Andy Lapteff once considered himself a ‘CLI lifer.’ As a network engineer he wasn’t interested in Python. He didn’t want to learn to code. He had no desire to embrace any of the developer-like processes and tools creeping into the profession, particularly around network automation. That’s changed. On today’s Heavy Networking, Andy shares the professional,... Read more »

Unit testing is a software development practice for checking that an individual component of code works before integrating that unit with other components in a larger program. A new open source project called Network Unit Testing System, or NUTS, brings the same concept to network automation. The big idea is that by incorporating unit tests into... Read more »

NANOG, or the North American Network Operation Group, is an organization committed to the continuing advancement of an open, secure, and robust Internet. At the NANOG Conference 95 in late October 2025, Ethan Banks chatted with Steve Feldman, a member of NANOG’s Board of Directors. Steve has been involved with NANOG since the very first... Read more »

How do you architect a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) to provide critical security services to millions of endpoints distributed across the planet? How do you build such a service for scale, performance, and resiliency? One option is to build your own PoPs or use colocation facilities, run your own infrastructure stack, and connect everything... Read more »

On today’s episode, we take a break from one’s and zero’s for a discussion about starting a networking meetup. Our guest is Steinn “Steinzi” Örvar, who recently founded the ISNOG, a network operators’ group in Iceland. We quiz Steinzi about what worked and what didn’t. We also pick his brain for the nitty-gritty details about... Read more »

The architecture and tech stack of a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution will influence how the service performs, the robustness of its security controls, and the complexity of its operations. Sponsor Fortinet joins Heavy Networking to make the case that a unified offering, which integrates SD-WAN and SSE from a single vendor, provides a... Read more »

Could an LLM or some kind of an AI-driven language model, such as a natural language interface, someday replace our beloved CLI? That is, instead of needing to understand the syntax of a specific vendor’s CLI, could a language model allow network operators to use plain language to get the information they need or the... Read more »

Today’s show is one of those “We’re living in the future” episodes, where we talk about using AI to perform root cause analysis of a performance issue. But not root cause analysis for just the networking part of the stack. The full stack. Why? Because it’s not good enough to say “it’s not the network”.... Read more »

If you’ve got an Autonomous System Number (ASN) and an IPv6 block, you too can multi-home IPv6 to your home lab! Sounds easy, right? Well, maybe…but today we’re going to discuss why you’d want to and how you can do that with guest Anton Lönnerbro. Anton is a solutions architect at a managed service provider... Read more »

On today’s Heavy Networking: the Security Operations Center, or SOC. When I think of a SOC, I picture a miniature version of NASA’s mission control: lots of computers, lots of people, some big boards with lines and arrows and telemetry scrolling across the screens. I also think of SOCs as requiring a lot of gear,... Read more »