Packet Pushers - Weekly Show

Today's Heavy Networking talks about the tradeoffs between commercial and open source software. While open source takes time and effort to make work, is commercial software any better? Guest Daniel Teycheney is here for the debate.

Hannes Gredler stops by the Heavy Networking virtual studios to educate us on what BGP-LS is, the problems it aims to solve, how it differs from segment routing, and whether the industry is loading too many features onto the back of the BGP workhorse.

On today's Heavy Networking, sponsored by Fortinet, we dive into a variety of topics including a multiplicity of edges that require connectivity and security (WAN edge, LAN edge, cloud edge, remote edge, etc.), the convergence of infrastructure and security, the need for interoperability among security vendors, implementing Zero Trust Access (ZTA), and the current and future roles for machine learning and AI. Our guest is John Maddison, EVP of Products.

SONiC is a network OS that can run on a variety of whitebox switches. Originally developed by Microsoft, SONiC is now an open-source project with distributions that target hyperscale and enterprise environments. Today's Heavy Networking is a deep dive into SONiC with Dave Maltz, a Technical Fellow at Microsoft who has been closely involved with SONiC's development. While Microsoft is a SONiC backer, this is an unsponsored episode.

Today's Heavy Networking podcast examines cross-domain automation. Our sponsor is Cisco and our guest is Omar Sultan, Leader, Product Management for Cisco's Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) product. While the discussion starts with NSO, the conversation also covers dealing with automation complexity, the need for tool choice, and the critical roles that organizational structure and teams play in a successful automation/orchestration effort.

In this discussion, Greg accosts...no, converses with...Simon Sharwood on a variety of issues highly relevant to networking's future. It turns out, Simon is not short on opinions. And thusly, Simon and Greg opine about sundry topics.

If you’ve been looking at automation for your network, you should listen to this episode. This is one of those discussions that can help you understand whether you should roll your own artisanal automation, lovingly handcrafted with Python scripts flowing from your keyboard, or whether your organization would be better served with a commercially supported tool like Apstra. That’s the choice Beelastic needed to make, and we’re going to discuss why they went the Apstra direction. Apstra customer Beelastic is going to tell their tale of data center fabric, multiple data centers, automation, validation, multi-tenancy, EVPN, and more.

Today’s Heavy Networking show dives into Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) with sponsor Catchpoint. Catchpoint combines synthetic testing with end user device monitoring to provide greater visibility into the end user experience while helping network engineers and IT admins support and troubleshoot a distributed workforce. Our guests from Catchpoint are Nik Koutsoukos, CMO; and Tony Ferelli, VP Operations.

Zero trust network access is ideal for today's distributed workforce, but it can be tricky to put into place. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking podcast, we talk with NetMotion about its remote access product that enable zero trust plus performance monitoring to help troubleshoot problems for remote workers. Our guest is Jay Klauser, VP of Worldwide Sales Engineering & Alliances at NetMotion.

Automated state validation is our topic today on Heavy Networking. The hard part isn't configuring the network: it's ensuring the configuration has resulted in the desired state. Guest John Capobianco regards automated state validation is an advanced automation technique. We dive into details in this episode.