The Fat Pipe - Most Popular Packet Pushers Pods

AJ Murray joins Kevin and Alexis to share his unique journey into tech, pivoting away from aviation maintenance into networking. Together they explore the importance of person-to-person networking and building a community in order to be successful. They also talk about the reality of burnout, which ultimately led AJ to step away from his podcast.... Read more »

Let’s hear from the next generation of network engineers. Eric Chou sits down with Sem Eyob and Damon Hoody, two early-career network engineers, to talk about how they got into the profession and where they hope to go. They share their views on AI and its effect on their generation, their struggles finding entry level... Read more »

As AI tools and agentic AI become part of how applications are developed, delivered, and managed, application performance monitoring and observability have to adapt. Ned Bellavance sits down with Drew Flowers and Jacob Yackenovich from IBM Instana about where these fields sit today, and the potential impacts of AI. They detail the challenges of application... Read more »

Cloud-based workspaces such as Google Workspace are often the backbone of an organization. But they also face threats from spam and phishing, account takeovers, and illicit access to sensitive documents and files. On today’s Packet Protector we talk with sponsor Material Security about how it brings additional layers of protection to Google Workspace, including email... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Our Red Alert calls out a dangerous vulnerability in the popular open-source React library. On the news front, HPE decides on a “both and” strategy for its two wireless portfolios and rolls out an option to let customers pick and choose among cross-platform features in Mist and Aruba Networking Central through... 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 »

Will it be possible to have fully autonomous networks in the near future? Anil Varanasi, CEO and Co-Founder of Meter, joins Scott Robohn in this sponsored episode to discuss the ongoing evolution from automated to autonomous networks. Anil breaks down how Meter differentiates from other networking vendors, discusses how Meter’s network products are vertically integrated... Read more »

In Part 1 of Redundancy vs. High Availability, we said that sometimes high availability and redundancy are considered to be the same thing, but we disagree. Holly and Ethan do agree that high availability can be considered a network design goal, and that redundancy is just one technique that can be used to help make... Read more »

Ned and Kyler sit down with Deana Solis, a freelance FinOps engineer and mentor. They discuss the undervalued skills of communication, look at the inherent biases and misplaced confidence of AI models, and offer guidance for those starting their careers. Deana also talks about her journey to discover the intersection of technology, career, and finding... Read more »

There may be misconfigurations and other problems lurking in your wireless network. From a lack of peer isolation to poor segmentation to RADIUS problems and vendor fails, these issues can make your WLAN less secure. Jennifer “JJ” Minella goes from Packet Protector co-host to guest as she discusses these issues with Drew Conry-Murray. This episode... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with listener follow-up on Fortinet’s vulnerability numbering, and sound a red alert about an authentication bypass vulnerability in ASUS’s AiCloud service. AWS and Google announce a joint cross-cloud interconnect offering (other cloud providers are invited to play), Microsoft and Ciena pitch a new design to boost optical network resiliency,... Read more »

The world of networking is changing at lightning speed thanks to AI. Today Eric sits down with Chris Kane to explore this new reality for network engineers. Together, they dive deeper into some of the changes that will be coming next, breaking down the technical demands and mindset shifts of intellectual curiosity and humility necessary... Read more »

Web applications have always been tricky to protect. They’re meant to be accessible over the Internet, which exposes them to malicious actors, they’re designed to take end-user inputs, which can be manipulated for malicious purposes, and they often handle sensitive data. Then the rise of public cloud and microservices architectures added new layers of complexity... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with a relative path traversal vulnerability in Fortinet’s FortiWeb. We’ll move on to an acquisition by Palo Alto Networks, another hiccup from our friends at Cloudflare, some AI announcements by Itential and Gluware, and finish with first quarter 2026 fiscal results from Palo Alto Networks. AdSpot Sponsor: Itential ... Read more »

Today Scott interviews Andy Lapteff. He opens up about his non-linear career path, starting from a working class background and his physical jobs in telecom to becoming a senior product marketing manager and podcaster. Join us as Andy shares candid stories of how he developed his resilience and the heartwarming origin story for the Art... 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 »

