How would you build a system for indexing and monitoring the entire Internet?

Start by breaking the Internet up into IP address ranges. Give each of those address ranges to servers distributed around the world. On each of those servers, iterate through your list of IP addresses, sending packets to them. Depending on what sorts of packets those IP addresses respond to, and what those responses are, you can build a map of the devices on the Internet: what is running on those devices, and what they respond to.

Qadium is a company that indexes and monitors devices on the Internet, to help organizations understand the devices that are within corporate networks. If you are a large corporation, Qadium can probably do a better job of figuring out your Internet footprint than you can.

Matt Kraning is the CTO of Qadium, and in today’s show he describes the process by which Qadium maps the Internet. Matt used to work on data infrastructure at DARPA, and has deployed Hadoop in Afghanistan–so the infrastructure of Qadium seems relatively manageable. Our data conversations in this episode spam from talking about Storm and Hadoop to Google BigQuery, BigTable, and DataFlow.

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