Packet Pushers - Fat Pipe

Cisco recently announced a major evolution to its certification roadmap: starting February 2026, the popular DevNet certifications will transition to a brand-new Automation track. Joining us today is Francois Caen, Product Manager at Cisco, also an expert in network automation and a recognized voice in the Cisco Learning and Certification Community. We talk with Francois... Read more »

Quantum computing is here, and it’s being used for more than cracking encryption. On today’s Packet Protector we get a primer on quantum, how it differs from classical computing, its applications for difficult computing problems, why quantum will be the death of blockchain, and how to think about quantum risks. Our guest, Johna Johnson, is... Read more »

Take a Network Break! HPE and Juniper have settled with the US Department of Justice, allowing HPE’s $14 billion purchase to move forward. However, as part of the deal, Juniper must grant a full license to its AI Ops for Mist source code to one, or perhaps two, companies via an auction to be overseen... Read more »

SNMP is still widely used in today’s networks. But modern telemetry and network observability are bringing changes to network monitoring. Today’s Heavy Networking is a roundtable discussion about alternatives to SNMP and real-world use cases for those alternatives. This episode was inspired by a request from listener Nikolay. He says… While telemetry (gRPC, etc.) is... Read more »

On today’s show we talk about NetDevOps and AI Ops with Greg Freeman, VP of Network and Customer Transformation at Lumen. Greg spearheads network automation, orchestration ,and AI strategy, guiding the highest technical tier in operations and championing NetDevOps methodologies. We talk about the people and work culture that’s influenced the development of automation and... Read more »

By popular request (and now that we have some other background topics covered) we start our series on the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) routing protocol. We kick off the series with OSPF basics including Link State Advertisements, Link State Database, and other related essentials. We’ll explore additional OSPF topics over subsequent episodes. This week’s... Read more »

MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is an open-source project originally created by Anthropic. MCP is designed to let AI agents to connect to data repositories, applications, business and developer tools, and other agents to execute tasks and carry out instructions. Day Two DevOps explores the capabilities and pitfalls of MCP, how the protocol works, and... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert is a remote code execution vulnerability in Roundcube. On the news front, HPE announces GreenLake Intelligence, which will bring agentic AI capabilities to the HPE portfolio, Pure Storage brings cloud-like operations for on-prem storage, and Juniper Networks adds predictive analytics to its data center ops platform. Weka rolls... Read more »

Today’s Packet Protector digs into risks and threats you might encounter in a Kubernetes environment, what to do about them, and why sometimes a paved path (or boring technology) is the smartest option. My guest is Natalie Somersall, Principal Solutions Engineer for the Public Sector at Chainguard. We talk about risks including identity and access... Read more »

Service provider networks face a couple of difficult challenges: how to map service level agreements to actual network health and performance, and how to deliver service assurance to customers regardless of what happens on the network. On today’s sponsored Heavy Networking we talk with Cisco Systems about its approach to service assurance, how Cisco is... Read more »

At AutoCon 3 in Prague, Scott Robohn sat down with Ernest Lefner from sponsor Gluware to talk about lessons learned throughout his career: from his early days of pulling cable to becoming Chief Product Officer at Gluware and helping to found ONUG. Ernest talks about being a continuous technology learner, and also about the need... Read more »

People consistently overestimate their ability to predict whether a new product or feature will be a success. Instead of blithely going forward with a project that takes up lots of resources and yields minimal results, today’s guest says we should get our ideas into contact with external reality as quickly as possible, and maybe do... Read more »

If you need to route in your network, you can program static routes into all your routing-capable devices. And this can work. But at some point, you’re probably going to want to switch to a dynamic routing protocol. On today’s N Is For Networking, Ethan and Holly discuss the differences between static and dynamic routes,... Read more »

On today’s show, we’re joined NetBox Labs co-founders Mark Coleman and Kris Beevers. They recount how they founded NetBox Labs and discuss its growth and how it’s being used. We also delve into the NetBox Labs community and its importance for users. And of course, there’s the ever-present AI discussion. Mark and Kris also talk... Read more »

Secrets trickle out through misconfigurations, poor tooling, and rushed Git commits. Today’s guest, John Howard, joins us on Packet Protector to walk through practical secrets management with Vault and TruffleHog to help make sure you don’t expose your privates. John discusses work he’s done to build an automated process in his organization for developers and... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert for the week is a remote code execution vulnerability in open-source XDR platform Wazuh. In tech news, we dig into several announcements from Cisco Live US including: unified management of Meraki and Catalyst gear, new switches, an AI Assistant for the Meraki dashboard, a Deep Network Model LLM,... Read more »

There’s an old saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. On today’s show, we talk about taking your first step into network automation with guest Joseph Nicholson. He’s been automating at NTT Data for many years now and has some perspective to share. He’s a network engineer by trade,... Read more »

Today we chat with Megaport’s Mitchell Warden, Founding Engineer; and Alexis Bertholf, Global Technical Evangelist, to find out what NetOps is like at Megaport, a company that provides scalable internet connections for all types of organizations. We look at the origins of Megaport and how the company started with the intention of network automation from... Read more »

What shape is your network? In other words, what is its topology? On today’s episode, we discover the different types of network topologies and designs used in the enterprise, data center, and service provider networks. We cover leaf/spine, hub and spoke, point to point, mesh, and others. We also talk about how topologies affect traffic... Read more »

Is WebAssembly the next big thing? Here to help us understand what WebAssembly (WASM) is and what it can and can’t do is Michael Levan, a consultant and WASM trainer. He also dives deeper into WASM details such as hosting, security, monitoring, and the ever-present influence of AI. AdSpot: Spacelift Founded by the creator of... Read more »