The Future of Networking series continues with Brad Casemore, who survived multiple decades in the technology sector, including sixteen years as an analyst for IDC. He’s been a longtime observer of networking markets, technologies, and trends. Recently retired from the analyst business, we’ve invited Brad onto the show as a kind of exit interview to explore where networking has been and where it might be going. We talk about the interest in AI and try to separate the hype from the reality,...

AIOps has been making the rounds in networking marketing departments for a few years now. The big promise has been that AI is going to perform analytical thinking for us and, when things are going wrong, make life easier for engineers. The reality has been somewhat different. We’ve gotten lots of statistical analysis tools branded as AIOps–not really AI, but simpler math models that can detect when certain metrics deviate too far from normal. Fancy threshold alerting was mostly all that was...

Today’s Heavy Networking is about an open source project called GitNops. The idea behind GitNops is collaborative automation. It draws from the principles of DevOps, such as Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to networking. That means things like version control, working with sources of truth, operating infrastructure as code, and collaborating on network configurations so that there are multiple eyeballs on changes and updates. GitNops benefits include automation,...

Most of us have built a set of scripts or playbooks that solve some problems we have. But most of us have NOT productized the solution. Our automations likely save us some time and reduce human error, but aren’t the sort of things we can package up and turn the rest of the organization loose with. All we’ve really done is build macros. Macros are not the end game of network automation. The end game is self-service. A platform where network consumers can request the services they need and get...

Today’s Heavy Networking is another roundtable episode. We’ve assembled a group of network engineers to talk about what’s on their minds. Topics today include why other IT departments adn end users are quick to blame the network first, and what can be done about it; using Nokia’s open-source Containerlab for testing and development work; and why you shouldn’t feel left behind when you hear talk about 400G and 800G networks. Our guests are Bryan Ward, John Howard, and Lindsay Hill. If you’d...

Today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by Palo Alto Networks, discusses Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) across the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). And if you don’t know what those terms mean, here are the real world issues we’re tackling today. Your network has no meaningful edge or perimeter where you can do all your secure policy enforcement. Your apps are no longer served from a couple of data centers you own. Many of the IT services your company accesses are in the cloud. You,...

Welcome to Heavy Networking, the flagship podcast from the Packet Pushers. Our discussion today covers Pandas. Not the cuddly bears that eat bamboo, but the Python library that makes it easy for you to work with a set of data. Import Pandas at the top of your Python script, follow one of many Pandas tutorials online, and in short order you’ll be able to perform data operations in a spreadsheet-like way. Pandas is a general use tool for data manipulation. So what’s the Pandas use case for...

Welcome to Heavy Networking. Our topic today is SD-WAN monitoring at massive scale. What do I mean by that? If back in the day you monitored the underlay–the physical circuits that made up your wide area network, today you have likely deployed a software-defined WAN on top of that underlay. The overlay. You need to monitor that overlay as well. Overlays are made up of tunnels, and often those tunnels are deployed as a full or partial mesh. You end up with a lot more endpoints to monitor than...

On today’s sponsored Heavy Networking we talk with Fortinet about how it converges network and security across the breadth of its portfolio. Fortinet is best known for its firewalls, but the company also offers campus and branch switches, has a wireless portfolio, offers SD-WAN and SASE, provides AI-supported operations, and more. We also talk about Fortinet’s approach to the branch office to provide security and performance. Most of Fortinet’s products use the same operating system, and...

Virtual Application Networks, or VANs, are today’s Heavy Networking topic. Our guest is Ted Ross, an open source developer and motive force behind the Skupper.io project. Skupper creates VANs largely in the context of multi-cluster Kubernetes. That is, install Skupper in multiple K8s clusters, do a little plumbing, and you’ve built a Virtual Application Network that’s conceptually like a VLAN or VPN, except that all the magic is happening up at layer 7. Don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty of...

On today’s Heavy Networking we explore the edge. But where is the edge? In the context of today’s conversation with sponsor VMware it’s a remote location where data is being generated. It could be end users in a branch office, or IoT devices and sensors on a factory floor. These edge locations needs integrated compute and networking to run application workloads while also being able to  connect to cloud applications and services. VMware recently announced the VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator....

Welcome to Packet Pushers Heavy Networking. In today’s sponsored show we explore new features in Cisco Thousand Eyes, an operational tool based on visibility and observability of public and private network. From its roots in “monitoring the Internet” using probes, BGP monitoring, and math so you could know why ‘the Internet is broken,” Thousand Eyes has continued to grow into more complex operational realms such AWS Network Path, Webex performance, and integrations with Meraki to help you...

EVPN/VXLAN is our topic on today’s Heavy Networking. What is it? What’s it for? Should you deploy it? Since you’ve probably already got a network, how do you add EVPN to it? Can you just turn it on, or do you need special hardware? How does EVPN impact your security design? And what are the fundamentals for engineers trying to understand how packets flow around an EVPN-based network? Our guest today is making a repeat Heavy Networking appearance, Tony Bourke. Tony is an IT and skydiving...

