EP 483 | JUNE 17, 2024

Cisco Hopes To Be Ikea For AI Infrastructure; Is Anyone Besides Nvidia Making Money From AI?

We start with an announcement from Greg about his impending retirement. After we dust ourselves off from that, we pivot to this week’s tech news. We cover: Fortinet acquires Lacework. Cisco announces an Ikea-like kit to build AI infrastructure on prem. Juniper extends AI operations into its WAN products. Apple announces private cloud computing for AI processing. And Nvidia seems to be the only one making money in the AI gold rush. | LISTEN NOW

JUNE 17, 2024

Journey to SSE with HPE Aruba Networking

When it comes to SSE, it’s helpful to know the vendor’s history and approach to understand if it’s the best fit for your organization. HPE Aruba’s SSE journey started when it acquired Axis Security, a company focused on solving the problem of third party access. Because of that focus, HPE Aruba says its SSE is well-positioned to secure a hybrid workforce. For employees, that means they don’t have to tangle with VPNs, varying multi-factor authentication, and different experiences at home versus in the office. For the IT team, it means a unified system for gradual ZTNA rollout, patches and upgrades, policy changes, and incidence investigations. We also get a sneak peek of upcoming HPE Aruba Networking SSE announcements. Our guests from HPE Aruba Networking are Jaye Tillson and John Spiegel. | LISTEN NOW

EP 075 | JUNE 18, 2024

How to Ask Questions

Asking questions is a critical skill whether you’re an outside consultant or on an internal IT team. In today’s episode, Greg and Johna review what kind of questions to ask and how to ask them. They discuss the ‘Five Whys,’ identifying points of invariance, discovering unknown unknowns, and watching out for landmines. They also cover how to think about people’s perspectives based on position– business executives may not need or want to get into the tech weeds, subordinates may be very scared of being fired, etc. If you’ve been questioning your questions, this episode might be your answer. | LISTEN NOW

EP 019 | JUNE 18, 2024

The God Accounts: Cloud IAM

Today we discuss how to secure your all-powerful root accounts on the three major public cloud providers: AWS, Azure, and GCP. Our guests today, Ned Bellavance and Kyler Middleton from the Day Two Cloud podcast (soon to be Day Two DevOps podcast), describe the struggle of securely managing several root accounts at once. They take us through what has worked best for them when it comes to MFAs, lifecycle management, BYoD, and more. Above all, they recommend OpenID Connect (OIDC), an open source, keyless authentication program that works with all three big cloud providers. | LISTEN NOW

EP 066 | JUNE 19, 2024

Operationalize Your Automations With torero

When you’re trying to share your cool new network automation with your co-workers, the last thing you want to do is deal with other systems’ different libraries and dependencies gumming it up. That’s where our episode sponsor torero comes into play. As an “automation gateway,” torero dynamically creates an execution environment based on what has been committed into a repository so the script will execute successfully and in the exact same way you developed it on your local system. Paul Sprygada joins us today to explain how this free product works, and what we can expect as new versions are released every three months. | LISTEN NOW

EP 245 | JUNE 19, 2024

Don’t Fear Database DevOps

Most platform engineers are scared of databases, and most database administrators prefer it that way. But our guest today says it’s time to move forward together toward a future of database linters, observability, and abstraction. Adam Furmanek makes the case that just like how developers had to learn some networking, and networking tools were created to meet their needs, now the same must be done with databases. He walks us through database history, why DevOps should care about databases more now than ever before, and why he predicts a future full of DevDBOps… or something like that. |LISTEN NOW

EP 739 | JUNE 21, 2024

High Stakes Network Observability for High Frequency Trading

High Frequency Trading in finance demands the utmost quality and speed from a network, making flawless observability a must. Our guest today is Radu Ionco from Jump Trading, and he tells us about how they built their own custom network observability platform, even creating a monitoring system for the monitoring system. We talk through streaming telemetry, REST APIs, and even CLI scraping. He explains how they do data normalization, and how they do database management for multiple terabytes of telemetry. He also walks us through how they make sure the polls are polling and the alerts are alerting. Even if you never find yourself in such a high-stakes environment, you can learn a lot about network observability from this unique setting. | LISTEN NOW