EP 475 | APRIL 22, 2024

Cisco Hypes Hypershield; Broadcom Tries To Clarify VMware Strategy

This week we cover Hypershield, a new Cisco security product that uses technology from its Isovalent acquisition. We parse a blog from Broadcom CEO Hock Tan on the company’s VMware strategy, and discuss China’s latest counter-punch in its tech infrastructure fight with the United States. Plus much, much more. | LISTEN NOW

APRIL 22, 2024

Begin Your Unified SASE Journey with Next-Gen SD-WAN

Secure Access Service Edge, or SASE, combines SD-WAN with cloud-delivered security services including next-gen firewall, CASB, secure web gateway, and others. You can mix and match your SD-WAN and cloud security, but today Rajesh Kari from Palo Alto Networks is here to advocate for the benefits of their single-vendor option. We talk performance, security, and leveraging a single data lake for AI-powered automation. | LISTEN NOW

EP 070 | APRIL 23, 2024

Living on the Edge: The Present Future of Edge Architecture

Right now we’re in the first generation of edge architecture. We won’t even really know how to define it until we’re past it. Greg and Johna discuss the operational milieu in which the edge is forming: Vast numbers of IoT devices, increased remote computing capabilities, questions around cloud operational costs and efficiency, and vendors jostling for sweet spots in the emerging market. Johna emphasizes the need for businesses to put together workload placement plans. Greg shares his struggles with integrating his home lighting smart devices. | LISTEN NOW

EP 011 | APRIL 23, 2024

IoT Protocols: Detection and Protection

IoT devices are often like the tiny aliens in the locker in Men in Black: They’ve created a whole little world on your network without almost any humans knowing they exist. Today Troy Martin joins the show to teach us the basics of how to find and secure IoT devices on your network, specifically focusing on their protocols. He gives us an overview of some protocols including Zigbee, Thread, WirelessHART, and the one he thinks may eventually rule them all: Matter. He differentiates between threats for IoT devices that have IP connectivity versus IoT devices that use a gateway to translate proprietary protocols. Plus, Troy lists detection tools that work on different protocols. Best of all, he gives us really, really cool examples. | LISTEN NOW

EP 061 | APRIL 24, 2024

Transforming Network Telemetry Into Operational Insights With Kentik

The expectations for application delivery are higher than ever before, the networks that support those applications are increasingly distributed, and visibility is essential for network operations and troubleshooting. On today’s sponsored episode, Kentik’s Phil Gervasi joins us to discuss how Kentik collects essential performance data to help you monitor and manage all the networks your applications rely on. We talk through the different types of telemetry Kentik collects, its ingestion pipelines, and how it enriches the data to give engineers the information they need to fix problems in real time. We also talk about developments in machine learning, AI, and natural language processing and how they’re being applied to network observability. | LISTEN NOW

EP 241 | APRIL 24, 2024

Choose Your Own Adventure: Manager, Director, or IC

What makes for a good manager, director, and independent contributor (IC), and how do you figure out which is the best fit for you? Hazel Weakly has had a whirlwind tour of all three and is ready to share her insight into each. We talk about the skill set needed for each, and figuring out what you’re good at versus what you’re world class at. We dive into her experience of effectively growing headcount (spoiler: no, return to office isn’t necessary). Plus we cover how to learn soft skills like empathy, the ability to ground yourself in stressful situations, and building adaptive capacity into your schedule. | LISTEN NOW

EP 054 | APRIL 25, 2024

OpenTelemetry: Open Source Observability

Observability is foundational to application and infrastructure performance. That’s why it’s fitting that OpenTelemetry is the second most active project in the CNCF after Kubernetes. Today CNCF ambassador Dotan Horovits tells us about the project: OpenTelemetry is a uniform, vendor-agnostic observability framework for generating and collecting telemetry data across both infrastructure and application, across different signal types, logs, metrics, and traces. As “OTel” approaches its CNCF graduation day (pending final exams), now is the perfect time to learn more. | LISTEN NOW

EP 731 | APRIL 26, 2024

GraphQL: Open Source Query Language for APIs

What if instead of sending multiple queries out to APIs and getting disparate data back, you could just send a single query and receive a single answer. That’s exactly what GraphQL does for you. Rick Donato joins the show today to teach us about GraphQL and how it can help us on the path to network automation. As an open-source data query and manipulation language, GraphQL helps with both configuration and testing. Rick points out that NetBox has an easy-to-use integrated GraphQL server, but we also go over how to build your own using Python. | LISTEN NOW