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Ask HN: How Can I Learn Network Architecture Concepts?

4 points by elbigbad ↗ HN
My job has moved me more from frontend SWE to an SRE/DevOps role and I feel pretty out of my depth in networking conversations. I know some ops stuff, like sshing into linux boxes and fixing things/how to do that. Here are some example topics I keep running into that I seem to know nothing about:

* Looking at proposed network architecture diagrams and everyone else rolls their eyes at 'obvious' mistakes made, I don't see the problem in the design * Segregating traffic based on layer (Oh, well it does that at layer 7, not layer 4) * Flow logs, and where to place monitoring (several times situations have some up where everyone thought it was obvious what was deficient in a monitoring setup, I did not) * BGP and route advertisement in an internal network (looks like the issue is that the routes aren't being advertised properly)

Can someone point me to a resource that would help learn these things pretty fast? An Oreilley Book maybe, or good series of articles?

2 comments

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Yadi
They are talking about the OSI model layer.

I recommend looking into Network+ material, don't do the exam, but I learned quite a lot studying for the exam using the CBT Nuggets videos.

Also, Cisco has the ICND1 and ICND2, or rather called CCNA, which goes into depth on network technologies.

If you're more on the Web technology side, I recommend looking at this book called "HTTP: The Definitive Guide"

By far it was one of the best books I studied in undergrad, it goes over a lot of Network protocol fundamentals.

chatmasta
I spend a lot of time reading about network architecture. The problem is "networking" is overrun with vendor specific terms, technology, and products. It's annoying that if I want to learn about fundamental networking concepts, I need to sort through what jargon is referring to universal ideas, and what jargon is referring to a specific vendor ecosystem. Many experts have a tendency to refer to concepts using terms specific to the ecosystem they are familiar with. Often two vendors will refer to the same concept by two entirely different terms (e.g. competing implementations of the same protocol).

Basically, the namespace for networking knowledge is polluted with proprietary crap from cisco, juniper and the like. The rise of SDN is slowly opening up the networking world, but there are quite a few proprietary holdovers. This makes broad learning quite difficult.