Mastodawn

This week we've been working on our chapter on network operations, historically a backwater for networking, which we aim to bring to the foreground in our next edition. One of the challenges is that there is no one "right answer" - every network has their own operational practices. But one thing we notice is how much the operations of large clouds has come to influence practices in network operations, and mostly for the better. We cover this line of thought in this week's newsletter:

https://systemsapproach.org/2026/06/15/internet-%E2%86%92-cloud-repeat/

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Internet → Cloud; Repeat - Systems Approach

There is a symbiotic relationship between the Internet and the cloud, and nowhere is that more obvious than in network operations

Systems Approach

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Systems Approach Jun 16

If you use early editions of mainstream networking textbooks (including ours) as your archaeological “core sample”, network management is synonymous with SNMP and MIB. That’s how we’ve taught network operations for years, if we covered the topic at all. That started to change in the 2010s with the appearance of modelling languages like YANG, with NETCONF providing the RPC mechanism for interacting with such models.

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Systems Approach Jun 16

Left to their own devices (no pun intended), network vendors were happy to define models for their own products, and there was no clear reason for that to change just because of a move from MIBs to YANG. But maybe it required a cloud provider to push for a vendor-agnostic unification of the models, which is a primary objective of the OpenConfig initiative. Whereas the telcos seem to have depended on vendor tooling, the cloud operators have long used open source tools and their own engineering teams to scale operations. OpenConfig, pushed by Google, is a good example of this, leveraging gRPC (an open source RPC framework) and gNMI (gRPC network management interface).

https://www.openconfig.net/

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OpenConfig

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Systems Approach Jun 16

When we were deciding how to cover network operations in our book, we decided to focus on gNMI rather than NETCONF (while admitting that there are still adherents to the latter). We appreciated the way gNMI leveraged an existing RPC framework rather than creating a new one. And taking the side of the cloud operators is consistent with our belief that operations need to be treated as a first class topic rather than an afterthought.

When we look at how we cover other topics in our book—such as SDN, virtual networks, datacenter networking—they all have large operational components. They depend on programmatic interfaces and centralized control to abstract away the details of managing individual devices. This focus on scalable operations feel like an important theme to highlight in a modern book on networking.

More details here:
https://systemsapproach.org/2026/06/15/internet-%E2%86%92-cloud-repeat/

/FIN

Internet → Cloud; Repeat - Systems Approach

There is a symbiotic relationship between the Internet and the cloud, and nowhere is that more obvious than in network operations

Systems Approach