As I started Software Gone Wild podcast in June 2014, I wanted to help networking engineers grow beyond the traditional networking technologies. It’s only fitting to conclude this project almost seven years and 116 episodes later with a similar theme Avi Freedman proposed when we started discussing podcast topics in late 2020: how do we make networ…

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio, the host of today’s podcast. In today’s evolving landscape of whitebox, brightbox, and software routing, a small but incredibly comprehensive routing platform called FreeRTR has quietly been evolving out of a research and education service provider network in Hungary. Kevin Myers of IPArchitec…

Remember my rant how “fail fast, fail often sounds great in a VC pitch deck, and sucks when you have to deal with its results”? Streaming telemetry is no exception to this rule, and Avi Freedman (CEO of Kentik) has been on the receiving end of this gizmo long enough to have to deal with several generations of experiments… and formed a few strong op…

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio, the host of today’s podcast. In the original days of this podcast, there were heavy, deep discussions about this new protocol called “OpenFlow”. Like many of our most creative innovations in the IT field, OpenFlow came from an academic research project that aimed to change the way that we as o…

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio, the host of today’s podcast. As we all know, BGP runs the networked world. It is a protocol that has existed and operated in the vast expanse of the internet in one form or another since early 1990s, and despite the fact that it has been extended, enhanced, twisted, and warped into performing …

In early May 2020 I wrote a blog post introducing SuzieQ, a network observability platform Dinesh Dutt worked on for the last few years. If that blog post made you look for more details, you might like the Episode 111 of Software Gone Wild in which we went deeper and covered these topics: How does SuzieQ collect data What data is it collecting from…

A while ago we discussed a software-focused view of Network Interface Cards (NICs) with Luke Gorrie, and a hardware-focused view of them with Or Gerlitz (Mellanox), Andy Gospodarek (Broadcom) and Jiri Pirko (Mellanox). Why would anyone want to implement features in hardware and not in software, and what would be the best hardware implementation? We…

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio, the host of today’s podcast. As private overlays are becoming more and more prevalent and as SD-WAN systems and technologies advance, it remains critical that we continue to investigate how we think about internetworking. Even with platforms such as Slack Nebula, Zerotier, or the wireguard bas…

The last Software Gone Wild podcast recorded in 2019 focused on advances in Linux networking - in particular on interesting stuff presented at NetDev 0x13 conference in Prague. The guests (in alphabetical first name order) Jamal Hadi Salim, Shrijeet Mukherjee, Sowmini Varadhan, and Tom Herbert shared their favorite topics, and commented on the futu…

No, we were not talking about IP fabrics in general - IP Fabric is a network management software (oops, network assurance platform) Gian Paolo discovered a while ago and thoroughly tested in the meantime. He was kind enough to share what he found in Episode 107 of Software Gone Wild, and as Chris Young succinctly summarized: “it’s really sad what w…

Everyone is talking about FRRouting suite these days, while hidden somewhere in the background OpenBGPD has been making continuous progress for years. Interestingly, OpenBGPD project was started for the same reason FRR was forked - developers were unhappy with Zebra or Quagga routing suite and decided to fix it. We discussed the history of OpenBGPD…

Sick-and-tired of intent-based GUIs that are barely better than CiscoWorks on steroids? How about asking Siri-like assistant queries about network state in somewhat-limited English and getting replies back in full-blown sentences? Warning: you might be reentering the land of unicorns driving flying DeLoreans... but then keep in mind what Arthur Cla…

Imagine you would have a system that would read network device configurations, figure out how those devices might be connected, reverse-engineer the network topology, and be able to answer questions like “what would happen if this link fails” or “do I have fully-redundant network” or even “how will this configuration change impact my network”. Welc…

When I was still at university the fourth-generation programming languages were all the hype, prompting us to make jokes along the lines “fifth generation will implement do what I don’t know how” The research team working in Networked Systems Group at ETH Zurich headed by prof. Laurent Vanbever got pretty close. The description of their tool says: …

Every time a new simple programming language is invented, we go through the same predictable cycle: Tons of hype; Unbounded enthusiasm when people who never worked in target environment realize they could get something simple done in a short time; Ever-worsening headaches as the enthusiasts try to get a real job done with the shiny new tool; Disapp…

Remember how Nick Buraglio tried to use OpenDaylight to build a small part of SuperComputing conference network… and ended up with a programmable patch panel? This time he repeated the experiment using Faucet SDN Controller – an OpenFlow controller focused on getting the job done – and described his experience in Episode 101 of Software Gone Wild. …

I mentioned Multipath TCP (MP-TCP) numerous times in the past but I never managed to get beyond “this is the thing that might solve some TCP multihoming challenges” We fixed this omission in Episode 100 of Software Gone Wild with Christoph Paasch (software engineer @ Apple) and Mat Martineau from Open Source Technology Center @ Intel. Read more ……

