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. 😄

Last month I got access to Jio 5G like everyone else around in Haryana. They are running a beta program with uncapped data for now. Overall it works fine for usual stuff (web surfing on popular sites, YouTube videos, music streaming etc) but 464XLAT seems to be a little buggy in IPv4 hardcoded destinations. Initially it was giving quite a few issues but many of them seem to be fixed in last few days.

Last year had many interesting developments and one of that has been object storage. For those unaware, object storage is de-facto cloud storage which stores data as objects instead of file system architecture. This gives the option of simple plug-and-play horizontal scalability. It became popular when Amazon Web Services (AWS) launched S3. The idea was straightforward - pay-as-go storage with a few cents/GB/month charge to store data and a few cents/GB to egress data. No need to plan storage, no need to plan hard disk, storage servers, or rack capacity but a simple pay-as-you-go opex cost. Plus top tier cloud players do offer redundancy of data. The API replies with “success” on uploads only when data is replicated to multiple datacenters.

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.

More and more EVs (Electric Vehicles) are visible on the road as time is passing. On two-wheelers, it’s getting quite common. I don’t have sales stats but I can see as many as 1-2 scooters are electric out of 10 in the area. In cars, it’s still uncommon but one can see a few Tata Nexon EV and Toyota with green number plates when driving around in Delhi, besides many parked electric cars at terminal 3 in Delhi airport parking.