The Fat Pipe - All Packet Pushers Pods

If you listen to some engineers tell the story, managers are clueless and hopeless, misunderstanding technology and the engineers that make it work.

But is that the case? Or are engineers the ones missing what is really going on?

Today on the Packet Pushers, we cover what managers want from their teams.

Joining us are Michael Bushong, VP, Enterprise & Cloud Marketing at Juniper Networks; and Omar Sultan, CTO, Office of the Service Provider, at Cisco.

We talk about what managers look for when hiring, how they handle star players and struggling team members, and how they get individuals to pull together as a team.

We also discuss how managers measure team vs. individual success, how they navigate and communicate organizational politics, and what they do to motivate their teams.

Sponsor: Cumulus Networks

By building innovative data center products with Linux, Cumulus offers unprecedented interoperability, agility and scale, and makes integrating your open source software with your proprietary software seamless and efficient. To learn more about Cumulus’ open source philosophy and contributions, head to cumulusnetworks.com/openpod

Sponsor: ITProTV

Whether you’re just starting out or you’re a seasoned IT professional, ITProTV is the only source you’ll need to learn the skills to pass the most in-demand IT certs — from entry level to advanced. Visit itpro.tv/packetpushers and use code PACKETPUSHERS to try it FREE for 7 days, and receive 30% off your monthly membership for the lifetime of your active subscription.

Sponsor: ThousandEyes

ThousandEyes gives you performance visibility from every user to every app over any network, both internal and external, so you can migrate to the cloud, troubleshoot faster and deliver exceptional user experiences. Sign up for a free account at thousandeyes.com/packetpushers and choose a free ThousandEyes t-shirt.

Show Links:

Michael Bushong on Twitter

Omar Sultan on Twitter

Conway’s Law

Four Interview Questions I Have Asked Network Engineering Candidates – Packet Pushers

Today's episode explores the ins and outs of IPv6 address planning, with IPv6 Buzz co-host Tom Coffeen in the guest chair. Tom discusses how to get away from "IPv4 thinking" when planning your v6 transition, and shares his real-world experiences of IPv6 adoption with CDNs and service providers.

On today's sponsored Priority Queue podcast we take a deep dive into Cisco's IOS-XR network OS to learn what it takes to build a carrier-grade NOS, including its microservices architecture, multiple levels of abstraction, and how it captures and shares state data.

On today’s Packet Pushers episode, we dive into the guts of Cisco’s IOS-XR. What does it mean for IOS-XR to be carrier-grade? What kinds of problems need to be solved by large service providers? How does the architecture of IOS-XR solve them?

Cisco is our sponsor for this deconstruction of the NOS. Our guests are Jag Tangirala, Principal Engineer; and Praveen Bhagwatula, Distinguished Engineer.

We start by examining the scalability, performance and reliability requirements that carries and service providers demand, and then drill into IOS-XR’s architecture.

We break out the control, data, management and infrastructure planes and look at the role of abstraction in a network OS.

Our guests delve into what state means in the context of a network OS. We look at how IOS-XR captures and communicates state to the processes that need it using tools such as SysDB and an event notification system.

The discussion also tracks what happens if a process crashes and how the system recovers, and we look at how IOS-XR gets updated.

Join us for a truly deep dive into this OS. And get more details on IOS-XR at @xrdocs.io.

Microsoft recently announced Azure DevOps. If you’re not familiar with this product, I bet you can imagine what it is. And I also bet you’re wrong.

But fear not. You’ll get insights into this developer platform with our guest and guide Nathaniel Avery, a solutions architect at a systems integrator with a host of Microsoft certifications (among many others).

Azure DevOps is a revamped version of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), an application lifecycle management system. Azure DevOps, which is (mostly) free and hosted online, consists of five core services:

* Azure Pipelines

* Azure Boards

* Azure Artifacts

* Azure Repos

* Azure Test Plans

The goal of Azure DevOps is to help developers get up to speed on the processes and tools that encompass a DevOps initiative.

Nathaniel and the Datanauts examine the background of Azure DevOps, dive into key components, offer tips on how to pick the best tools for developing in a Microsoft environment, and how to actually bring the “Operations” part into DevOps.

Show Links:

Introducing Azure DevOps – Microsoft Azure

Microsoft splits VSTS five ways to build new Azure DevOps platform – Ars Technica

The Jevons Paradox – Wikipedia

Nathaniel Avery on Twitter

Nathaniel Avery on LinkedIn

Not Your Dad’s IT – Nathaniel Avery’s blog

Microsoft recently announced Azure DevOps. If you’re not familiar with this product, I bet you can imagine what it is. And I also bet you’re wrong.

But fear not. You’ll get insights into this developer platform with our guest and guide Nathaniel Avery, a solutions architect at a systems integrator with a host of Microsoft certifications (among many others).

Azure DevOps is a revamped version of Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), an application lifecycle management system. Azure DevOps, which is (mostly) free and hosted online, consists of five core services:

* Azure Pipelines

* Azure Boards

* Azure Artifacts

* Azure Repos

* Azure Test Plans

The goal of Azure DevOps is to help developers get up to speed on the processes and tools that encompass a DevOps initiative.

Nathaniel and the Datanauts examine the background of Azure DevOps, dive into key components, offer tips on how to pick the best tools for developing in a Microsoft environment, and how to actually bring the “Operations” part into DevOps.

Show Links:

Introducing Azure DevOps – Microsoft Azure

Microsoft splits VSTS five ways to build new Azure DevOps platform – Ars Technica

The Jevons Paradox – Wikipedia

Nathaniel Avery on Twitter

Nathaniel Avery on LinkedIn

Not Your Dad’s IT – Nathaniel Avery’s blog

Guest pontificator Tom Hollingsworth joins Network Break to discuss the latest Bloomberg hardware hack story, Juniper's embrace of multicloud, a new NAT service from Google and other tech news.

Today's Weekly Show delves into DNS performance and endpoint testing with sponsor ThousandEyes. We'll review key findings from a new report on the state of global DNS authored by ThousandEyes, and discuss how to analyze performance and improve troubleshooting with end point testing.

On today’s Weekly Show we discuss measuring application performance across a network. We’re going to focus on a couple of specific scenarios with our sponsor, ThousandEyes.

First is the global domain name system, or DNS. DNS is that first step before one system can contact another, turning a hostname into a numerical address.

DNS performance matters, because not much else in an application transaction is getting done until name resolution is completed.

ThousandEyes recently completed an extensive report on global DNS performance. We’ll talk about how ThousandEyes gathered data for the report, and examine some of its key findings.

The second scenario is endpoint tests, where you can see exactly how an app is performing on the system using the app.

We’ll discuss the kinds of tests you can perform, and the insights you can glean to understand performance and speed up troubleshooting.

Our guests are Angelique Medina, Senior Product Marketing Manager; and Ameet Naik, Senior Technical Marketing Manager, both from the team at ThousandEyes.

Show Links:

2018 Global DNS Performance Benchmark Report – ThousandEyes

Angelique Medina’s Blog

Angelique Medina on Twitter

Ameet Naik on Twitter

I got together to Chris Swan @cpswan to record a two beer networking. Through my own staggering incompetence the video hasn’t turned out but the audio is just fine.

Chris a leader in service practice and the conversation talks about how organisational scar tissue. He recently attended the European IDC CIO summit in Lisbon which made it possible for him to meet on the harbourside and have a couple of beers to talk about how organisations tend to damage themselves when it comes to technology.