A while ago we did a podcast with Luke Gorrie in which he explained why he’d love to have simple, dumb, and easy-to-work-with Ethernet NICs. What about the other side of the coin – smart NICs with their own CPU, RAM and operating system? Do they make sense, when and why would you use them, and how would you integrate them with Linux kernel? We disc…

In previous Software Gone Wild episodes we covered Snabb Switch and numerous applications running on it, from L2VPN to 4over6 gateway and integration with Juniper vMX code. In Episode 98 we focused on another interesting application developed by Max Rottenkolber: high-speed VPN gateway using IPsec on top of Snabb Switch (details). Enjoy! Listen to …

In summer 2018 Juniper started talking about another forward-looking concept: Network Reliability Engineering. We wanted to find out whether that’s another unicorn driving DeLorean with flux capacitors or something more tangible, so we invited Matt Oswalt, the author of Network Reliability Engineer’s Manifesto to talk about it in Episode 97 of Soft…

We love to claim that we’re engineers and yet sometimes we have no clue how technology we use really works and what its limitations are… quite often because understanding those limitations would involve diving pretty deep into math (graphs, queuing and system reliability quickly come to mind). Read more ……

After a series of forward-looking podcast episodes we returned to real life and talked with Carl Buchmann about his network automation journey, from managing upgrades with Excel and using Excel as the configuration consistency tool to network-infrastructure-as-code concepts he described in a guest blog post in February 2018 Read more ……

In recent years Linux networking started evolving at an amazing pace. You can hear about all the cool new stuff at netdev conference… or listen to Episode 94 of Software Gone Wild to get a CliffsNotes version. Roopa Prabhu, Jamal Hadi Salim, and Tom Herbert joined Nick Buraglio and myself and we couldn’t help diverging into the beauties of tc, and …

Hardware vendors are always making their silicon more complex and feature-rich. Is that a great idea or a disaster waiting to happen? We asked Luke Gorrie, the lead developer of Snabb Switch (an open-source user-land virtual switch written in Lua) about his opinions on the topic. TL&DL version: Give me a dumb NIC, software can do everything else. I…

In recent Software Gone Wild episodes we explored emerging routing protocols trying to address the specific needs of highly-meshed data center fabrics – RIFT and OpenFabric. In Episode 92 with Dinesh Dutt we decided to revisit the basics trying to answer a seemingly simple question: do we really need new routing protocols? Read more ……

In 2014, we did a series of podcasts on Snabb Switch (Snabb Switch and OpenStack, Deep Dive), a software-only switch delivering 10-20 Gbps of forwarded bandwidth per x86 core. In the meantime, Snabb community slowly expanded, optimized the switching code, built a number of solutions on top of the packet forwarding core, and even forked a just-in-ti…

David Barroso was sick-and-tired of using ZX Spectrum of Network Automation and decided to create an alternative with similar functionality but a proper programming language instead of YAML dictionaries masquerading as one. The result: Nornir, an interesting network automation tool formerly known as Brigade we discussed in Episode 90 of Software Go…

Continuing the series of data center routing protocol podcasts, we sat down with Russ White (of the CCDE fame), author of another proposal: OpenFabric. As always, we started with the “what’s wrong with what we have right now, like using BGP as a better IGP” question, resulting in “BGP is becoming the trash can of the Internet”. Read more ……

Years ago Petr Lapukhov decided that it’s a waste of time to try to make OSPF or IS-IS work in large-scale data center leaf-and-spine fabrics and figured out how to use BGP as a better IGP. In the meantime, old-time routing gurus started designing routing protocols targeting a specific environment: highly meshed leaf-and-spine fabrics. First in the…

Continuing the Linux networking discussion we had in Episode 86, we focused on Linux interfaces in Episode 87 of Software Gone Wild with Roopa Prabhu and David Ahern. We started with simple questions like “what is an interface” and “how do they get such weird names in some Linux distributions” which quickly turned into a complex discussion about ke…

Linux operating system is used as the foundation for numerous network operating systems including Arista EOS and Cumulus Linux. It provides most networking constructs we grew familiar with including interfaces, VLANs, routing tables, VRFs and contexts, but they behave slightly differently from what we’re used to. In Software Gone Wild Episode 86 Ro…

A long while ago Marcel Wiget sent me an interesting email along the lines “I think you should do a Software Gone Wild podcast with Phil Shafer, the granddaddy of NETCONF” Not surprisingly, as we started discovering the history behind NETCONF we quickly figured out that all the API and automation hype being touted these days is nothing new – some e…

During Cisco Live Berlin 2017 Peter Jones (chair of several IEEE task forces) and myself went on a journey through 40 years of Ethernet history (and Token Bus and a few other choice technologies). The sound quality is what you could expect from something recorded on a show floor with pigeons flying around, but I hope you’ll still enjoy our chat. Li…

