Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Heavy Networking

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 »

Today’s Heavy Networking comes to you from the AutoCon2 tech event being held in Westminster, Colorado. This episode was recorded in conference room on site at AutoCon2 in November, 2024. The format? Roundtable. Four network automators have raised their hand and brought topics they want to discuss. Those topics include: Crafting tools to “listen” to... Read more »

Today on Heavy Networking, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we explore how virtual patching can be used to protect IoT and OT devices. Virtual patching leverages intrusion detection and intrusion prevention, combined with threat research, to block exploits targeting IoT and OT devices. Why would you use virtual patching? When it comes to IoT and... Read more »

The BGP Monitoring Protocol, or BMP, is an IETF standard. With BMP you can send BGP prefixes and updates from a router to a collector before any policy filters are applied. Once collected, you can analyze this routing data without any impact on the router itself. On today’s Heavy Networking, we talk with Bart Dorlandt,... Read more »

On today’s episode, artificial intelligence with sponsor Selector.AI. If you’re curious and maybe still skeptical about the value AI brings to network operations, listen to this episode. Selector is on the forefront of AIOps for networking, building models that are customized and specifically targeted at networks. What Selector is doing is NOT simply the low-hanging... Read more »

On today’s episode, we chat with wireless ISP engineer Elijah Zeida. Elijah had an interesting connectivity challenge to solve for a remote mountain town that relies on a wireless connection for Internet access, and not much budget to solve it with. But he got it done by building his own SD-WAN using Mikrotik boxes and... Read more »

Alkira provides a Multi-Cloud Networking Service (MCNS) that lets you connect public cloud and on-prem locations using a cloud-delivered, as-a-service approach. But Alkira offers more than just multi-cloud connectivity. On today’s sponsored episode of Heavy Networking, we dig into Alkira’s full set of offerings, which include networking, visibility, governance, and security controls such as firewalls... Read more »

Ethernet competes with InfiniBand as a network fabric for AI workloads such as model training. One issue is that AI jobs don’t tolerate latency, drops, and retransmits. In other words, AI workloads do best with a lossless network. And while Ethernet has kept up with increasing demands to support greater bandwidth and throughput, it was... Read more »

AI is finding its way into more and more consumer and business applications. In particular, the widespread use of Generative AI raises a serious question: how secure is it? In this sponsored Heavy Networking episode we discuss security risks of AI tools and ways to mitigate those risks. Our guest is guest Rich Campagna, Senior... Read more »

On today’s episode, guest James Henderson joins the Packet Pushers to discuss Cisco’s Network Service Orchestrator (NSO). NSO’s role in network automation, its declarative management approach, and the challenges it presents are some of the things James shares with the hosts. They also cover operational requirements, deployment challenges, and performance considerations, in addition to discussing... Read more »

Our topic today is digital twins. Sponsor Forward Networks offers software that creates a “mathematically accurate” copy of your network, be it on prem or in the cloud. We talk about what “mathematically accurate” actually means, and how a digital twin can support network operations including change control, network automation, visibility, and troubleshooting. We also... Read more »

The Packet Pushers and guest Mason Reimert discuss strategies he’s using to prepare for the Cisco CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure lab exam. Mason shares practical tips for hands-on labbing for both established and emerging technologies like SD-WAN and SD-Access, resource management, virtualization tools, and automation. He also highlights the importance of understanding APIs, data formats, and... Read more »

On today’s episode, we cover open source Clabernetes, a tool that allows you to run Containerlab on Kubernetes. Containerlab provides a CLI for orchestrating and managing container-based networking labs. It starts the containers, builds a virtual wiring between them to create lab topologies of your choice and manages the lab’s lifecycle.  We discuss the answer... Read more »

On today’s episode of Heavy Networking, Rob Sherwood joins us to discuss the impact that High Performance Computing (HPC)and artificial intelligence computing are having on data center network design. It’s not just a story about leaf/spine architecture. That’s the boring part. There’s also power and cooling issues, massive bandwidth requirements, and changes in how we... Read more »

Our Heavy Networking guest today is Hans Driessens, and we sat down at AutoCon1 to talk through some of his network automation projects. Hans shares his journey from a service engineer to a consultant specializing in network automation. We discuss the evolution of programming languages, the importance of foundational programming skills, and the practicalities of... Read more »

On today’s episode we delve into OSPF filtering. That is, how to filter routes from a device’s routing table in an OSPF environment. This is a tricky business, because OSPF requires an identical database on every device in an OSPF area. That means you can’t stop announcing a route from one OSPF router because you... Read more »

Today’s episode of Heavy Networking comes to you from AutoCon1 in Amsterdam, recorded live on premises. In today’s network automation discussion, we cover abstraction layers with guest Jaakko Rautanen. Practically speaking, what are abstractions, and how do they help make your network automation project successful? We’ll also discuss some of our guest’s automation projects, how... Read more »