In today’s chat, Holly and Ethan consider a question from listener Douglas who asks, “How do you approach designing a network for high availability and redundancy?” They start by defining differences between redundancy and high availability, and talk about Holly’s experience with her own customers. Then they share examples of how to achieve redundancy in... Read more »

Ever wonder what it takes to level up your career in data science? Senior Data Scientist Darya Petrashka joins Ned and Kyler to share her personal journey from management and linguistics into data science, the real difference between a junior and a senior role, and helps us get under the “data science umbrella” to see... Read more »

Just what’s inside that commercial software you bought? Does it contain open-source components, NPM packages, or other third-party code? How could you find out? The answer is a Software Bill of Materials, or SBOM, a machine-readable inventory of a finished piece of software. Why should you care about SBOMs? Our guest, Natalie Somersall, is here... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Red Hat Samba server has a remote command execution vulnerability, and we cover some follow-up on fusion as a viable energy source (still a work in progress). On the news front, we search for signs in SoftBank’s sale of its Nividia stake, Mplify debuts a new certificate on carrier Ethernet for... 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 »

Think you need a degree or a ton of certificates to succeed in tech? Think again. Matthew Oborne joins our hosts Alexis Bertholf and Kevin Nanns to discuss how he went from working fast food to leading operations at an ISP. Your starting point doesn’t define your ceiling; resilience, adaptability, and a willingness to learn... Read more »

Tomas Kirnak, CEO of Unimus, joins Eric Chou in this sponsored episode to introduce Unimus, an on-premise network configuration management system built by network engineers to solve real-world problems. In this deep dive they discuss Unimus’ proprietary “Behavioral Tree” for automatic device discovery, the platform’s vendor support, the 70/30 rule, and lowering the barrier for... Read more »

Certificates are the socks of IT—everyone needs them, and you always lose track of a few. On today’s show we dive into the ACME protocol, an IETF standard to help automate how a domain owner gets a domain validation certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA). Our guest, Ed Harmoush, a former network engineer with AWS... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with a critical vulnerability in Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Express. On the news front it’s a Cisco triple play: the company brings AI to professional services and tech support with Cisco IQ, debuts converged infrastructure for the AI edge, and launches a new cert geared for running AI data... 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 »

What does network testing and validation really mean? How do testing and validation fit within an automation workflow? Is it possible to run meaningful tests without coding skills? Dan Wade from BlueAlly answers these questions and offers practical insights into building trust in automation through test environments, using AI for ideation and problem-solving, and personal... Read more »

MACsec is a protocol for encrypting Ethernet frames on a local (though not always local) network. Ethan Banks and Holly Metlitzky have an ELI5 (explain like I’m 5) discussion as to what exactly is MACsec and how it differs from IPsec. They talk about when and whether you need to implement MACsec with all the... Read more »

If you think managing Kubernetes clusters is hard, what about managing Kubernetes clusters across three different public clouds? We dive into the challenges that arises from running multi-cloud Kubernetes workloads. These challenges include workload identity, DNS query resolutions, and security. Here to help us navigate this complexity and offer possible solutions is Goutam Tadi, Staff... Read more »

Did you know college students are snooping on satellite transmissions? On today’s news roundup we discuss new research in which university investigators use off-the-shelf equipment to intercept traffic from geostationary satellites and discover that a lot of it is unencrypted. We also dig into the credential hygiene lessons we can learn from a corpus of... Read more »

Cisco Workflows is a new platform that makes network automation easier, smarter, and safer. On today’s episode, sponsored by Cisco, we get introduced to Cisco Workflows by Stephen Orr, Distinguished Solutions Engineer; and Reid Butler, Director of Product Management. They break down how Workflows helps you ditch repetitive tasks, roll out changes faster, and plug... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with some educational content on Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, and sound the alarm about a sandbox escape affecting the Firefox browser. On the news front, a DNS issue triggers a major Azure outage that affected numerous services and caused problems around the globe, Palo Alto Networks announces enhancements to... Read more »

On today’s show, sponsored by Itential, we talk about automation in the real world. Guest Jesse Ford is an automation architect at Itential. We talk about his career journey, how he got into network automation, how he decides which is the best tool for a job, and why tool diversity isn’t the same as chaos.... 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 »

