focuses and Fiat 500s. About once a week since the start of 2015 we've seen an electric VW Golf and the little electric Mercedes.

Numbers from June 2014
We walk regularly around Los Altos at the weekends. Usually for 3 or 4 miles, at a leisurely pace, so we are out for around and hour and a half. About three years ago, we started counting cars, to compare the frequency of Honda Fits with Ford Focuses. Teslas started to show up, so they were counted too. For comparison, Nissan Leafs were added. At this point, we've been doing this enough that anecdote starts to approach data. Yesterday we saw 6 Teslas, 3 Fits, 1 Leaf and 1 Focus. It has become routine to see more Teslas than Fits.

http://www.cunningsystems.com/2015/06/tesla-town-2
http://www.cunningsystems.com/2014/06/tesla-town
https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/ (image credit)

Last week I bought new underclothes. Being from the UK, Marks & Spencer are my strongly preferred source for bras and underpants - they have a predictable quality versus price trade off, consistent sizing, and reasonable colors for their clothes. Shopping from their web site is significantly preferable to visiting an actual store. The order and delivery details epitomize globalization in the supply chain.

Countries of origin - Bangladesh, China and Cambodia.

Order placed Monday morning Pacific time
Order processed Tuesday UK time
Order dispatched Wednesday from Birmingham, to the East Midlands airport sorting facility
Order arrived at Cincinnati, then San Francisco, then delivered to the Los Altos, California house on Thursday just after noon.

For 10 pairs of underpants, 4 bras, and a pair of leggings, the total charge including taxes and delivery was $86, paid in dollars.
The items arrived inside a Marks & Spencer plastic bag, in their retail packaging. DHL sent a message to say "there's a delivery on the way. It may require a signature. If you aren't going to be at home to take the delivery, feel free to leave a note on the door to say that you don't care if we leave it on the doorstep." This saves lots of trouble and expense both for them and their customer.

References

Marks and Spencer http://www.marksandspencer.com/
Economic globalization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_globalization

Held at the Strand Theatre on Market St - which turns out to be a very reasonable small conference venue in San Francisco, 11 - 12 January 2016

The content was nicely presented - it was marketing, only slightly technical, for Google's internet of Things (IoT) - they'd like to get a constituency of developers who are familiar with the Google Cloud and the Google security model, to work on Brillo, Weave, Beacons, and machine learning.

Updating to add link to all the event video https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOU2XLYxmsILhJSXjIpNxBE5HkND3wFPL Google Developers channel

Brillo - not a scouring pad made with steel wire and embedded soap, but hardware specifications, APIs, runtime environment, libraries and tools - code is written in C or C++
Weave - a messaging service, bootstrapping services, mobile SDKs, a cloud server

The two things were presented as "Brillo & Weave" , said as one word. This was common across presenters.

Beacons are small devices broadcasting Bluetooth low energy in the Eddystone frame format to an Android or iOS app.

The security session was very competent; covered the risks of each component, gave examples related to common consumer experiences, explained the recommendations and tradeoffs. Eminently suitable for early stage experiments, and relies totally on Google's account security. No recommendations for a production environment which wouldn't use Google accounts.

The real time IoT talk used development of a remotely accessible Simon Says game as its working example, and the relevance to production development was even less obvious. It did use the GRPC library, Kubernetes, and protocol buffers.

Coming to this from 4 years hearing about the development and implementation of the sensor network for millions of PG&E meters, this stuff seems oddly light weight. Google Ventures was an investor in SilverSpring Networks, who build the wireless NICs for those meters. However, that's the Industrial IoT, and this event was for consumer oriented developers. There is a E-SIM for consumer devices specification which is intended for production.

All the support for the event was excellent. I listened to part of the livestream on the first day, then went in person on the second, having joined the Slack channel. Swag included a Dragon board, LEDs, and a Beacon as well as Cardboard. Video of the presentations is on Youtube.

https://ubiquity.withgoogle.com/

https://ubiquitydevs.slack.com

www.brillo.com
https://developers.google.com/brillo/
https://developers.google.com/weave
https://developers.google.com/beacons/
https://developer.qualcomm.com/hardware/dragonboard-410c
Keynote video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZLp2cidEB0

Industrial IoT https://www.cbinsights.com/blog/top-startups-iiot
McKinsey paper on E-SIM http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/telecommunications/E_SIM_for_consumers_...