Today we explore a network automation use case for configuration compliance in the face of never-ending common vulnerabilities and exposures, or CVEs. If you can automate that compliance, you have a shot at keeping pace with the bots and attackers attempting to exploit those CVEs and breaching your network. Our guest is Rekha Shenoy, CEO... Read more »

AI is making its way into network automation. Maybe the thought of a hallucinating ChatGPT getting its six-fingered hands on your network makes you want to run the other way. But the story of AI for IT operations is more nuanced than the hot takes we get about the confidently dumb results that Large Language... Read more »

On today’s show we talk about designing a network to support hybrid cloud deployments. That is, building and operating a network to interconnect the Big Three US public clouds (GCP, AWS, and Azure) as well as on-prem infrastructure to support a variety of applications and workloads. The network design had to meet several requirements, including... Read more »

Ready to take a trip back to the 1980’s and learn some networking history? We talk with Alan Kirby, who was there forty years ago when the first Ethernet bridge was created at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). He explains the story of why and how it came to be. We discuss how Ethernet compared to... Read more »

When you think of IETF, you probably just think of defining protocols, but its new NMOP working group is all about helping network operators identify issues and deploy solutions, including those that pop up around automation. Mahesh Jethanandani is an Area Director (AD) for Management in IETF, which oversees the NMOP WG, and joins the... Read more »

High Frequency Trading in finance demands the utmost quality and speed from a network, making flawless observability a must. Our guest today is Radu Ionco from Jump Trading, and he tells us about how they built their own custom network observability platform, even creating a monitoring system for the monitoring system. We talk through streaming... Read more »

Fortinet’s Unified SASE provides consistent security controls and policies both for traditional campuses and the hybrid workforce.. Nirav Shah joins us to explain how Fortinet is positioned to do this: a foundational software developed for 20 years, a network of over 140 POPs, a security lab with over 1,000 researchers, continuous ZTNA verification proxies, and... Read more »

Greg Ferro, co-founder of Packet Pushers, is signing off. After years of frustrating health issues, he’s decided to fully step back from podcasting and industry analysis to take care of himself. After 14 years, today is his last appearance on Heavy Networking. In this parting episode, Greg shares his final dose of incisive insights and... Read more »

Today on Heavy Networking, sponsored by Broadcom, we talk about VMware’s transition under Broadcom’s ownership. The acquisition has led to big changes that rolled out very quickly, including how VMware sells products and services – subscription only licensing, bundles of products, a hard stop on sales of existing licenses, overhaul of license issuance, and more.... Read more »

The variety and number of OT devices continue to grow at such a pace that network engineers really need to think through how to manage them as part of their broader network. Dan Massameno joins the show to talk about how he’s collaborating with his facilities department and using SD-Access to manage the OT virtual... Read more »

Welcome to the second part of our interview with friend of the podcast, Russ White. We start our conversation with a listener question about VXLAN/EVPN which acts as a springboard for what Russ really thinks about network engineering these days. He defends network snowflakes, championing their power in business use cases. He questions the merit... Read more »

We turn the nerd meter up to eleven on today’s episode with longtime friend of the show, Russ White. First we dive into how an Ethernet adapter knows when a link is lost, where Russ teaches us all about loss of carrier and OAM. He also gives us a tutorial on how the rest of... Read more »

The future has arrived: 800 gig Ethernet is here. Amit Bhardwaj and Dmitry Shokarev from today’s sponsor, Juniper Networks, join the show to tell us all about Juniper’s 800 gig Ethernet and what we need to know as engineers: use cases, transition plans, fiber and power needs (a lot less than you’d think). We also... Read more »

What if instead of sending multiple queries out to APIs and getting disparate data back, you could just send a single query and receive a single answer. That’s exactly what GraphQL does for you. Rick Donato joins the show today to teach us about GraphQL and how it can help us on the path to... Read more »

If you haven’t made the leap from traditional wide area networking to SD-WAN, or perhaps you’re thinking about adding security services to your SD-WAN infrastructure, this episode is for you. Rajesh Kari from Palo Alto Networks joins the show to share customer stories from the front lines of multi-branch businesses’ networks. Industry verticals including retail,... Read more »

With “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” as his guide, Srivats launched Ostinato, his open source project, in 2010. He needed an affordable network traffic generator at his day job, he was passionate enough to build one during his nights and weekends, and end users loved it– it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times.... Read more »

To run AI workloads, a network needs thousands of GPUs and those GPUs must operate in sync. If there is congestion or dropped frames, very expensive efforts could be delayed or disrupted. While there are advantages to using Ethernet for AI networking (including engineers well-trained in the protocol and a robust ecosystem), it wasn’t designed... Read more »

