Packet Pushers - Weekly Show

While studying for the CCIE Service Provider certification, Andrew Ohanian assembled a workbook to help him prepare. It’s packed with lab exercises, and Andrew has turned it into a free Web resource that anyone can access. On today’s Heavy Networking, we talk with Andrew about what’s in the guide, the state of the CCIE SP,... Read more »

On today’s Heavy Networking we talk with Dan Wade about testing the network, inspired by Dan’s talk at AutoCon 2: “Step 0: Test the Network.” We discuss why testing is a good idea, and then explore four types of network testing, including unit tests and integration tests. We dig into Yang, RESTCONF, NETCONF and gNMI... Read more »

On today’s Heavy Networking, a roundtable panel considers whether a modern network needs to be built around underlays and overlays. This isn’t just Ethan yelling at clouds. This is a legitimate question pondering the real-world value of an overlay/underlay approach. Is overlay everywhere overkill, or is that the architecture we need to deliver a safe,... Read more »

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a very new protocol that provides a standard way to link AI models to a variety of data sources and tools. As the industry heads toward agentic AI–in which an AI agent interacts with disparate applications, data sources, and other agents to achieve a task–MCP provides the protocol glue. On... Read more »

Today’s Heavy Networking is all about overlay technologies, their history, development, and current state, both from engineer and vendor perspectives. We discuss why the industry turns to overlays to solve problems, and look at overlay and segmentation approaches including VXLAN, SRv6, and EVPN. We also drill into the idea that EVPN could become the standard... Read more »

Network security has evolved from stateful perimeter firewalls with maybe some IDS/IPS to a complex stack delivered as numerous unique tools, which often don’t talk to one another and may need to be operated by specialists. In this environment it’s hard to unify a security policy, troubleshoot problems, manage and operate tools, and respond effectively... Read more »

On today’s Heavy Networking, we’ll discuss building a Slackbot wired to an AI and trained on your own organization’s knowledge. The potential use cases for network operations are fascinating, and today’s guest, Kyler Middleton is here to explain the finer details on how to do it and point us to free resources created so that... Read more »

IT and infosec professionals are used to operating and protecting mission-critical infrastructure; servers, databases, load balancers, and so on. But what about valves that control the flow of gas or oil in a refinery? Temperature and vibration sensors that monitor industrial manufacturing processes? If you’re thinking “That’s not my problem” think again. There’s a whole... Read more »

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) is an industry body that aims to optimize Ethernet for AI and HPC use cases. On today’s Heavy Networking we get an overview of the UEC and an update on its efforts. We’re joined by J Metz and Rip Sohan, both heavily involved with the UEC. We discuss the consortium’s... Read more »

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is all about understanding a user’s application experience, and pinpointing problems if the experience is bad. Under the DEM umbrella, you’ll find Internet Performance Monitoring, or IPM. That’s our topic in today’s episode with sponsor Catchpoint. With more and more applications hosted in the cloud and more employees working remotely, organizations... Read more »

The CCIE remains the gold standard for networking certifications. But these days there are lots of other avenues for developing your skills and advancing your networking career, including network automation, cloud networking, and yes, even AI. So is the CCIE still worth it? We chew on this topic with Eman Conde. Eman has been known... Read more »

In our conversation today with CTO Cameron Daniel of Megaport, we discuss their global WAN architecture, PoPs, use cases, the Megaport Cloud Router, and more. Megaport is our sponsor today. It’s accurate to describe Megaport as providing Network-as-a-Service. Megaport’s automated connectivity solutions enable rapid provisioning of circuits, contrasting sharply with traditional telcos. The discussion also... Read more »

Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) is a framework that developers use to help them manage and integrate frequent code changes. As network automation evolves, should network engineers adopt CI/CD? Guest Tony Bourke joins us to talk about CI/CD pipelines: what they are, how they’re used, and how they can support network automation efforts. We... Read more »

Connecting your branch to your wide area network used to be simple enough. Call your carrier, get a circuit ordered, wait a long time, then turn it up. A little routing, and there you were. Cloud blew that model apart. Now when we connect branches to our corporate networks, we have to consider not only... Read more »

Unless you’re building out AI infrastructure at a hyperscaler, you probably don’t have unlimited dollars. On today’s Heavy Networking we talk with guest Frank Seesink about how to build and operate networks effectively when money’s tight. We look at free and open source tools, talk about the trade-offs that come with free software, and how... Read more »

On today’s show, we’re discussing the complexities of network design for AI computing at the edge. We’re not talking about AIOps, although that might come up in this conversation. Instead, we’re focusing on how to effectively cope with the network traffic patterns happening on your network as a result of AI computing workloads. Our subject... Read more »

Many of us have had network design discussions relating to natural disasters. What if a fire comes through? Or a flood? For most of us, those discussions don’t feel overly worthy of our attention. Yes, we should think about it. Yes, we should plan for it. If we’re really serious, we’ll even dust off the... Read more »

Do you think you have what it takes to be a manager? Should you go for it? Laura Santamaria, host of the Technically Leadership podcast, joins Ethan Banks to discuss those questions. They talk about the motivations for moving into a management role, the challenges of managing people, and the need to understand the business... Read more »

Packet capture and packet analysis is incredibly useful for problem-solving and troubleshooting. Analyzing packets is also a difficult skill to master. With the incredible array of network troubleshooting tools at our disposal, including emerging networking models for artificial intelligence, do we still need to fuss around with Wireshark in 2025? Our guest Chris Greer says... Read more »

Once you get past a handful of Python scripts, network automation can be…daunting. If you want to make network automation process-driven, repeatable, reliable, and something that doesn’t just rely on your scripts and the knowledge inside your head, there’s an entire landscape that opens up before you. Have you thought about network discovery? How about... Read more »