While studying for the CCIE Service Provider certification, Andrew Ohanian assembled a workbook to help him prepare. It’s packed with lab exercises, and Andrew has turned it into a free Web resource that anyone can access. On today’s Heavy Networking, we talk with Andrew about what’s in the guide, the state of the CCIE SP,... Read more »

On today’s Heavy Networking we talk with Dan Wade about testing the network, inspired by Dan’s talk at AutoCon 2: “Step 0: Test the Network.” We discuss why testing is a good idea, and then explore four types of network testing, including unit tests and integration tests. We dig into Yang, RESTCONF, NETCONF and gNMI... Read more »

On today’s Heavy Networking, a roundtable panel considers whether a modern network needs to be built around underlays and overlays. This isn’t just Ethan yelling at clouds. This is a legitimate question pondering the real-world value of an overlay/underlay approach. Is overlay everywhere overkill, or is that the architecture we need to deliver a safe,... Read more »

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a very new protocol that provides a standard way to link AI models to a variety of data sources and tools. As the industry heads toward agentic AI–in which an AI agent interacts with disparate applications, data sources, and other agents to achieve a task–MCP provides the protocol glue. On... Read more »

Today’s Heavy Networking is all about overlay technologies, their history, development, and current state, both from engineer and vendor perspectives. We discuss why the industry turns to overlays to solve problems, and look at overlay and segmentation approaches including VXLAN, SRv6, and EVPN. We also drill into the idea that EVPN could become the standard... Read more »

Network security has evolved from stateful perimeter firewalls with maybe some IDS/IPS to a complex stack delivered as numerous unique tools, which often don’t talk to one another and may need to be operated by specialists. In this environment it’s hard to unify a security policy, troubleshoot problems, manage and operate tools, and respond effectively... Read more »

On today’s Heavy Networking, we’ll discuss building a Slackbot wired to an AI and trained on your own organization’s knowledge. The potential use cases for network operations are fascinating, and today’s guest, Kyler Middleton is here to explain the finer details on how to do it and point us to free resources created so that... Read more »

IT and infosec professionals are used to operating and protecting mission-critical infrastructure; servers, databases, load balancers, and so on. But what about valves that control the flow of gas or oil in a refinery? Temperature and vibration sensors that monitor industrial manufacturing processes? If you’re thinking “That’s not my problem” think again. There’s a whole... Read more »

The Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) is an industry body that aims to optimize Ethernet for AI and HPC use cases. On today’s Heavy Networking we get an overview of the UEC and an update on its efforts. We’re joined by J Metz and Rip Sohan, both heavily involved with the UEC. We discuss the consortium’s... Read more »

Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) is all about understanding a user’s application experience, and pinpointing problems if the experience is bad. Under the DEM umbrella, you’ll find Internet Performance Monitoring, or IPM. That’s our topic in today’s episode with sponsor Catchpoint. With more and more applications hosted in the cloud and more employees working remotely, organizations... Read more »