Comment by ca508

9 hours ago

We didn't find many good up-to-date resources online on the hardware side of things - kinda why we wanted to write about it. The networking aspect was the most mystical - I highly recommend "BGP in the datacenter" by Dinesh Dutt on that (I think it's available for free via NVidia). Our design is heavily influenced by the ideas discussed there.

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ca508

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chatmasta  7 hours ago

What was the background of your team going into this project? Did you hire specialists for it (whether full time or consultants)?

  • ca508  6 hours ago

    We talked to a few, I think they're called MSPs? We weren't super impressed. We decided to YOLO it. There are probably great outfits out there, but it's hard to find them through the noise. We're mostly software and systems folks, but Railway is a infrastructure company so we need to own stuff down to the cage-nut - we owe it to our users. All engineering, project management and procurement is in-house.

    We're lucky to have a few great distributors/manufacturers who help us pick the right gear. But we learnt a lot.

    We've found a lot of value in getting a broker in to source our transit though.

    My personal (and potentially misguided) hot take is that most of the baremetal world is stuck in the early 2000's, and the only companies doing anything interesting here the likes of AWS,Google and Meta. So the only way to innovate is to stumble around, escape the norms and experiment.