Book
Networks, Automation, Connectivity & Data Centres
Twelve chapters from a single packet to a submarine cable. Subnetting worked by hand, BGP and why hijacks succeed, DNS and the two outages worth knowing by name, TLS and the expiry that still takes down companies, cloud networking with the arithmetic, transit and peering, colocation and what an AI rack did to the industry, and four debugging scenarios worked end to end.
Written for infrastructure, platform, SRE and security candidates. No prior networking assumed — chapter 2 starts at binary.
CHAPTER 1
What actually happens when you open a web page
Eight distinct mechanisms, each with its own failure mode. Learn this once and every network conversation for the rest of your career becomes easier.
CHAPTER 2
Addressing and subnetting, done properly
Binary for twenty minutes, then a set of worked examples you can do in your head. This is the most testable knowledge in networking and the most commonly faked.
CHAPTER 3
Switching, VLANs and the layer-2 world
The layer people stop learning about, and the layer that produces the worst outages. A broadcast storm can take down a hospital.
CHAPTER 4
Routing, and how the internet decides where your packet goes
From a static route to BGP. Including why the internet occasionally routes half of Europe through a small ISP by accident.
CHAPTER 5
DNS, properly
A distributed cache with no invalidation, holding up the entire internet. Two of the largest outages in history were DNS.
CHAPTER 6
TLS, certificates, and the outage that happens every year
The handshake, the chain of trust, and the four things that actually break — one of which is still the single most common self-inflicted outage in the industry.
CHAPTER 7
Load balancing, proxies and the edge
Where traffic gets shaped, and where a bad health check turns a small problem into a total outage.
CHAPTER 8
Cloud networking, and the bill it generates
VPCs, security groups, endpoints and egress. The concepts are the same as the physical world with different names and a meter running.
CHAPTER 9
The WAN: leased lines, MPLS, SD-WAN and what actually replaced what
How offices, factories and data centres connect to each other, and why a technology that dominated for twenty years is now a line item people are trying to remove.
CHAPTER 10
Connectivity: transit, peering, exchanges and the commercial internet
The internet is not a network. It is about 75,000 networks with contracts between them, and the contracts explain the routing.
CHAPTER 11
Colocation and the data centre
What you are actually renting, what the bill is made of, and why an AI rack changed the economics of an entire industry.
CHAPTER 12
Diagnosing a network problem, with four worked scenarios
A ladder that bisects the stack, the eight commands that settle each rung, and four real problems worked end to end.
CHAPTER 13
Data centre engineering: what the numbers actually say
Tiers, PUE, rack density and cooling — with the published figures, and the four places the industry's own marketing contradicts its own survey data.
CHAPTER 14
What infrastructure actually costs — India versus the US, worked
The rent ratio says India is 2.4× cheaper. The all-in ratio says 1.3×. The gap is the whole lesson, and it is not where people expect.
CHAPTER 15
Network automation at scale
What teams actually run, why the source of truth decides whether the programme survives, and the failure mode that has no analogue on a server.
CHAPTER 16
Changing a network without losing it
The outage data, the control that recovers a change which cut your own path, and a pipeline that tests before it pushes.
CHAPTER 17
Network observability
Why a five-minute poll conceals the failures that matter, what sampled flow can and cannot prove, and the traffic no switch will ever see.
CHAPTER 18
AI in networks, and what can actually be automated
What works and why, the benchmark that settles config generation, and the one piece of non-vendor evidence that cuts the other way.