This week marks a decade since the ALBA-1 submarine cable began carrying traffic between Cuba and the global internet. On 20 January 2013, I published the first evidence of this historic subsea cable activation which enabled Cuba to finally break its dependence on geostationary satellite service for the country’s international connectivity. ALBA-1 was one of my first lessons on how geopolitics can shape the physical internet.

There are many factors making networking both more complicated and more critical than ever. The advent of cloud infrastructure, web-based applications, and increasingly diverse network environments demand a new approach to network operations, or NetOps, as it’s referred to in the industry. Networks are bigger than ever: they now connect everything ranging from automobiles to cloud servers.

I spent the last few months of 2022 sharing my experience transitioning networks to the cloud, with a focus on spotting and managing some of the associated costs that aren’t always part of the “sticker price” of digital transformation.

Only two days into the new year, and we had our first BGP routing leak. It was followed by a couple more in subsequent days. Although these incidents were brief with marginal operational impact on the internet, they are still worth analyzing because they shed light on the cracks in the internet’s routing system.

The office network has been in a near-constant state of evolution since dumb terminals and token rings. MPLS unlocked the ability to connect LANs. VPNs allowed end-users to work remotely while still being behind the firewall. Wi-Fi made intra-office travel easy and lessened reliance on extensive cabling. The WAN is slowly giving way to SD-WAN. New software and cloud-based networking componentry are allowing vendors to reimagine firewalls and routing.