Network Atlas End of Year 2018 Update

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
1

NANOG Friends,

The final month of 2018 is going to be a busy one for Network Atlas, and while I still have a few spare hours, I wanted to share some exciting updates and address a few questions.

First, I would like to thank all the people who believe in Network Atlas and have helped it get to where it is today. Network Atlas is at its heart a community concept, and it is energizing to see so many of you excited about its potential and interested in making it better.

To that end, the Network Atlas team will be spending the next month working feverishly to improve the product and get it ready for 2019. I am very excited to announce the following list of features that should come online early next year:

  1. Cable system operation status allows users to see which segments are up/down/partial and their last outage, along with textual details of previous outages with potential for links

  2. Cable system information - length, activation date, and estimated end-of-life

  3. Fast page load time of <5 secs for users within the US

  4. 3D data center locations

  5. “Buy capacity” - a form that generates an email to a specified cable owner

  6. Report-an-issue on routes for users to send feedback

  7. Ability for users to receive email notifications about cable status changes ,Option to show subsea cables only , Option to show active cables only, Option to show future cables only

  8. A Time Machine function that will show cables that will be active in the future

  9. Ability to add custom fields in select or all cables to show information such as latency3-tiered Network Atlas Cable

  10. Management UI: Users can:Add/Delete/Replace

I can’t wait to share this next phase of Network Atlas with you all. Once it’s complete, it will truly be “one map to rule them all.”

Next up, let me address the elephant in the room. As many of you know, Network Atlas’ Kickstarter for $100K for 2019 funding came up short of meeting its goal(we cancelled it before the time because many of you reached out wanting to support directly not via Kickstart). However, it was an excellent learning experience, as it provided a chance to interact with potential donors and hear their questions. One of those questions was if Network Atlas could show its 3-year plan for the project. In the interest of transparency, I would like to share with you Network Atlas’ proposed 3-year operating budget as of today.

You can see this as details in our blog - https://www.networkatlas.org/blog/eoy2018

Month of December, we will freeze adding new fiber routes to Network Atlas, this will allow us to focus on working the 10 feature we have explained above. If you want to upload fiber routes you own and authorized, feel free to go to https://kmzs.networkatlas.org and upload them and please include your email address in the file name (or create a colder with readme in it) so we can reach back with questions. Our self-service portal will solve this issue in January :slight_smile:

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Have a wonderful December, and a happy new year!

Mehmet

2

Hey Mehmet,

  Thanks for putting together this resource for the community.

  Can you expand on some of these line items? I'm at a bit of a
loss as to how a community funded, crowd-sourced service likes this
needs 18% of its budget allocated to travel.

  What am I missing?

  Thanks!

  --msa

3

Hi Majdi,

https://www.networkatlas.org/blog/eoy2018

Hey Mehmet,

Thanks for putting together this resource for the community.

Can you expand on some of these line items? I’m at a bit of a
loss as to how a community funded, crowd-sourced service likes this
needs 18% of its budget allocated to travel.

How are you calculating the 18%?

4

Hi Majdi,

https://www.networkatlas.org/blog/eoy2018

Hey Mehmet,

Thanks for putting together this resource for the community.

Can you expand on some of these line items? I’m at a bit of a
loss as to how a community funded, crowd-sourced service likes this
needs 18% of its budget allocated to travel.

How are you calculating the 18%?

36000/313000 * 100 = 11.5% (maybe majdi included the line item above as well?)

5

Ok, I am just excited to share this so won’t wait till January :slight_smile: Time Machine is ready! What is time machine? Change the time in future, and see which cables will be still operational (aka run out of their life times of approximate 25 years!).

https://dev.networkatlas.org check it out! by the way we are looking for people who can volunteer to demo few features like uploading kmzs, and creating custom fields like latency. If you have free time , please join our slack here . https://join.slack.com/t/networkatlas/shared_invite/enQtNDUwOTIzMDEwODM4LWE5NjNmOWRkMmQxYmYzYWU1YmI0ZmEwNWVlODllY2U1MGU5OTVhZDk4YjA1ZmFiN2VhYWI5ZWUyMGQ0YjU0OTc

Coming soon, the feature that will make engineers life easy “buy now” :slight_smile: watch this space… :slight_smile:

6

Thank you everyone for following up offlist with their feedback and recommendations. I truly appreciate this. I am creating a FAQ section in www.networkatlas.org now as it seemed like several areas needed to be clarified.

What is Network Atlas? it’s a very good question and I want to open that little bit more and ask back to community, what should Network Atlas be? Obviously we are not yet another cable map. When I started Network Atlas, I had one goal and that was to visualize operational status to make it easy for non-tech folks to digest information as well as those who do not acquire backbone directly but suffer when there is an outage to have visibility to backbone outages. We’ve evolved from this point with great recommendations by you guys. One of the most recent recommendation is that we allow people who want to connect to sales people to be able to do that using our tool, but how?

let’s say you zoomed in a metro where you have an office or planning to get a colo space, you will be able to see who the onnet carriers are and connect sales people directly. I want to ask community’s suggestion, is this something Network professionals (engineers mostly, not sales teams) find useful? Would you actually use this function if it was built? This is a very easy function for us to build and we have already included in our demo but the question is if you guys don’t find it useful, then there is no point.

We are also working on similar things like you select a building/pop address and you can hit click to get quote for space/power, all transit providers, and backbone providers at once. Obviously we need to make sure there is a sustainable way to run network atlas so we are not a bottleneck or single point of failure but definitely we are group of engineers not sales people so we do not really know what the best way to build this up.

Our self service portal is working now, what does this mean? Soon, (Q1 2019) you will be able to go to www.networkatlas.org and register a username, upload your own kmzs. we are working on a feature where you can have company.networkatlas.org and custom map (public or private) for your own network where you only see what you care about :wink: this was the most requested feature. We will be able to give you so many choices on customization here. It will be possible to build a map which you can embed to your website as well.

Just wanted to ask feedback on these two features we are working on and see if you guys would find this useful , please feel free to tell me if not, some of the folks really have given me great feedback and i appreciate these. I know a lot of people prefer to deal with carriers/colo providers directly and with lots of mergers and acquisition it might be useful to have one place where you know globally who to contact for wholesale level pricing.

mehmet