This is Packet Pushers Heavy Networking. In today’s show we get into network automation. Network automation can be a heavy lift once you get beyond a handful of simple scripts. Network teams building out an automation strategy have to assemble and manage a mix of open source and commercial products, up-skill on tools such as Python and Ansible, capture knowledge that lives in individual engineers’ heads, and build processes to ensure that automations are correct, repeatable, and deliver the...

This week on Heavy Networking we’ve assembled a roundtable of network engineers to talk about…stuff. Each guest has brought a topic to discuss with the table, so we’ve got lots of subjects and lots of experiences and opinions. In particular we explore: Topic 1: SPB Why running Shortest Path Bridging in your multi-tenant environment is seriously niche, and yet still wonderful. Topic 2: Career Progression And Frustration What would you advise the folks affected by recent layoffs, fed up and...

Remotely accessing applications seems like no big deal, right? We’ve been doing it since client/server architecture was a thing. It’s not the accessing that’s the problem, though. It’s the security. In the old days when you controlled everything in the data path, you could (mostly) differentiate the good guys from the bad guys based on who logged into the VPN gateway paired with some posture assessment. That’s not the world we live in today. One-time posture assessment for endpoints isn’t...

If you’ve been staring down the barrel of network automation and wonder what the proper approach might be, today’s episode is for you. I’m chatting with Tony Bourke about what network automation tools and techniques have become the default standard. Now that we’ve got a few years of network automation behind us, what are the key approaches most people take? Don’t get me wrong. It’s not one size fits all. It never is. “It depends” applies to network automation just as much as with any other...

Today on Heavy Networking we talk about out-of-band management with episode sponsor ZPE Systems. Out of band management, or OOB, provides secure remote access to IT infrastructure and uses a separate network to provide that access in case your production management plane isn’t available. OOB is useful to have when systems go down, be it a software problem or maybe a security incident. It’s especially useful if the infrastructure is remote and getting someone onsite could take hours. On...

Welcome to Heavy Networking. On today’s episode, we talk LACP and link aggregation. You might wonder what there is to discuss. After all, bonding two or more links together to act as a single virtual link has been done for decades. The point of our discussion today will be to differentiate between LACP and link aggregation. It turns out they aren’t the same thing, and the distinction matters. Our guest is Tony Bourke, a network instructor. We discuss: * Why LACP and link aggregation...

Certifications are a part of life in IT. On today’s Heavy Networking we explore preparation strategies with guest Mary Fasang, who you might know as the Network Green Girl or the Running Green Girl on the socials. Mary and I met at a tech event a while back, and I found out she’s a fellow certification enthusiast. Her certifications run the gamut from CompTIA to MCSE to the CCNP, as well as the PMP and ITIL certs. She’s also got an MBA. We discuss Mary’s certification study strategy. How...

Packet-level fundamentals are essential for network engineers to be able to diagnose and solve network and application problems. On today's Heavy Networking, we dive into the transport layer and packets with packet analysis expert and instructor Chris Greer. The post Heavy Networking 688: Packet-Level Fundamentals With Chris Greer appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Bandwidth solves all network problems and DWDM coherent optical networks are a significant step in efficiency and cost. Coherent SFP optic modules installed into routers replace the DWDM transponders at the edge of the optical network. Source white paper (not paywalled) : Reimage IP over DWDM with Juniper CORA For those that run large-scale networks, IPoDWDM offers a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine the economics of DWDM operations and Juniper has products today. In this...

Today we’re going deep on software-defined networking for containers and OpenStack with sponsor Juniper Networks. Juniper has revamped its approach to secure networking for telcos and telco cloud-delivered services with Juniper’s Cloud-Native Contrail Networking or CN2 software. CN2 lets you automate the creation of network connections for containers and for virtual machines while also providing routing, security, segmentation and isolation of workloads. This is one of those episodes where...

The focus on operational management of infrastructure has been intense. Instead of arguing over speeds, feeds and port density, more and more customers are buying software that operates our networking to turn your worst day into just another day. Yes to automation, yes to asset management, configuration backups and automated upgrades and even larger yes to visibility tools. Lets face it, who wants to spend their weekends and nights in a hotel, plane or car  just to reboot a device or access...

Take a Network Break: Drew is on holiday (again) and Ethan shows up. Who knew he was still around ? We start with FU, Cisco Live was underwhelming announcing a new focus simplicity and that customers hate their licensing, Bluecat spends again, Hashicorp gets a financial slapping, Itential ships a new version and Quantum Space Networking. Sponsor: Itential Itential simplifies automation across hybrid cloud network infrastructure. Their platform makes it easy for network teams to bring their...