Packet Pushers - Weekly Show

On today’s Heavy Networking I talk with two people who have built and are running Hachyderm, a Mastodon instance which orients itself towards technical-minded folks. What started as a cool project in the basement suddenly grew to tens of thousands of users. I talk with Hachyderm's founders on how they scaled, problems they encountered, how they solved problems, and how they grappled with technical and human challenges. The post Heavy Networking 670: The Challenges And Satisfactions Of Building And Running A Mastodon Instance appeared first on Packet Pushers.

On today's Heavy Networking, sponsor Graphaint is here to discuss how it's rethinking SD-WAN using a Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) model to help customers consume WAN connectivity instead of setting up and operating a WAN for themselves. Graphiant combines SD-WAN mainstays such as multiple connection options and traffic policies based on applications and performance, without the operational overhead of SD-WAN tunnels. We dive into the how and why in this episode. The post Heavy Networking 669: Graphiant’s Network Edge Service Rethinks SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

On Heavy Networking today we look at a home lab running VMware products including NSX, as well as infrastructure-as-code products Terraform, Packer, and Ansible. These use cases create a different hardware demand than virtualized network operating system images. Guest Maarten Van Driessen explains it all, including how he saves money on lab gear. The post Heavy Networking 668: Inside A Virtualization Consultant’s Home Lab appeared first on Packet Pushers.

In today’s Heavy Networking show with sponsor Broadcom we go deep into network management and Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM). At its heart, DEM is about understanding the user experience of the network. Network monitoring and management products that incorporate user experience, such as Broadcom's DX NetOps, can provide visibility into network and application performance to help inform troubleshooting efforts and speed resolution. The post Heavy Networking 667: Broadcom’s NetOps Delivers End-User Visibility Into SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Welcome to Heavy Networking! In this episode we discuss LibreQoS, a free and open source software project to help ISPs improve network latency and responsiveness and improve the Quality of Experience (QoE) for their customers. That project is LibreQoS, and it's being used by ISPs and others to ensure stable latency across networks. The post Heavy Networking 666: Improving Quality Of Experience With LibreQoS appeared first on Packet Pushers.

The Packet Pushers' Heavy Networking podcast dives into sponsor Augtera and how its AI platform, purpose-built for networking, improves network operations and enables automation. We'll examine how Augtera works, how it aims to move beyond the automation of configurations to automate operations and fault management, the kinds of data it collects and how, and how customers are using Augtera in production networks The post Heavy Networking 665: Augtera Network AI Automates NetOps And Works To Prevent Incidents (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Today's Heavy Networking is a forward-looking episode about semantic networking. Semantic networking aims to make decisions on how to route packets based on more than just the destination address and give network operators more routing choices based on considerations such as bandwidth, cost, performance, application type, and so on. But how do you add semantic information to IP headers? How do you program routers and networking hardware to consume semantics? Do we really need this? Guests Adrian Farrel and Hannes Gredler join Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks to discuss and debate. The post Heavy Networking 664: Semantic Networking – Science Project Or Networking’s Future? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Would you give an artificial intelligence responsibility to write your router configurations? You wouldn’t. Not yet. But we’re not as far from that as you might think. On today's Heavy Networking we dig into OpenAI and ChatGPT and what it might mean for networking. The post Heavy Networking 663: OpenAI For Networking appeared first on Packet Pushers.

On today's Heavy Networking, guest Tom Costello walks us through his personal lab in the cloud. We discuss pros and cons of the cloud vs. a basement, using EVE-NG vs. CML, how automation can help you manage cloud costs, resources for those who might want a cloud lab, and more. The post Heavy Networking 662: Home Lab In The Cloud Or Your Basement? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Today on Heavy Networking, home labs. Specifically, we’re going to discuss building and using a lab with virtualized Juniper gear in EVE-NG. Our guest is Christian Scholz, who has written and presented quite a bit on this topic. The post Heavy Networking 661: Home Labbing With EVE-NG And Juniper appeared first on Packet Pushers.

