The Curious Engineer

All blogs / Networking

Systems Approach

systemsapproach.org

Building on the theme of our original book, Computer Networks: A Systems Approach, we are writing books on emerging topics (5G, SDN, etc.).

NetworkingDistributed systems / cloudComputing history

’19’20’21’22’23’24’25’26
Posts
159 from 14 Oct 2019 to 19 Oct 2026
Posting
weekly (26 in the last year)
Kind
project news
Feed
https://systemsapproach.org/feed/

2026 21

  1. 31 Years of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach
  2. Everything is Connected
  3. Welcoming Our Robot Overlords
  4. A Modest Proposal
  5. Reflections on the SIGCOMM 2026 Education Workshop
  6. Framing the Problem
  7. Reality-based Network Operations
  8. What Happened to IP Multicast?
  9. Scaling Real-time Streaming
  10. Internet → Cloud; Repeat
  11. Textbooks in Tokenland
  12. Sound Advice from the White Knight
  13. Literally Virtualized
  14. Not Your Father’s Internet
  15. QUIC: The Third Transport Protocol
  16. Convergence Takes Off in the Datacenter
  17. Dave Farber And Gigabit Networks
  18. Convergence of Wi-Fi and 5G
  19. Faster than Dijkstra?
  20. No Skyhooks
  21. In Memory of Frank Gehry

2025 26

  1. Holiday Reading
  2. Second-System Syndrome
  3. Foreword to “Network Security: A Systems Approach”
  4. Tradeoffs in System Security
  5. What Artifacts Teach Us
  6. Thematic Consistency
  7. Fitting It All in Your Head
  8. What We Talk About When We Talk About Systems
  9. Deconstructing Trust
  10. Zero Trust Revisited
  11. Let Me Preface That…
  12. Network Security: A Systems Approach
  13. Does DNS Security Matter?
  14. Towards Digital Sovereignty
  15. A Middle Ground for AI
  16. The Power of “Out of Scope”
  17. Securing Internet Infrastructure
  18. Rhetorical Devices
  19. Communications for Engineers
  20. Should You Build Your Own Cloud?
  21. Overlays For The Win
  22. Internet Research: What Happened to Ossification?
  23. My Fediverse Report Card
  24. It’s a Judgement Call
  25. Labels Upon Labels
  26. Secure From the Ground Up

2024 26

  1. Holiday Reading
  2. Three Packets Walk Into a Tunnel
  3. The Last Tool You’ll Ever Need
  4. Learning From Our Mistakes
  5. Repeatability: As Difficult as it is Important
  6. Can Passkeys Replace Passwords
  7. What I Did Over Summer Break
  8. Can LLMs Be Used in Networking Education?
  9. This is Not a Pipe
  10. How the Hourglass Won
  11. What is Network Architecture, Really?
  12. Adventures in Automation
  13. Programming Network Systems
  14. Is Security Getting Worse or Better?
  15. Automation: An Over-Constrained Problem
  16. What Happened to Network Automation?
  17. On Taking Ownership of the Edge
  18. Security and the Internet Hourglass
  19. More Thoughts on Elegance and Simplicity
  20. Making Computers Useful
  21. Elegance: The Undervalued System Requirement
  22. Revisiting Blockchains
  23. Decentralize This
  24. Why Security is Different (or is it?)
  25. How Not to Write About Security
  26. All Things Must Pass

2023 26

  1. Holiday Reading
  2. Outrageous Opinions
  3. The Tip of the Iceberg
  4. Three Years of Systems Approach
  5. Applying a Systems Lens to Software Testing
  6. Network Virtualization Revisited
  7. Democratizing 5G
  8. How Congestion Control Saved the Internet
  9. Abstraction Merchants Revisited
  10. Looking inside Large Language Models
  11. Abstraction Merchants
  12. The Challenge of East-West Traffic
  13. OnRamp: Incrementally Mastering Complexity
  14. 60 Years of Networking
  15. Open Source: Another Value Proposition
  16. Escape from Big Publishing
  17. The Future of P4, Revisited
  18. How SDN Came to the Wide Area
  19. Private 5G: As Easy As Wi-Fi*
  20. Was MPLS Traffic Engineering Worthwhile?
  21. RPC vs TCP (Redux)
  22. Putting Large Language Models in Context
  23. It's TCP vs. RPC All Over Again
  24. Does Network Slicing Solve a Real Problem?
  25. To Infinity and Beyond
  26. Ageing Like A Fine Wine

2022 26

  1. Stakeholders and #2 Pine
  2. Decentralization Strikes Back
  3. What's in a Name?
  4. Applying a Systems Lens to Mobile Networks
  5. How Traffic Engineering Became A Systems Problem
  6. Boundary Conditions: A Systems Approach
  7. QUIC Is Not a TCP Replacement
  8. TCP: The “P” is for Platform
  9. Is Disaggregation Working?
  10. Can We Unify All These Edge Routers?
  11. Performance Matters for Service Mesh
  12. Omission by Design
  13. Quantum Reality
  14. What's next for P4?
  15. Is Zero Trust Living Up to Expectations?
  16. Observability Joins the List of Essential System Properties
  17. Why APIs Matter
  18. Narrow Waists and Big Ideas
  19. Decentralizing Cellular Networks
  20. Overtaken By Events
  21. SDN and the Alignment of Planets
  22. Venn Diagram Engineering
  23. Was MPLS Necessary?
  24. Read Section 8
  25. Always in the Kitchen at Parties
  26. Light Reading for the New Year

2021 27

  1. TCP x 5G: Mind the Gap
  2. Applying Cloud Native Principles to Wireless Networks
  3. Infrastructure Processing Units: Balancing Generality and Specialization
  4. The Source of Truth Moves to the Edge
  5. What can we learn from Internet outages?
  6. TCP Congestion Control: Acceptable Unfairness
  7. The Importance of Thinking Across Layer Boundaries
  8. SD-RAN: A Familiar Tussle Unfolding
  9. Verified Networks
  10. The Decentralized Internet: Rethinking Trust
  11. Control Planes Are More Than Signalling
  12. Decentralizing the Internet, Again
  13. Range: Why SDN Platforms Should be General-Purpose
  14. Service Mesh and the Goldilocks Zone
  15. If GitOps is the answer, what’s the question?
  16. How Innovation in Computing Drives Networking
  17. Software is Eating the Edge
  18. Service Mesh: SDN for Layer 7
  19. Security is an Architectural Issue
  20. What OpenFlow Teaches Us About Innovation
  21. The Accidental SmartNIC
  22. Defining “A Systems Approach”
  23. Systems Approach Newsletter
  24. Congestion Control And Internet Modeling
  25. Foreword to "SDN: A Systems Approach"
  26. Open Source Network Education: A Systems Approach
  27. 5G and the End-to-End Argument

2020 6

  1. Why 5G Matters
  2. From the Archives: Foreword to the First Edition
  3. Foreword to Computer Networks: A Systems Approach (Sixth Edition)
  4. A Conversation with SDN Pioneer Martin Casado
  5. A Conversation on the Past, Present and Future of Networking
  6. It's Been a Fun Ride

2019 1

  1. Demystifying 5G