Syllabus
Books
The books below are optional but nevertheless useful throughput the course.
-
Dinesh G. Dutt, Cloud-Native Data Center Networking, Architecture, Protocols and Tools, 1st Edition. 2019. This book is referred to as DUTT in the rest of the syllabus.
- This book will provide the necessary background to understand the networking technologies and architectures that constitute today’s multi-cloud (edge-core) networking environment. The book may be downloaded from here. Note also the author’s Github code.
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Marko Lukša, Kubernetes in Action, 1st edition 2017. This book is referred to as LUKSA in the rest of the syllabus.
- This all times classic (2nd edition is almost out) will be used for you to create networks and run cloud native applications that require monitoring, resource (re)scheduling and ingress networking. If you purchase this book from the publisher the 2nd edition you will get for free the 1st edition.
Software
In this course we will be using many tools and the programming language of choice will be Python 3. The instructor will provide before the course starts instructions on how to set up your environment and how to get on learning Python if you have no earlier programming experience. Part I and II require AWS Free Tier subscription and associated APIs.
Schedule
The schedule below is based on Academic Calendar Fall 2020:
Themes:
| Part | Lectures |
|---|---|
| Part I: Introduction to Cognitive Networks | 1-6, 8 |
| Part II: Cognitive Network Apps | 9-15 |
Details:
| Lecture | Date | Description | Reading List |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 9/8 | Today’s Networking Environment We start by providing a 360-degree view of networking today and where this course is positioned with respect to this vast field. We look at open source initiatives such as Linux Foundation networking and through a historical review we understand why the industry has converged to an (almost fractal) networking architecture where almost every element hides a cloud behind it. | DUTT Chapter 1, DUTT Chapter 2, The Motivations for a New Network Architecture, https://www.lfnetworking.org/, The Journey to Cloud Networking |
| 2 | 9/14 | Massively scalable apps and the disaggregated hybrid network We look at the cloud-native applications we use every day and understand how they affect the requirements of the underlying network. | Slides, DUTT Chapter 3. Network Disaggregation, Cisco Cloud Network Functions, Networking at Facebook |
| 3 | 9/21 | Network Virtualization and Container Networking Containerization (with or without Serverless execution model) now dominates cloud native applications. Here we look at container based networking and the CNI that has allowed a whole ecosystem to flourish around it. | Selected chapters from K8s in Action, CNI |
| 4 | 9/28 | Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) and life on the edge | Notes and various papers / videos, Building a Scalabe and Secure Multi VPC AWS Infrastructure |
| 5 | 10/5 | Network Automation and the transition to Cognitive Networks Network automation now involves far more than big data (log) aggregation and eye-balling dashboards. Network engineers must be familiar with the same tools and processes used in software development. We review the tools and DevOps approaches that together with frameworks that help us learn from network data, they can automate decision making in network management and a microservices based deployment model. | Notes and various papers / videos, AWS CodeStar |
| 6 | 10/12 | Network Monitoring Tools and Network Data Pipelines We look at network monitoring as a pipeline that ingests data from virtualized network elements and perform ETL procedures to generate metrics suitable for upstream applications such as root cause analytics, anomaly detection and others. We dissect AWS CloudWatch as an example of a monitoring system. | Notes and various papers / videos |
| 7 | 10/19 | Good luck with your Midterm | |
| 8 | 10/26 | 5G and Network Slicing (Guest Lecture by Rob Soni) We present the next generation wireless technology that now extends cellular communications to markets such as fiber replacement for internet service provision and space communications. 5G will be powering industrial automation and many other multi-tenant applications. We treat the open cloud RAN in particular. Lecture will be open to the wider NJIT YWCC community to watch remotely. | Slides |
| 9 | 11/2 | Learning from network data - Going beyond Metrics In this lecture we start looking at the methods that allow us to learn from network data. We provide an overview of supervised and unsupervised learning and use AWS Sagemaker to detect network anomalies. | Notes and various papers / videos. |
| 10 | 11/9 | Chaos Engineered Networks With so many interacting components, the number of things that can go wrong in a distributed system is enormous. You’ll never be able to prevent all possible failure modes, but you can identify many of the weaknesses in your system before they’re triggered by these events. | Notes and various papers / videos. |
| 11 | 11/16 | Location Intelligence A significant and current application in network data mining is to extract location information of mobile end users. We see it right here at NJIT with a COVID19 contact tracing solution based on network monitoring of wi-fi connected users. | Notes and various papers / videos, AWS Wavelength |
| 12 | 11/23 | Real-Time Communications We will use services such as AWS Kinesis Video Streams to develop our understanding on WebRTC and how to optimize the delivery of Zoom-like applications using the analytics services provided by the cognitive network layer. | Notes and various papers / videos |
| 13 | 11/30 | Machine Learning for Cyber-security If there is one signature area that the AI/ML has been deployed in production is to detect and increasingly counter-attack when our network is facing cybersecurity threats / active attacks. We will look at specific real-world examples and AWS VPC Flow Logs processed by our ELK instance. | Notes and various papers / videos |
| 14 | 12/7 | Video Streaming and Content Distribution Networks For the dominant traffic type of the internet today we focus our attention to the engineering of AWS media analytics services that provide to the service provider complete visibility of the quality of experience by the video streaming users. | Notes and various papers / videos. Code |
| 15 | 12/14 | Review of everything that we will be testing in the final. | |
| 16 | 12/21 | Good luck in your Final |
Projects
For details on the three projects you need to submit see Projects page.