Update

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. Tutorial typically is a “view only” event where the audience would be presented with content in the form of slides, live terminal demo etc. It does not involve a hands-on workshop for the attendees as one day time won’t support that.

Last few weeks went extremely busy. Feb + the first few days of Mar were spent in the Philippines for APRICOT 2023. This was the first time I spent close to 15 days at an APRICOT event due to involvement in workshops. Anyways, I enjoyed it. So far I have done this workshop on network automation twice (at SANOG 38 and APRICOT 2023) and both times I get attendees with a different sets of skillset. In SANOG 38 I assumed I will see network admins but the majority of attendees were sys admins. In APRICOT 2023 I assumed there will be sys admins but the majority of attendees were network admins. 😄

Next month will be APRICOT 2023 which is exciting. The last in-person event of such kind was in Feb 2020 in Melbourne. Later APRICOT 2021 & 2022 were completely online (similar to other NOGs). This year’s APRICOT will be in Manila, Philippines. On the agenda will be meetings with network operators, CDNs and internet exchanges in the region. Along with that, I will be doing a 5-day long workshop on “Network Automation for Network Engineers”. This will be a step-upgrade from the last one I did at SANOG 38. One day extra gives me the option to add a CRUD-based app besides REST APIs. Plus I think 5 days will be the longest ever I have ever done in past.

In Hyderabad for the weekend to participate in GFCE workshop at IIIT Hyderabad. I like GFCE workshops as they are short & to the point. This will be my third one after Delhi and Kolkata. These are round table discussions covering concepts like IPv6, routing security, DNS, email security protocols etc. I will be sharing updates on RPKI in the region and participating in the discussion about this wide varieties of topics.

Upcoming presentations

Next week will be APNIC 54 conference followed by SGNOG 9 (Singapore Network Operators Group) event. I will be attending both events. At APNIC 54 I will be doing a short tutorial on “Running Containers in Production” with CI/CD pipelines with a focus on its utility in network engineering and also a panel discussion on “World IPv6 2022 - the story behind the events”. This should be fun!

This week I worked on the paperwork to get on the board of E2E Networks as one of the Independent Director. It was quite an interesting process as this is the first time I am joining the board of directors of an organisation.

 

About E2E

Not to be confused by the “Networks” in the name, E2E is in the business of selling high powered, low cost compute (Virtual machines) hosted in India targeted towards Indian organisations. It’s one of the very few organisations of its kind which is listed at the National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) since 15th May 2018. E2E was started by Tarun Dua and Mohammed Imran. I know Tarun since a really long time (if I remember correctly, probably since 2010). It has been good to see the organisation grow from a very small team to where it stands now. While AWS, Azure and now Google Cloud are helping to grow the market of Cloud Computing, there’s still a gap of providers who can offer much more competitive pricing for the monster machines for lesser overbuild which large cloud providers do.

I am in Noumea in New Caledonia in the Pacific Islands. Next week we have APNIC 46 conference and I would be moderating an exciting panel discussion with friends from Akamai, Cloudflare, Facebook and more about working of CDNs. 

If attending APNIC 46, please come & join this session.

If you are interested in connecting to Hurricane Electric (AS6939) in this region, please do drop me a message.

(List of our PoPs in the region here)

I posted about the home network in multiple other posts in past. I recent time I switched from Microtik SXT Lite 5 to Power Beam PBE-M5-400. This gave me a jump from 16dbi to 25dbi which gives much sharper beam. I also got a harness & climbed BTS myself (after getting permission from the manager) this time to switch gear. I think I can do a better job than wasting time in finding guys from local WISPs to do it. :)   Also, Essel Group launched Siti broadband in my home area and they are using DOCSIS. The network is overall fine though initially faced many outages due to fibre cuts here & there. As of now, the connection is reasonably stable. I am paying 860Rs/month ~ $14 for 10Mbps uncapped link which gives me 10Mbps down and 1.5Mbps up. From a price point, it’s an excellent connection to have for redundancy reasons. Now as the connection is stable enough to explore auto-failover. For last few months I took both primary links as well as backup links to the router in the form of tagged VLANs and used to push specific traffic based on source IP (device at home) or destination IP/port combination using policy based routing.  

Some updates from personal life…

I have joined Fremont based IP backbone & colocation provider - Hurricane Electric and would be working on some cool things at AS6939. :)  

Updates on blog…

I have changed theme and entire look of blog and re-designed it with new plugins, more tweaking etc. As of now blog has more cleaner while theme which gives more space for posting, improved security with some ACLs, forced HTTPS to avoid telcos from injecting iframe in readers on 3G networks (which is very bad and worrying). Also, with use of bunch of plugins, now my I am hosting all static media content on AWS S3 to avoid local storage on server, it’s backup etc. Running it on AWS S3 with Geo replication + Cloudfront for CDN/efficient delivery made much more sense. Though sad that there’s no easy way for integration of Google Cloud storage with wordpress. S3 being more mature product makes it easier.

I would be presenting in SANOG 24 (Noida) on “BGP Route leaks”. Buzz me if you around. Meet and greet me as well as Citycom/Spectranet team :)    

Update: 18th August 2014 Here’s what I presented :) ` author: “Anurag Bhatia” url: “/2014/07/update/presentation-on-bgp-route-leaks-sanog-24/”

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