The internet protocols are designed to support a (very large) decentralized network from a user access perspective.

The internet protocols are designed to support a (very large) decentralized network from a user access perspective. However, from a business/marketplace perspective, all the major Internet based services (search, e-commerce, social networking) has become monopolistic in nature, i.e. dominated by a SINGLE entity. Similarly, from a network traffic perspective, a majority of the internet’s content is now being stored/serviced by just a few large cloud provider organizations that run huge data centers.

A. Read up on Data Center Engineering and answer the following – i. What are the multi-faceted challenges engineers face in maintaining these data centers? List a few areas, considering different perspectives (reliability, security, energy efficiency, performance etc.).

B. Pick one of the areas in part (A) and describe a specific problem in more detail. Provide some quantification and/or high level analysis to illustrate.

C. In view of recent controversies, discuss some of the ethical responsibilities of a network engineer working for a company like Facebook, Google or Twitter. For example, consider a) how these organizations prioritize news or other commodities that have a public mission, or b) how they respond to hacking or other issues like poor software engineering practices (resulting in known bugs in user-facing code) or malware etc. and discuss the role of engineers’ vigilance (or lack thereof) in the face of such escalating threats.

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