Back in 2017, Google Cloud launched a low-performance tier and effectively gave an option to their customers of “cheaper” bandwidth with slightly reduced performance. This page describes their network tiers in detail. That page says - “Cost optimized: Traffic between the internet and VM instances in your VPC network is routed over the internet in general.” Background For a while, I wanted to find out how this works. In network routing this concept is known as “hot potato routing Vs cold potato routing”.

Last month after the mnNOG 5 event in Mongolia, I got a chance to visit Skytel’s IPTV headend. Skytel is one of the large Mongolian operators doing mobile and fixed-line networks. Tour of network infrastructure is always interesting and this time it was not just IP but broadcast network over the IP which excited me. In past, I have visited datacenters, IXPs etc and those are mostly IP (layer 3) or ethernet (layer 2) networks.

I have been in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia for the last few days. This is my first travel to Mongolia and this far up in the North (except for previous travel to Russia in 2016 and some parts of Nordic areas in Europe). Geographically Mongolia is located between Russia (on the North side) and China (on the South side). I am here for mnNOG 5 event. mnNOG is the Mongolian Network Operators Group.

APNIC 56 is happening next month in Kyoto, Japan. This would be my third-time travel to Japan and besides meeting network operators around the region at the event, I will be doing a one-day tutorial on Network automation with Christoff Visser from IIJ research labs and Abdul Awal from APNIC. The agenda is similar to (though a subset) of network automation workshops I have done over the last few months across different events.

For a while, I have been looking for a smokeping alternative for latency monitoring from different servers spread around. While smokeping has survived well over time, in 2023 it feels like an outdated package, with limited options, lacks federation etc. This post from Karan Sharma / Zerodha on “Monitoring my home network” was exciting. His setup included a telegraph agent on a local server, Prometheus to scrap data and Grafana to draw latency data.