Packet Pushers - Fat Pipe

This week's Network Break checks the fine print on a Google pledge to phase out third-party cookie tracking, examines a serious attack against Microsoft Exchange servers, dives into HPE's latest financial results, and analyzes more tech news.

Engineers are skeptical of vendor marketing, which is typically heavy on buzzwords and light on actual information. But technical marketing tries to change that dynamic by creating collateral to help engineers and practitioners understand a product. We get into this world with guest Martez Reed, Director of Technical Marketing at Morpheus Data.

On today's Network Break we discuss a slate of Juniper announcements around new integrations with its Mist platform, plus new switches. HPE acquires a SaaS company for controlling cloud and infrastructure costs, US telcos spend $81 billion on spectrum for 5G, and we dive into the latest round of financial results from SolarWinds, VMware, and Nutanix.

AWS needs a new CEO now that Andy Jassy has been tapped to run the Amazon mothership. Does the cloud giant need a high-powered, Type-A successor to drive AWS's growth, or is it now so dominant that a ham sandwich could run the company? That's the topic for discussion on today's Day Two Cloud podcast.

Today's Network Break discusses an acquisition by Palo Alto Networks that targets the security of Infrastructure as Code, a souped-up firewall for Microsoft Azure, a new private cloud option from Dell, commentary on the wisdom--or lack thereof--about gathering in person in Barcelona for a wireless convention, and more tech news.

Let’s say I host my Infrastructure as Code provisioning stuff locally. It works. It’s nearby. I feel in control. Are there good reasons I should move that stuff to the cloud? Here to help us sort the pros and cons of that question is Calvin Hendryx-Parker. Calvin is the co-founder and CTO of Six Feet Up, a Python web application development company.

This week's Network Break dives into Juniper reorganizing and rebranding automation products as the Paragon portfolio, new SASE and ZTNA capabilities from Fortinet, the rise of cyber-insurance premiums, an HPE server getting launched into space, and more tech news.

Today's Day Two Cloud gets into consulting. How do you start? What does the job entail? Is it a good job to have? How do you build a client base? There are so many questions! We're joined by Michael Jenkins, Sr. Systems Reliability Engineer at Managed Kaos; and Anthony Nocentino, Enterprise Architect at Centino Systems and Pluralsight author, to get some answers.

Take a Network Break! This week we start with a couple of follow-ups, and then dive into the week's news. Arista Networks announced a Zero Trust offering that has room to grow, Google's Stadia game streaming service shuts down its in-house game development studio, AWS and Google Cloud announce their financial results, and more tech news.

Computing power is a vital part of modern life. Should access to that power be more equitably distributed? Is there a role for a public-utility-style cloud that could make computing more cost-effective and accessible to a broader number of constituencies? These are the starting questions for today's episode of Day Two Cloud. Our guest is Dwayne Monroe, a cloud architect, consultant, and author.

Today's Network Break explores new Catalyst hardware and micro switches from Cisco, a new security offering from Fortinet that combines endpoint security with cloud analytics, an Internet sleuth tracking IPv4 shenanigans, financial results from Juniper and F5, and a whopping big investment for routing startup DriveNets.

Today's Day Two Cloud podcast speaks with the creator of the Envoy proxy, Matt Klein, about the challenges of networking, load balancing, and service discovery in microservices architectures. The upshot? Depending on what you're trying to do and why, you may not need a service mesh. You may not need microservices. Sometimes a VM is just right.

Today's Day Two Cloud episode is part one of a two-part show on abstractions. Hosts Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks riff on the idea that "Abstractions are there to save you typing, not to save you thinking." The upshot? Abstractions don't eliminate issues, they just move them someplace else. And that has repercussions for design, development, infrastructure, and operations.

Is multi-cloud real? Some say no, but others know the reality of multi-cloud because they are living it every day. One such human is William Collins, and he joins us to talk through some actual multi-cloud use cases.

There's a lot of hype and fanfare around Kubernetes, but on today's Day Two Cloud episode we'll cut through the hype with a guest who has enterprise experience with Kubernetes and containers--including the pain and problems. Those pains revolve around complexity, the ignorance of the Kubernetes platform, and the disconnect between the designers of Kubernetes and the people trying to use it now. Our guest is Eric Wright, Technology Evangelist at Turbonomic and host of the DiscoPosse podcast.

Corey Quinn stops by the Day Two Cloud podcast to explore the complicated world of understanding and managing cloud costs, CapEx vs OpEx, cloud lock-in, and other tricky issues. Corey is Chief Cloud Economist at Duckbill Group. He also publishes the Last Week In AWS newsletter.

Kubernetes seems like a shining paragon of Ops efficiency, but the reality of running it is quite different. Is your organization up to the task? Is Kubernetes the thing you actually want or need? In this Day Two Cloud episode we talk to Cory O’Daniel and Rishi Malik from Container Heroes, and they have some thoughts on why Kubernetes is wrong for you.

On today's Day Two Cloud we review announcements and make our observations of the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2020 virtual event. That includes a new Kubernetes certification, the results of a Cloud Native survey, the quality of technical sessions, and new product releases.

Consistency is key for your cloud operations team and your end users (be they employees, customers, or developers). On today's Day Two Cloud episode with sponsor VMware, we discuss how to implement consistent operations for your hybrid cloud. Our guests from VMware are Brandon Gordon, Staff Technical Marketing Architect; and Matt Bradford, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager.

Why are we talking about shadow IT in 2020? Didn't we DevOps shadow IT out of the picture? Turns out we didn't. All the initiatives and process changes that were supposed to eliminate the need for shadow IT didn't quite work out the way we expected. Guest Christopher Kusek stops by to talk about why shadow IT still exists, and how to deal with it.