Packet Pushers - Weekly Show

Are you an AI skeptic or an enthusiast? Ethan and Drew sit down with Igor Tarasenko, Senior Director of Product Software Architecture and Engineering at Equinix, to break down the reality of AI in the network. In this sponsored episode, Tarasenko discusses why APIs are the new CLI, the critical need for observability in AI,... Read more »

It’s been over a decade since the first Packet Pushers podcast on EVPN. Now, guest Jeff McAdams can legitimately suggest that we “EVPN all the things.” Hosts Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray dig into Jeff’s stance on EVPN/VXLAN. They look at how VXLAN and EVPN work; talk about use cases in the data center, the... Read more »

Is the ideal IT employee just leaving college or a veteran with years of experience? Russ White joins Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray to discuss the complexities of this question. Younger professionals just out of college are more willing to work longer hours or unpopular shifts, learn new tools and skills, and take risks. Older... Read more »

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 »

When someone from the executive suite starts an AI initiative, what does that mean to you, the network engineer? The executive suite probably doesn’t know what their AI idea might mean for infrastructure. They might only have a vague idea of what they’re even trying to accomplish with an AI initiative. Regardless, that initiative puts... Read more »

Your production IT operations are almost certainly using cryptography libraries that are not quantum-safe, and the time to begin planning a cryptography overhaul is now. But this is likely to be a daunting project because it touches everything: clients, servers, apps, network devices, middleboxes, and so on. Daunting, but doable. We talk with Richu Channakeshava, Principal... Read more »

Monitoring and troubleshooting latency can be tricky. If it’s in the network, was it the IP stack? A NIC? A switch buffer? A middlebox somewhere on the WAN? If it’s the application, can you, the network engineer, bring receipts to the app team? And what if you need to build and operate a network that’s... Read more »

How might we get network traffic from Earth to a lunar base? Or Mars? Or to spaceships carrying astronauts or probes exploring space? And how do we get it back? The problem, among other things, is latency. The answer isn’t TCP/IP. The answer is…complicated. On today’s Heavy Networking we explore the challenges of getting packets... Read more »

Today’s episode is all about high-performance memory in switches. We dig into the differences among TCAM, SRAM, DRAM, and HBM, and all the complex tradeoffs that go into allocating memory resources to networking functions. If you’ve ever had to select a Switching Database Manager template or done similar operations on a switch, this is your... Read more »

LLMs and AI-powered chatbots are becoming a regular feature of network operations tools and vendor product portfolios. Now the next iteration of AI in network ops and automation is likely to be agentic. On today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by HPE Juniper Networking, we talk about what agentic AI actually means, how AI agents will accomplish... Read more »

Perhaps the biggest question around adopting network automation is whether you should build a solution using open source tools and a lot of coding glue, or buy a network automation platform from a vendor and construct your automation solution on top of that. Either way has tradeoffs. Network engineer Lee Harper joins Heavy Networking to... Read more »