On today’s Heavy Networking we get inside the process of technical writing and product documentation from a person deep in the trenches of creating docs. We also talk about why writing as a skill might be worth cultivating even if you aren’t responsible for creating the manual. The post Heavy Networking 660: Writing The Manual – An Insider’s View Of Product Documentation appeared first on Packet Pushers.

On today's Heavy Networking podcast, sponsored by Juniper Networks, we discuss how metro networks are evolving to Cloud Metro, how to apply cloud principles and automation to these locations, and how the attack surface changes when you transition to Cloud Metro. We also talk about how Juniper supports active assurance and zero trust security in these environments. The post Heavy Networking 659: Securing Cloud Metro With Zero Trust (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Today on Heavy Networking, modeling your network with Batfish. Batfish is an open-source project that builds a model of your production network based on a snapshot of your network and device configurations. Engineers can then test and validate changes against this model before making those changes to the production network. Guest Rick Donato walks us through how Batfish works, use cases, and more. The post Heavy Networking 658: Using Batfish To Model And Test Your Network appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Today on Heavy Networking, a discussion with sponsor VMware about SD-WAN and SASE. We’re diving into announcements from VMware Explore Barcelona 2022 covering a new SD-WAN client and more. With this client, you’ll be able to connect your users to the SASE cloud with software--no hardware edge box required. We dive into how it works, the network architecture, use cases, and more. The post Heavy Networking 657: New VMware Client Connects Users To SASE, SD-WAN (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

On today's Heavy Networking we look at the idea of embedding zero trust into applications. The way we do cyber security these days has failed in significant ways. What if we could extend the AAA or RBAC model to all applications? Better yet, what if we take the RBAC model, make authentication more robust than username & password, assess endpoint security posture constantly, and evaluate each request individually up at layer 7 for all applications? Guest Galeal Zino has opinions on what embedded zero trust looks like. We discuss. The post Heavy Networking 656: Embedding Zero Trust Into Applications appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Heavy Networking welcomes sponsor Netris to the show with a special episode for you network nerds who are really getting into automation, infrastructure as code, pipelines, and so on. Netris is all about bringing that public cloud VPC experience to the network you’ve already got. Imagine being able to consume your existing network with APIs and being able to stand up VLANs, VXLANs, elastic load balancers, firewalls, Internet gateways, and more the same way you do in the cloud, but on premises. The post Heavy Networking 655: On-Prem VPC Networking With Netris (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Today on Heavy Networking we have a round-table discussion about Data Processing Units (DPUs). These devices let you bring networking, security, and storage capabilities closer to server workloads without burdening server CPUs. Guests Pete Lumbis and Aaron Glenn help us dissect DPUs, identify use cases, discuss adoption and operational challenges, and more. The post Heavy Networking 654: What’s Up With DPUs? appeared first on Packet Pushers.

Today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by Nokia, dives into Nokia's fabric-based approach to data center automation and operations. That approach includes its SR Linux network OS, its Fabric Services System intent-based platform, its NetOps Development Kit, or NDK, and how all this ties together to address your operational life cycle across Day zero, Day 1, Day Two, and beyond. The post Heavy Networking 653: Design, Deploy, And Operate With Nokia Data Center Fabric Solution (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.

On today’s Heavy Networking episode, I talk with Nick Carter about Flock Networks, his routing protocol stack startup, as well as Nick’s love of the Rust programming language. As a network engineer, maybe you don’t think you care about Rust. Nick’s here to explain why the discerning network engineer might prefer their routing daemons to have been written in Rust. We also talk about the pleasures and travails of startup life. The post Heavy Networking 652: Why Networkers Should Want Routing Protocols Written In Rustlang appeared first on Packet Pushers.

As carriers and service providers look to embrace disaggregated infrastructure and software, and drive new business through technologies such as network slicing, it’s critical to have management and orchestration capabilities to coordinate  hardware and software resources in the RAN, the transport layer, and the network core. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking, sponsored by Juniper, we dive into Juniper's Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) platform, which is designed to provision, manage and monetize custom network services on demand. The post Heavy Networking 651: How Juniper Networks’ SMO Enables Network Slicing (Sponsored) appeared first on Packet Pushers.