Your background and experiences outside of tech can become a significant factor in your tech career. Guest Chris Williams is a good example; he talks about how his undergraduate and graduate studies in psychology influenced his work as a Developer Relations Manger at Hashicorp. Hosts Alexis Bertholf and Kevin Nanns chat with him about how... Read more »

CVEs, or Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures, are such a routine aspect of tech that most IT pros probably take them for granted. But like many things we take for granted, the CVE process takes some serious organizational infrastructure to function. On today’s Packet Protector, sponsored by Cisco, we talk about the organizations and processes that... Read more »

Host Eric Chou talks with Jeff Kala, co-author of the newly released “Network Automation Cookbook 2nd Edition,” to discuss his book and the experiences that led him from networking to network automation author. They discuss Jeff’s learning style and why it was helpful when working on his book. Lastly, they dig into Jeff’s predictions on... Read more »

Take a Network Break! Companies spying on…I mean, monitoring…their employees via software called WorkExaminer should be aware of a login bypass that needs to be locked down. On the news front, we opine on whether it’s worth trying to design your way around AWS outages, and speculate on the prospects of a new Ethernet switch... 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 »

Senad Palislamovic has held many roles in his time, from engineer to network operator to sales engineer and back again. He’s been around long enough to see trends come and go. Senad visits Total Network Operations to share some of his observations on network automation, AI for NetOps, and the quality of network data. Senad... Read more »

If you’ve ever wondered what the difference is between a Switched Virtual Interface (SVI) and Integrated Routing and Bridging (IRB), today’s show is for you! Ethan Banks and Holly Metlitzky start with some history and the basics of communication between layer 2 and layer 3 and then explain how the concepts of SVI and IRB... Read more »

While declaring the death of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) or Terraform may get you clicks on LinkedIn, IaC is alive and kicking. On today’s Day Two DevOps we talk about why IaC still matters. Guest Malcolm Matalka argues that IaC provides the tools and a model for managing infrastructure across its lifecycle in a structured... Read more »

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open-source protocol that enables AI agents to connect to data, tools, workflows, and other agents both within and outside of enterprise borders. As organizations dive head-first into AI projects, MCP and other agentic protocols are being quickly adopted. And that means security and network teams need to understand how... Read more »

Take a Network Break! On today’s coverage, F5 releases an emergency security update after state-backed threat actors breach internal systems, and North Korean attackers use the blockchain to host and hide malware. Broadcom is shipping an 800G NIC aimed at AI workloads, and Broadcom joins the Wi-Fi 8 party early with a sampling of pre-standard... 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 »

Multi-cloud, automation, and AI are changing how modern networks operate and how firewalls and security policies are administered. In today’s sponsored episode with Palo Alto Networks, we dig into offerings such as CLARA (Cloud and AI Risk Assessment) that help ops teams gain more visibility into the structure and workflows of their multi-cloud networks. We... Read more »

A college degree can be a useful stepping stone into a tech career, and it certainly doesn’t hurt to have it on your resume. But do you really need that college degree to succeed in IT? Maybe, maybe not. Today’s guest is Wes Noonan, whose non-traditional path into and through a career in IT has... Read more »

We’re thrilled to welcome Tim McConnaughy back to the podcast. Tim is a hybrid cloud network architect, author, and co-host of the Cables to Cloud podcast. He recently wrote a 5-part blog series titled ‘Goodbye, Yellow Brick Road’ that reflects on his career path, including his decision to leave a startup. We discuss the impetus... Read more »

Today we’re bringing back one of our favorite guests — Akili Akridge. He’s a former Baltimore cop who transitioned to building and leading mobile offense and defense teams for federal agencies and Fortune 100s. These days he’s a straight-talking expert on all things mobile security. We’re digging into mobile threats, why they keep CISOs up... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with listener follow-up on security browsers, and then dive into a deep pool of Juniper vulnerabilities to pick two critical ones affecting Juniper Space. We also get an update from SonicWall that the breach of its cloud storage service affected all users of the service. Cisco announces a new... Read more »