A few weeks ago we published the draft of Computer Networks: A Systems Approach (7th edition) and asked for feedback. One of the most helpful responses was from a networking practitioner who commented on our treatment of network operations. His point was that we had focused too much on the perspective of large cloud operators and not enough on the "real world" of traditional network operators. In this week's newsletter we wrote about the difference, which has a lot to do with how much you can make the network conform to a "clean" model versus needing to deal with the messiness of heterogeneous systems in the real world. https://systemsapproach.org/2026/07/27/reality-based-network-operations/ 🧵 1/n