Packet Pushers - Fat Pipe

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.

Each week Network Break runs vendor press releases through our patented ML algorithms to strip out the marketing & buzzwords. It doesn't leave us much to work with, but we do our best. Today's episode covers Apstra's IBN support for the SONiC NOS, IBM's purchase of APM newcomer Instana, VMware's furthering of its networking ambitions, a startup building 5G chips for the edge, and more.

SONiC is a network OS that can run on a variety of whitebox switches. Originally developed by Microsoft, SONiC is now an open-source project with distributions that target hyperscale and enterprise environments. Today's Heavy Networking is a deep dive into SONiC with Dave Maltz, a Technical Fellow at Microsoft who has been closely involved with SONiC's development. While Microsoft is a SONiC backer, this is an unsponsored episode.

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.

This week's Network Break discusses a serious flaw in some Aruba switches, why Kemp acquired Flowmon, what makes a networking startup worth a $29 million investment, what Extreme Networks is up to with its AWS Outpost competitor, how Cisco is spinning a tough financial quarter, and more tech news.

Today's Heavy Networking podcast examines cross-domain automation. Our sponsor is Cisco and our guest is Omar Sultan, Leader, Product Management for Cisco's Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) product. While the discussion starts with NSO, the conversation also covers dealing with automation complexity, the need for tool choice, and the critical roles that organizational structure and teams play in a successful automation/orchestration effort.

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.

Guest commentator Johna Till Johnson, CEO of Nemertes Research, brings her analytical eye to this week's Network Break. Coverage includes new Arista campus switches, a Dutch telco shutting down legacy TDM systems, Google Chrome getting its own certificate store, and a massive Bitcoin seizure.

In this discussion, Greg accosts...no, converses with...Simon Sharwood on a variety of issues highly relevant to networking's future. It turns out, Simon is not short on opinions. And thusly, Simon and Greg opine about sundry topics.

Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks analyze the big announcements from two conferences the clouderati should care about: AnsibleFest and HashiConf Digital. Both of these were virtual events because there's still an pandemic on, folks. Speaking of which, how do Ned and Ethan feel about virtual events? Not great, really. Slidewhipping the attendees in multi-day webinars seems to be how vendors are running their virtual conferences, and it ain't workin'...

If you’ve been looking at automation for your network, you should listen to this episode. This is one of those discussions that can help you understand whether you should roll your own artisanal automation, lovingly handcrafted with Python scripts flowing from your keyboard, or whether your organization would be better served with a commercially supported tool like Apstra. That’s the choice Beelastic needed to make, and we’re going to discuss why they went the Apstra direction. Apstra customer Beelastic is going to tell their tale of data center fabric, multiple data centers, automation, validation, multi-tenancy, EVPN, and more.

This week Network Break is about silicon companies Marvel and AMD bulking up to fight competition. Cisco ships a SmartNIC, Catchpoint releases new features and Space Networking.

Today's Day Two Cloud covers the most interesting announcements and presentations from VMworld 2020, including Project Monterey and partnerships with nVidia and Pensando, an an announcement from analysis tool vendor Runecast, and highlights from Pure Storage.

Today's Network Break covers new SD-WAN routers from Cisco, a giant Juniper acquisition, new WIPS capabilities from Extreme, the United States' anti-trust lawsuit against Google, Intel selling its NAND business, and Space Networking!

Technology is accelerating like crazy, with new tools, services, open-source projects, and processes. If you're trying to make DevOps work in your organization, you might feel like you're perpetually behind. This Day Two Cloud episode is here to say: You're going to be OK. You can still engage with DevOps to move your career and your organization forward. Our guest to tell you how is April Edwards, a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft.

Today's Network Break examines a new security service from Cloudflare, a SonicWall vulnerability that affects a massive number of its appliances, a fresh funding round for networking startup Alkira, and more nerdy networking news.

Today's show is a vigorous discussion of multi-cloud networking. Our guest, networking expert Ivan Pepelnjak, brings a heavy dose of skepticism, nuance, and informed perspective to the tricky issue of connecting workloads across different public clouds.

Today's Network Break analyzes NVIDIA's new roadmap for DPUs (also known as SmartNICs), IBM's spin-out of its managed infrastructure business, new security features from Juniper, a whopping judgement against Cisco for patent violations, and more.

On today's Day Two Cloud podcast we talk with a real-live SRE, or Site Reliability Engineer, who works in an IT group that delivers applications using DevOps principles as part of their day-to-day work. Our guest is James Quigley, SRE at Bloomberg. He and his team builds infrastructure and tooling for application and infrastructure teams to develop for the public cloud.

Keith Townsend stops by Network Break to lend analysis and commentary on our review of the biggest announcements to come out of VMworld, including Project Monterey and the SaltStack acquisition. We also discuss new products from Arista, acquisitions by Arista and Juniper, Google joining the Linux Foundation's LF Networking, and more.