infrastructure

James Hamilton of AWS gives a Velocity 2010 keynote on datacenter infrastructure innovation, focused on power and cooling costs and a breakdown of where datacenter spending goes.

Kyle Drake of Neocities explains the bandwidth pricing pitfalls of the big cloud providers. He describes how to run high-volume, bandwidth-heavy infrastructure far more cheaply, including through co-location.

An F8 2015 talk touring the tool-chain Facebook uses to let thousands of engineers build mobile apps, including its move to Mercurial, an Atom-based IDE and continuous integration.

A seven-minute Google I/O 2014 talk by Simon Newton on how developers can make use of Google's global network. It describes the network's footprint and some of the services running on it.

James Hamilton, AWS VP and distinguished engineer, gives an insider view of the innovations behind the AWS cloud at re:Invent 2014. He covers custom hardware, networking, regions and availability zones, and infrastructure at scale.

John Graham-Cumming of Cloudflare talks at dotScale 2015 about handling roughly 10 trillion log lines a month. The talk touches on Cloudflare's hardware, its logging stack and its use of Lua in Nginx.

Seattle landscape architect Fred Young gives an hour-long visual tour of Dutch cycling infrastructure, covering design details, continuous networks and how cycling fits daily life in the Netherlands.

James Hamilton's Tuesday Night Live keynote at AWS re:Invent 2016, touring AWS infrastructure at scale including networking, power and custom silicon. It also features NASA JPL's Tom Soderstrom.

Kelsey Hightower introduces Kubernetes to sysadmins at PuppetConf 2016, with a demo. He explains the declarative model and how it changes the contract between infrastructure and applications.

Urs Hoelzle, Google's SVP of infrastructure, gives the 2012 Open Networking Summit keynote on how Google adopted OpenFlow and software-defined networking in its own networks. The slides are linked in the description.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp speaks at MeetBSD about running a messaging service on FreeBSD and Erlang at huge scale. He covers the stack, tuning and the challenges of millions of connections per host.

An AWS re:Invent 2014 talk on the core distributed systems primitives behind AWS and Amazon.com, such as consensus, key-value stores and transactional logging. It describes how AWS builds large services from a few common building blocks.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk argues that networking should be rethought around named data rather than host-to-host conversations. He contrasts the circuit and datagram views of the internet and sketches content-centric networking as a replacement for the location-centric TCP/IP model.

A 2018 GDC talk by NetherRealm's Michael Stallone on the engine changes, optimizations and tooling needed to roll back and re-simulate up to 8 frames in 16 ms in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2. It is a deep dive into deterministic rollback netcode.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk on rethinking networking around named content instead of host-to-host conversations. He recounts packet-networking history and lays out the content-centric networking idea that later became NDN.

Eric Brandwine's AWS re:Invent 2015 session on how Amazon VPC networking works. It covers the problems the design solved, why traditional approaches do not scale, and the mechanisms used for customer isolation and VPC endpoints.

A lightning-style conference talk by Ricardo Signes about the horrors of email: its protocols, formats and decades of accumulated quirks. It is delivered with a humorous horror theme to show why handling email correctly is harder than it looks.

Ricardo Signes' YAPC::Asia Tokyo 2011 talk on the legends and horrors of email: how messy the SMTP and email standards are in practice. The first few minutes are Perl-specific, but the rest applies to anyone handling email.

Moxie Marlinspike's Black Hat talk presenting sslstrip, which defeats SSL in practice by intercepting the http-to-https redirect.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk argues for rethinking networking around named data rather than host-to-host connections. He gives the history and the unsolved problems of the current internet architecture.

A DEF CON 21 talk by Karl Koscher and Eric Butler on how SIM cards work, including Java Card applets, the SIM toolkit and the OS running on the card. It shows how much control the network and the card have independent of the phone.

Dan Tentler's DEF CON 20 talk on odd things he found on the internet through Shodan, such as stoplights, power systems and other non-computer devices exposed online. It highlights how many devices need no credentials.

Susan Crawford talks at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center about her book Captive Audience. She argues that deregulation and consolidation left a few telecom companies in control of American internet access, so people pay too much for slow service.

Jared Mauch tells how he got fed up with poor internet options in rural Michigan and built his own fiber network to his town. The talk was given at NLNOG Live in September 2020.

John Ousterhout's Netdev 0x16 keynote arguing that nearly every aspect of TCP is wrong for the datacenter, from connections and streams to reliable delivery and congestion control. He presents the case for a replacement protocol.

Artem Dinaburg's DEF CON 19 talk on bit-squatting, where DRAM bit flips cause DNS requests to go to domains one bit off from the intended one. It shows how hardware faults can be exploited for hijacking without any software exploit.

Troy Hunt argues that even static, non-secret websites need HTTPS, demonstrating attacks such as injected content and China's Great Cannon. It accompanies his blog post of the same name.

Netflix engineer Drew Gallatin's EuroBSDcon 2022 talk quantifies the older FreeBSD optimizations that let Netflix serve web traffic at 800Gb/s, including TSO, LRO, VM page cache zones, asynchronous sendfile and unmapped mbufs.

Cory Benfield's PyCon 2016 talk on building protocol libraries that can be reused widely, using the Python Hyper HTTP project as the example. He argues for separating protocol parsing from I/O.

Full recording of Elon Musk's January 2015 presentation and Q&A at the SpaceX Seattle office announcement. He lays out plans for a satellite constellation to provide low-latency global internet, tied to funding Mars ambitions. Pauses between questions have been edited out.

A NANOG 64 panel with speakers from Comcast, APNIC, T-Mobile and Facebook on deploying IPv6-only networks, including performance data showing IPv6 outperforming NAT-ed IPv4.

Artem Dinaburg's DEF CON 19 talk on bit-squatting, where flipped bits in DRAM cause devices to contact domains that differ by one bit from legitimate ones. He shows how registering such domains can hijack traffic without exploiting any software bug.

A FOSDEM 2023 talk from the Matrix team on Matrix 2.0, covering sliding sync, the Element X client rewrite and next-generation calling. It explains how Matrix aims to match the speed of proprietary messengers.

Google's Amin Vahdat gives the ONS 2015 keynote on Google's datacenter networking, including its custom hardware, software-defined networking and very high bisection bandwidth.

Dan Tentler shows a rapid-fire tour of insecure things found on the open internet using Shodan and his own scanning, from unprotected VNC endpoints to industrial controls. The emphasis is on how little security was considered before connecting them.

Tobias Engel's 31C3 talk shows how weaknesses in the SS7 telephone signaling network let companies and attackers locate, track and manipulate phones from anywhere in the world, with precision down to about 50 meters.

Justine Tunney presents Redbean, a web server distributed as a single actually portable executable that runs on multiple operating systems. It embeds Lua, SQLite and MbedTLS in a fork-based server.

Chris Paget's DEF CON 18 talk on practical cellphone spying, showing how GSM traffic can be intercepted with a fake base station. It covers 2G interception and the weaknesses of cellular networks.

A DEFCON 21 talk by Robert Stucke on DNS errors caused by single-bit flips, which lead to requests for misspelled domains. It shows real-world data on bitsquatting.

A Rocky Mountain IPv6 Taskforce talk in which T-Mobile's Stephan Lagerholm explains how the carrier went IPv6-only using DNS64 and 464XLAT, with a live Android demo and best practices.