To avoid losing focus on what I’m doing and what I want to write, I’ve decided to briefly sum-up the projects that I’m working on, some of them are purely theoretical. I do a lot of research and development but still, I always try to keep my foot on the ground it’s easier to deal with the real world if you observe and learn from it, instead of take for granted something written in a paper or a manual.
Easy to explain projects:
- The first company I own and run a Datacenter (I run the network, virtualization, telemetry, automation, workflow and of course corporate stuff)
- The consulting job It’s more interesting: I work for a Television Broadcaster and despite my IT background and the reason why I was hired in the first place I’ve ended up doing a lot of broadcasting tasks and development
More complex projects (IT):
- as a proof of concept, I’ve started more than 10 years ago a project named wide-net.org with the assumption to build an experimental enterprise network (for running collaboration and services of any kind) funny enough it became the foundations on which the datacenter and the entire network management and delivery run. At this point, the original project doesn’t really exist anymore the technology changed a lot since were I started so it doesn’t really make a lot of sense to continue and the strategic components are now part of the company assets, but the intellectual property of the project itself it will be always open
- as a byproduct of running the network in a modern datacenter, I spend a lot of time developing software-defined solution for the BGP routing and of course, automating everything, again it’s started as a proof of concept to do cost saving on the border routers and really quickly became the new production standard. Right now we are running the 4th generation of routers for the AS201333. Once again I’ve decided to not keep any intellectual property for myself, my company sell services don’t sell routers and even if is the core of a Datacenter I don’t think I’m giving up competitive advantage sharing the project
- Telemetry and Automation, I love telemetry and automation of any kind I’m doing this since ever from a physical PLC to deployment on some virtual infrastructure, right now I’m working on the network side I’m embracing the spine-leaf architecture a lot and soon enough became clear manuals configuration were not an option anymore, this is a requirement also for the next point
- DCI over VXLAN I’m in the process developing a stable solution to do the DataCenter Interconnection using VXLAN to decommission some the VPLS and OTV segments, as I’ve mentioned before this task need solid automation otherwise it can be very painful to run operations
- some advanced sFlow (or other native protocols) telemetry collector and aggregation for the internet traffic
More complex projects (Broadcasting):
- video signals are in the process of moving from some legacy SDI to some sort of IP based, I don’t really want to get into specific of any protocol, there are a lot of very compelling theories and explanations about the usage of 2022/2110/NDI/SRT but you’ll always end up with the wrong one, and deploy some sort of MPEG-TS/RTP as a backup solution because it just works and glues everything together
- video low latency streaming for monitoring live events and studios operations, this is a very specific usage for a broadcast centre because the ops response it’s very time-sensitive, to be honest, I found more fun working with this rather than doing some OTT and end-user CDN distribution
- video analysis for remote operations: this is another very interesting topic to me, I don’t think any explanation why in the year 2020 we needed the ability to analyse baseband video signal and making decisions from home, this is complementary to the ability to do engineering task also remotely
- subtitle related to a baseband signal, ok this topic it’s nothing new or technologically advanced but still
- timing and sync are the heart of the television and production centre and of course, new technologies need more accurate and something over IP timing solution like PTP, it seems an easy task to run some timing protocol over the network, trust me it’s not
- this is more a pet project than real work, I’m also writing an API gateway to control the cross point on some legacy video router, so far I’ve got right the XY-passthrough and the XY-console for any Leitch/Harris/Immagine router
- onair graphics: seriously I don’t even know I ended up doing that, basically, I’m trying to build HTML5 alpha rendering machine capable to produce some SDI FILL + KEY signals usable on a DSK
More complex projects (Physics):
- well, it’s almost a paradox because I’m always late (I value more been on-time delivering a project rather be punctual or present in some useless meeting) but one of my hobbies is the precise measure of time, in a few words I build atomic clocks. Right now I’m trying to put together an industrial solution for the datacenter timekeeping with the proper NTP and PTP interfaces
- I would love to have a remote telescope in some remote area with less light pollution than where I live, but still, it’s just a nice idea only
- I would like to have a radio telescope