Where there are containers, there is networking. Today we dig into the networking that underlies Kubernetes, the open source orchestration platform for container-based applications. Our guest Karim El Jamali takes us through the essential concepts: Nodes, pods, clusters, CNIs, virtual ethernet pairs, ingress controller, eBPF, and service meshes. As container-based applications grow in popularity, it’s... Read more »

Fiserv is one of the largest payment processors in the world, In 2023 it handled more than 35 billion transactions worth $2.03 trillion US dollars. Its network is critical to the business. The organization knew it needed network automation, but early attempts got some things wrong. On today’s Heavy Networking we talk about how Fiserv... Read more »

Matt Horn built a data center network through automation, remotely. This is the future of network engineering. Matt shares how his team did it technically: Terraform, a little Ansible, leveraging pipelines, etc. But he also shares the processes and culture that made it happen: Management and peer buy-in, tight enforcement based on user access, and... Read more »

Today we metaphorically pop open the hood of switches and routers, taking a look at the mechanics of how they work. We cover the three states: configuration, operational, and forwarding. We talk RIB and FIB, along with CAM, TCAM, and MPLS. We also cover line rate, port-to-port latency, and buffers. Whether it’s been awhile since... Read more »

Right now, we have the building blocks for network automation, but we don’t have end-to-end designs or complete systems. It’s like having a bunch of Legos but no instructions for how to build your spaceship. Ryan Shaw, David Sinn, and their colleagues in the Network Automation Forum are tackling this problem. Their goal is to... Read more »

One dark day, Ivan Pepelnjak stopped labbing. He just couldn’t make himself yet again go through assigning addresses, building links, putting devices in place, setting up OSPF, BGP, VXLAN, EVPN, etc. before even being able to start whatever simulation or test he wanted to do. But from that darkness arose netlab. Ivan created netlab to... Read more »

The days of network cowboy heroism are over… or at least they need to be. It’s time for network engineering to grow up and standardize how networks are built. Not only will this make life easier for all of us as we inherit networks when we move from company to company, but it’s the only... Read more »

Yale’s efforts to load-balance RADIUS servers is a case study in system design for resiliency. First, there was a lone, redundant PSN. Next, F5s load balancers entered the picture. Then the network team realized a feature in IOS-XE was the answer… and brought Cisco along the learning journey with them. Hear it all from the... Read more »

Guest Dinesh Dutt introduces his newest creation, SuzieQ. It’s a network observability platform application that has both a free, open source version and an enterprise version. Lightweight, fast, and platform-agnostic, SuzieQ’s use cases include network documentation, troubleshooting, fabric-wide visibility, network refresh and redesign, low/no code validation, audits and compliance, and proactive health checks. Hosts Ethan... Read more »

Remote and hybrid work means network engineers have to grapple with lossy residential networks such as home wireless that your work-from-home folks are using to access company resources. Their Wi-Fi sucks, and so their use of corporate resources sucks. Sure, you’ve got them plumbed into a SASE fabric, but that doesn’t fix their user experience... Read more »

On today’s episode, we discuss networking sources of truth. That’s right, sources of truth, because you’re likely to have more than one depending on your environment and your point of view. On LinkedIn, Ethan Banks quoted someone at the AutoCon0 conference who essentially said that the network itself shouldn’t be used as a source of... Read more »

At AutoCon0 in November 2023, guest Jeremy Schulman delivered a talk from the main stage about delivering network assurance. If the term “network assurance” doesn’t mean anything to you, think about how you prove after an install or a change that the network is doing what it’s supposed to be doing. If you’re doing it... Read more »

At NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, patients are the priority. That focus on patient care extends to the hospital’s campus network, data center, wireless network, and SD-WAN. These networks are instrumental for delivering medical applications and connecting medical devices. On today’s Heavy Networking, we talk with network architects and engineers at NewYork-Presbyterian about their use of automation to... Read more »

SD-WAN is evolving to encompass more features and capabilities around security, application performance, network visibility, and more. On today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, we look at how SD-WAN has transformed from a simple network connectivity solution to a comprehensive networking and security system. We discuss the limitations of legacy branch routers and... Read more »

Welcome to Heavy Networking! On today’s show we’ve got a roundtable conversation on the state of automation in the networking industry. This show was inspired by the recent AutoCon conference, which is a new conference focused specifically on network automation. Ethan Banks and I both attended, as did two our guests, and we’re going share... Read more »

Today we’re talking security, but security you don’t always see. Fortinet, today’s sponsor, has millions of devices in the field. These are real-world devices seeing real-world traffic, all day, everyday. While those devices have a primary protection role, they can also serve as sensors that collect threat signals and feed threat intelligence services that can,... Read more »