One of the Scottish Innovation Centres, CENSIS, for Sensor and Imaging Systems, ran a review of current and soon to be available technology in Edinburgh, and invited me along - here are my notes from the event.

Excellently run, some early stage ideas, and some more mature technology. The IoT space is a very long way from turn-key systems and end to end systems architecture, especially for continuous services.

Presenting companies

Odos Imaging, Edinburgh, Less than 10 staff.
3D time of flight cameras, 1280×1024 pixel resolution. Since the event they have launched a developer program.

Global Surface Intelligence, Edinburgh, Less than 10 staff.
Processing time series of remote sensing satellite data for predictive modelling and forecasting.

TRAC Oil & Gas, Aberdeen, Close to 400 staff.
Looking for partners to improve inspection and fault detection in exploration and extraction. Wind turbines as well as pipelines and platforms have corroded and eroded. Finding the faults before they have a major failure is critical. 2 - 4 Tbytes of data can be generated by 2 weeks of testing, and take 6 months of analysis.

IBM
Building alliances and an IoT ecosystem, and a new group with 1300 staff for helping businesses with IoT. BlueMix is the platform (runs on SoftLayer) for an IBM end to end solution.

Libellum, Zaragoza, Spain, 60 staff
Selling a hardware platform (Wasp mote) to cities to enable partners to develop apps. UK installations in Dublin, Newcastle. Use to monitor rubbish bin levels, air quality (sensors on buses), water, parking, street lights, etc.

Stream Technologies, Glasgow 50 - 100 staff
Network as a service specifically for IoT ... cellular, wired backhaul, satellites. ..long term relationships so that sensor data can be got to servers with appropriate redundancy and one bill. A complete 'IoT business in a box' for sale to network operators. Reports live service status.

Attendee companies

DD analytics, Edinburgh, David Alexander Dickie
Medical imaging analysis - demonstrating analysis of brain images, to be used for improving diagnosis.

Sensor-Works, Livingston, Edinburgh, less than 10 staff
Industrial machinery monitoring sensors with very small footprint, both in physical size and power consumption. Neat packaging, can be self-powered from vibration and/or use batteries.

Lockheed Martin - have a strong security focus in the Information Systems and Global Solutions group, and an office in Aberdeen for the oil & gas business.

Cisco Systems - IPv6 was barely mentioned by any of the presenters. IoT devices don't necessarily require IP addresses.

Adrok, Edinburgh
Subsurface scanner using atomic dielectric resonance

References
http://censis.org.uk/about/

http://censis.org.uk/2015/10/28/the-2015-censis-tech-summit-what-a-day/

Slides https://www.dropbox.com/sh/pcti00upgdb344r/AACqzq_oOCx-GwBzVcrkLjv0a?dl=0

http://www.odos-imaging.com/
http://www.surfaceintelligence.com/
http://www.tracoilandgas.com
http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/bluemix/
http://http://www.stream-technologies.com/

http://www.dd-analytics.com/

http://www.sensor-works.com/

http://adrokgroup.com

Ian Reid, CENSIS CEO, did a very good job of positioning the content of the day. The event ran on time, and had a good balance between useful content and time to talk to the other attendees.
Held at the Royal College of Physicians venue on Queen St - good location and very effective venue for this kind of group.

There have now been sightings of the little Google "self-driving" cars - usually with two occupants. They don't come to park in the car park we walk through most days, though, as the Lexus version used to do.

Here's one in the residential streets a few blocks from our house.



29 Oct 2105 Updating to add link to Bloomberg article on GM's self driving car development - very much still work in progress
http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-gm-super-cruise-driverless-car/

Last year at the beginning of June 2014 I wrote a short note on our unscientific observations on the electric car population in Los Altos.

"We walk regularly around Los Altos at the weekends. Usually for 3 or 4 miles, at a leisurely pace, so we are out for around and hour and a half. About three years ago, we started counting cars, to compare the frequency of Honda Fits with Ford Focuses. Teslas started to show up, so they were counted too. For comparison, Nissan Leafs were added. At this point, we've been doing this enough that anecdote starts to approach data. Yesterday we saw 6 Teslas, 3 Fits, 1 Leaf and 1 Focus. It has become routine to see more Teslas than Fits."

