Packet Pushers - Fat Pipe

On today’s Heavy Networking, we explore how to get network data you reference all the time and store it in a CSV using Ansible, the Genie parser, and Jinja2. Our guide for how to assemble these gears and get them cranking is John Capobianco, automation maven and Sr. IT Planner and Integrator for the House of Commons in the Canadian Parliament.

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.

In today’s sponsored show with Juniper Networks, we dive into Juniper's Paragon product portfolio, which measures service quality for critical applications. The portfolio allows service providers and enterprises to get deeper visibility into, and automated control over, their networks. Our guests from Juniper to walk us through the portfolio are Peter Weinberger and Jonas Krogell.

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.

In today's podcast, sponsored by IP Fabric, we dive into the IP Fabric Network Assurance platform. This platform gathers network configuration and state, and then builds a network model using a graph database. The result is a "digital twin" of the network that engineers and security teams can use for troubleshooting, to plan and verify changes, for network and security analysis, and to enable closed-loop automation. Our guests from IP Fabric are Pavel Bykov, CEO; and Daren Fulwell, Network Automation Evangelist.

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.

Construction sites generate tons of data but often lack network connectivity. Today's Heavy Networking explores how one CTO has found ways to move huge data sets to HQ and the cloud using everything from Free Space Optics to LTE to consumer broadband. There are also stories about flying drones and robot dogs, and the operational impacts of SD-WAN. Our guest is Michael Shepherd, CTO of Rogers-O’Brien Construction.

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 sponsored Heavy Networking dives into SR Linux, a new network OS built by Nokia. SR Linux combines a microservices architecture with modern data center networking features and is designed to fit multiple use cases while also being automation-friendly and extensible. Our guest is Bruce Wallis, Senior Director of Product Management in Data Center Switching at Nokia.

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 Network Break examines Citrix's multi-billion bet on a SaaS collaboration acquisition, a fight over the Elasticsearch project where everyone gets a black eye, Red Hat's sop to everyone angry about CentOS, a pair of dangerous Cisco SD-WAN bugs, and more IT news.

Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) transforms routers, load balancers, firewalls and other network devices into virtual instances that can be service-chained, spun up and down as needed, and are cloud-friendly. But if you're a hardware hugger or have been been burned by virtualization in the past, should you avoid NFV? Today's Heavy Networking guests want to change your mind. The Packet Pushers speak with Michael Pfeiffer, a Cloud Networking Architect for a VAR; and Brad Gregory, Senior Product Manager at Equinix.

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.

This week's Network Break opines on the breach of Ubiquiti customer data via a third-party cloud service, Pat Gelsinger's appointment to the CEO role at Intel, and the NSA offers advice for enterprises on deploying DNS over HTTPS (DoH). We also cover how a chip shortage is stalling auto production and more tech news.

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is the topic on today's Heavy Networking. IT folks tend to view user experience from their own particular area of responsibility--networking, security, app development--but the reality is there's a common set of data that IT should consume and understand. Sponsor Catchpoint joins us to discuss its DEM platform and how it measures user experience using metrics that are relevant across the IT stack. Our guest is JP Blaho, Director, Product Marketing at Catchpoint.

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.

This week's Network Break discusses the jaw-dropping $3.5 billion purchase of Pluralsight; welcomes a new network OS to life, the universe, and everything; debates whether ICANN was cautious or tardy in implementing DNSSEC for gTLD name servers, catches up on the SolarWinds hack, and more tech conversation.

GNS3 is a tool for building virtual networks for labbing. Heavy Networking welcomes GNS3 co-founder and developer Jeremy Grossman and networking instructor David Bombal. We cover the state of GNS3 in 2021, including what GNS3 can do that maybe you didn’t know, and what’s on the roadmap.