Packet Pushers - Fat Pipe

On this week's Network Break deployment of virtual donuts and tech commentary, Fastly takes out much of the Web but recovers quickly, AWS suffers an outage at a German data center, US law enforcement reclaims a large chunk of Bitcoin ransom, Bosch unveils a new fab to make silicon wafers for automotive chips, and more.

Nick McKeown, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University, stops by the Heavy Networking podcast to speculate on the future of networking. Professor McKeown has been a force behind the Software Defined Networking (SDN) movement and has co-founded successful startups including Nicira and Barefoot Networks.

On today's episode, sponsored by BlueCat Networks, we examine the technology and human challenges that arise when you integrate on-prem and the public cloud. You can't continue to do things in the cloud with traditional toolsets and processes. You need to update the tech and the people, including how they collaborate. We also discuss a new report that examines the need for, and challenges of, integrating networking and cloud teams. Our guest is Andrew Wertkin, Chief Strategy Officer at BlueCat.

Cisco debuts Cloud ACI to unify segmentation policies on prem and in the public cloud, Amazon will activate an opt-out mesh network using your Ring and Echo devices, Microsoft buys an IoT security company, and more tech news in this week's Network Break podcast.

On today's Heavy Networking, we get practical with infrastructure-as-code, talking with sponsor Gluware about how their users have integrated network automation into their IT practices, bringing DevOps to NetOps. We also explore Gluware Lab, an IDE for network engineers can develop network features and workflows. Our guests are Olivier Huynh Van, Chief Science Officer and Co-Founder; and Michael Haugh, VP of Product Marketing.

Crossplane is an open-source project that plugs into Kubernetes to serve as a control plane that can run across multiple private and public clouds. It allows infrastructure teams to compose infrastructure with all the required policies, permissions, and guardrails, while also providing APIs for developer self-service. Today's Day Two Cloud podcast dives into Crossplane and how it works with maintainer Daniel Mangum.

Today's Network Break discusses rising cyber insurance premiums and how wider insurance adoption might affect the security market. We also discuss a forthcoming Aruba AP that uses newly available spectrum, a new packet broker from Extreme with a programmable ASIC, Juniper's Apstra 4.0 release, and more IT news.

Today's Heavy Networking is a nerdy excursion into EVPN VXLAN, including how it works, why you might want it, and why multivendor interoperability is so difficult with this standard. Guest Tony Bourke and host Ethan Banks also explore hardware challenges, automation strategies, EVPN flooding mechanisms, BGP multi-homing, and more.

We're a good ten years into public cloud as an industry, and cloud operations don't seem to be getting any simpler. Why is that? Is it a problem? If so, can clouds become simpler? Guest Brian Gracely stops by the Day Two Cloud podcast to wrestle with these questions.

This week's Network Break covers new firewalls & other security products from Palo Alto Networks, discusses Arista's lowest-latency switch (now with EOS), reviews financial results from Cisco and Palo Alto, and explains why Microsoft is making Internet Explorer go away (just not entirely).

Today on Heavy Networking, we talk with sponsor Arrcus about its support for segment routing and the impact it will have on the wider network market, particularly for 5G networks. Our guests from Arrcus are Keyur Patel, CTO and Co-Founder; and Murali Gandluru, Vice President, Product Management.

A fractured cloud strategy causes headaches such as duplicated services, unnecessary costs, poor security controls, and other problems. A cloud center of excellence can reduce the pain by developing and championing best practices, socializing adoption, and addressing inevitable exceptions. Fred Chagnon visits the Day Two Cloud podcast to advocate for building a cloud center of excellence in your org.

This week's Network Break covers a pair of Cisco acquisitions, new path analysis capabilities from NetBeez, how the DarkSide ransomware gang is getting the spotlight, sleazy behavior from US broadband companies, and other tech news.

Lots of network engineers develop tools to help them automate tasks. What happens if you build something so useful it becomes adopted in your organization? Ivan Del Rio, Senior IP Engineer at DQE Communications, stops by the podcast to talk about a tool he built to automate some of his own tasks that is now being widely used. He discusses how and why he built the tool, and how supporting and developing the tool affects his day-to-day responsibilities.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast explores essential networking capabilities in Azure, including Virtual WAN, VPN gateways, availability zones, SSL termination options, connecting premises and branch offices to the cloud, and more. Our guest is Pierre Roman, Sr Cloud Ops Advocate at Microsoft. This is not a sponsored episode.

Today's Network Break covers IBM's new 2nm chip process, Juniper's first step toward a SASE offering, whether secondary markets for network gear might be an option for companies dealing with supply chain shortages, and more tech news.

Today's Heavy Networking gets into cloud-delivered security for user access. We're sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, and we'll talk about its Prisma Access service with a customer: Josh Dye, SVP at Jefferies Group. We discuss how Josh pivoted to Prisma Access during the pandemic, how he meets strict security and regulatory requirements for financial services, and more.

Today's Day Two Cloud is a wide-ranging discussion about the value of public cloud, a response to the growing backlash toward cloud cost and complexity, and techniques to better meld automation with application and infrastructure delivery. Our guest is Chris Wahl, Senior Principal at Slalom.

Guest analyst Johna Till Johnson, CEO and Founder of Nemertes Research, joins the Network Break to discuss a variety of IT news including the rising price of copper, Proofpoint going private in a $12.3 billion deal, why the US Defense Department suddenly began advertising a huge block of IPv4 addresses, and space networking.

Today's Heavy Networking examines the role of deception and "canaries" in network security. A canary sits on a network segment (or multiple segments) and sounds the alarm if it comes under attack. Is this an effective security tool? How is it deployed and operated? What are the drawbacks? We discuss with guest Haroon Meer.