Having been counting for another year, here's the update on the numbers. Taking much the same routes with the same frequencies, the number of Teslas we see hasn't increased by much - there was one day when we counted 12, but that was unusual. The number of Fits has also increased. What has changed is that we are seeing more diversity - one or two BMW i3s most days, the same number of electric Focuses and Fiat 500s. About once a week since the start of 2015 we've seen an electric VW Golf and the little electric Mercedes.

This year we have also seen many more Google cars - and as the Oatmeal says, they are programmed to act like nervous student drivers. The density is high - we see several in an hour. They are the Lexus based model, though we are watching for the little ones as described by the Oatmeal's test drive.

References

http://www.cunningsystems.com/2014/06/tesla-town
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2015/05/self-driving-vehicle-prototypes-o...

Notes from the Facebook Networking @Scale event at building 15, on the former Sun campus. 11 Feb 2015

Updated to add - Video for most of the talks is linked here. Slides are visible, but not published separately. https://code.facebook.com/posts/1421954598097990/networking-scale-recap-...

Omar Baldonado, with whom I worked at Netsys Technologies prior to their acquisition by Cisco Systems, was organizing- the event had excellent content, and was well worth the time.

Anees Shaikh Google
Talked about what Google is doing with YANG - need schemas for telemetry - want continuous real time stream for network operations state change. OpenConfig.org Working with IETF - aim is to bring something that works for operators to IETF, not specify there. Want vendor neutral models, with optional vendor additions. Building a model composition framework, from the point of view of 'what are all the components required to stand up a service' - in a time of a few hours, with very few people. This theme came up repeatedly in the FB talks later.

refer to http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/rtg-yang-coord/current/msg00252.html
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-shaikh-idr-bgp-model-00

Michael Payne, R&D, Cloud Development, JPMorgan Chase

He showed an outline design for a network for low latency trading.
They run different networks for different types of trading transactions - are seriously considering using microwave networks - 22 hops between Chicago and New York - to save 3 milliseconds round trip time (9 ms compared to 12 ms using fibre).
They care about and implement time stamps - NTP, IEEE 1588 Precision Time Protocol, and Pulse Per second for tick of time distributed on coax, 10 MHz sine wave output.

Morgan is working on the next generation infrastructure design for IT services. They are particularly concerned about the ability to measure performance, and a design to do it independent of the host systems using packet brokers.

Najam Ahmad, Facebook
They redesigned their data centres for simplicity of implementation - 3 days, 2 people, added 120 boxes to an existing data centre with a design using the Wedge.

This is very close to the slide set from Yuval Bachar https://code.facebook.com/posts/717010588413497/introducing-6-pack-the-f... Mentioned 3 months development time from design to power on for the Wedge, 4.5 months for the 6-pack (which is 12 Wedges, in 7 RU). 1.28 T Broadcom switch chip (as confirmed by the Broadcom VP I talked to), 128 x 40 Gbps interfaces. This rapid turnaround, and ability to implemented new features incrementally on their timescale, is one of the big drivers behind doing their own hardware and software development.

https://code.facebook.com/posts/networking
https://code.facebook.com/posts/681382905244727/introducing-wedge-and-fb...
http://www.opencompute.org/wiki/Networking/SpecsAndDesigns

Artur Bergman, Fastly artur@fastly.com

Building a 'small object' CDN - so they use Akamai for big video streams. For high frequency requests, they've built out an infrastructure using Arista switches, doing BGP routing using Bird. Uses Varnish.
Hardware (this was Aug 14) 2 Intel 2690 v2 (Sandy Bridge) • 10 Cores @ 3 Ghz • 768 GB of Ram • 4x10Gb Ethernet EB82599 • 24*500GB SSD • Intel 3500 • Samsung 840 Pro Hardware
16 Servers • 12 TB Ram • 192 TB of SSD • 640 Gbit/sec Rack
He "hates routers, hates F5"
Network designed with 4 times redundancy of server hardware, so that they don't have to debug on a server running live traffic - relocate the work, get to the failed thing "next Tuesday". Each pod has 4 x 10GE networks + IPMI + a management network (and a switch just for management traffic).
Relocateable MAC addresses on servers.

http://www.slideshare.net/Fastly/fastly-inaugural-nyc-varnish-meetup see slide 29 onwards. Rack picture.

Albert Greenberg, Microsoft Research
Talked about and did a live demo (the only one at the event) of flow tables (Azure Tables) being movable - this talk had the least common context with the other talks. Azure is bringing on 10,000 customers a week. Has 19 regions, 600,000 servers or so per region. albert@microsoft.com
http://www.mellanoxstore.com/resources/ons2014-keynote-albert-greenberg-...

Dave Temkin, Netflix dtemkin@netflix.com

Talked about the physical infrastructure Netflix is using to build out its own CDN (not on AWS so much anymore). 3 Tbs in 6 racks. They were able to get 1 Tbs, 40 kW in Paris Telehouse, to the astonishment of everyone who said it'd been full for years - went there for the best crossconnect (and they are in the attic). Design to two power envelopes. Custom build 18 cable types. MTP cables. Have a 6.5 kW per rack footprint - would like to get to 9kW per rack but most facilities can't support that. Using Arista 7500 switches, with one of 3 configurations depending on size at every PoP. They do no aggregation, have no use for top of rack switches.

https://openconnect.itp.netflix.com/openconnect/index.html

Peter Griess, Facebook
Talked about Mobile Proxygen
Monitoring, troubleshooting tools which are downloaded along with the FB app to the mobile client. Includes SPDY, happy eyeballs, DNS behaviour modifications.

https://code.facebook.com/posts/1503205539947302/introducing-proxygen-fa...

Agenda
http://networkingatscale.splashthat.com/?em=537

Omar Baldonado, Networking Software Manager, Facebook

Extending SDN to the Management Plane
Anees Shaikh, Staff Network Architect, Google

Building Low-latency High Performance Trading Networks
Michael Payne, R&D, Cloud Development, JPMorgan Chase

Facebook Data Center Network
Najam Ahmad, VP Network Engineering, Facebook
Yuval Bachar, Hardware Engineer, Facebook
Alexey Andreyev, Network Engineer, Facebook

CDN Scaling Challenges
Artur Bergman, CEO, Fastly

Synchronous Geo-Replication over Azure Tables
Albert Greenberg, Distinguished Engineer and Director of Microsoft Azure Networking, Microsoft

Scaling the Netflix Global CDN, lessons learned from Terabit Zero
Dave Temkin, Director of Global Networks, Netflix

Mobile Networking Challenges
Peter Griess, Software Engineer, Facebook

Twitter @netatscale
There's a FB group, https://www.facebook.com/groups/netatscale/ described as formed from the attendees.

Had an excellent three days in San Antonio last week, one day at the North American Network Operators Group meeting, one at TechStars Cloud for mentor meetings, and one at the San Antonio Art Museum.

The Nanog venue was the Mariott River Centre, on the Riverwalk - the Riverwalk transforms what would otherwise be a somewhat dilapidated dusty city into something civilized where one can walk, without stopping for streets and traffic, past both history and commerce.

From the agenda, the most interesting content was Geoff Huston's talk on Domain Name System resolvers, filtered by Autonomous System number. He's looking at what it is possible to learn about a large sample of Internet users by looking at their DNS queries and the response - particularly for response times, and for non-locality - DNS leakage across national boundaries. Google's public DNS service resolves for 10% of the Internet user population.

Andre Toonk's talk on BGP hi-jacking, some of which is malicious, is worth review, as are the security track slides.

XKL was a sponsor, as it has been many times, and it was good to talk to former colleagues there. Pica8 are newer - writing software for whitebox switches, located in Palo Alto.

Updated to add - Geoff Huston wrote much more detailed notes on both days.

References

http://nanog.org/meetings/nanog63/agenda
https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/monday_general_resolvers_husto...
https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/monday_general_bgp_toonk_63.18...
https://www.nanog.org/sites/default/files/Kristoff_Security_Track_v1.pdf

Geoff Huston's notes http://www.circleid.com/posts/20150213_notes_from_nanog_63/

www.pica8.com

www.xkl.com