In June 2017, we concluded the Building Next Generation Data Center online course with a roundtable discussion with Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President, Networking, and Simon Richard, Research Director, Data Center Networking @ Gartner. In the second half of our discussion (first half is here) we focused on these topics: Read more ……

A while ago I got a kind email from Kireeti Kompella, CTO @ Juniper Networks, saying “A colleague sent me an email of yours regarding SDN, the trough of disillusionment, and the rise of automation. Here's a more dramatic view: the Self-Driving Network -- one whose operation is totally automated.” Even though Software Gone Wild podcast focuses on pr…

In June 2017, we concluded the Building Next Generation Data Center online course with a roundtable discussion with Andrew Lerner, Research Vice President, Networking, and Simon Richard, Research Director, Data Center Networking @ Gartner. During the first 45 minutes, we covered a lot of topics including: Read more ……

Imagine a service provider that allows you to provision 100GE point-to-point circuit between any two of their POPs through a web site and delivers in seconds (assuming you’ve already solved the physical connectivity problem). That’s the whole idea of SDN, right? Only not so many providers got there yet. Read more ……

OpenConfig sounds like a great idea, but unfortunately only a few vendors support it, and it doesn’t run on all their platforms, and you need the latest-and-greatest software release. Not exactly a set of conditions that would encourage widespread adoption. Things might change with the OpenConfig data models supported in NAPALM. Imagine you could p…

Network automation and orchestration is a great idea… but how do you verify that what your automation script wants to do won’t break the network? In Episode 78 of Software Gone Wild we discussed the intricacies of testing network automation solutions with Kristian Larsson (developer of Terastream orchestration softare) and David Barroso of the NAPA…

Ansible, Puppet, Chef, Git, GitLab… the list of tools you can supposedly use to automate your network is endless, and there’s a new kid on the block every few months. In Episode 77 of Software Gone Wild we explored Salt, its internal architecture, and how you can use it with Mircea Ulinic, a happy Salt user/contributor working for Cloudflare, and S…

During Cisco Live Europe 2017 (where I got thanks to the Tech Field Day crew kindly inviting me) I had a nice chat with Peter Jones, principal engineer @ Cisco Systems. We started with a totally tangential discussion on why startups fail, and quickly got back to flexible hardware and why one would want to have it in a switch. Read more ……

During Cisco Live Europe (huge thanks to Tech Field Day crew for bringing me there) I had a chat with Jeff McLaughlin about NETCONF support on Cisco IOS XE, in particular on the campus switches. We started with the obvious question “why would someone want to have NETCONF on a campus switch”, continued with “why would you use NETCONF and not REST AP…

In autumn 2016 I embarked on a quest to figure out how TCP really works and whether big buffers in data center switches make sense. One of the obvious stops on this journey was a chat with Thomas Graf, Linux Core Team member and a founding member of the Cilium project. Read more …By ipSpace.net

Last year Cisco launched a new series of Nexus 9000 switches with table sizes that didn’t match any of the known merchant silicon ASICs. It was obvious they had to be using their own silicon – the CloudScale ASIC. Lukas Krattiger was kind enough to describe some of the details last November, resulting in Episode 73 of Software Gone Wild. For even m…

In 2013, large-scale cloud providers and ISPs decided they had enough of the glacial IETF process of generating YANG models used to describe device configuration and started OpenConfig – a customer-only initiative that quickly created data models covering typical use cases of the founding members (aka “What Does Google Need”). Read more ……

When I recorded the first podcast with Thomas Graf we both found it so much fun that we decided to do it again. Thomas had attended the NetDev 1.2 conference so when we met in November 2016 we warmed up with What’s NetDev and then started discussing the hot new networking stuff being added to Linux kernel: Read more ……

A while ago I decided it's time to figure out whether it's better to drop or to delay TCP packets, and quickly figured out you get 12 opinions (usually with no real arguments supporting them) if you ask 10 people. Fortunately, I know someone who deals with TCP performance for living, and Juho Snellman was kind enough to agree to record another podc…

From the moment Cisco and VMware announced VXLAN some networking engineers complained that they'd lose visibility into the end-to-end path. It took a long while, but finally the troubleshooting tools started appearing in VXLAN environment: NVO3 working group defined Fault Managemnet framework for overlay networks and Cisco implemented at least part…

In Software Gone Wild Episode 52 Katerina Barone-Adesi explained how Igalia implemented 4-over-6 tunnel termination (lwAFTR) with Snabb Switch. Their solution focused on very fast data plane and had no real control plane. No problem – there are plenty of stable control planes on the market, all we need is some glue. Read more ……

A few weeks ago Matt Oswalt wrote an interesting blog post on principles of automation, and we quickly agreed it’s a nice starting point for a podcast episode. In the meantime Matt moved to StackStorm team so that became the second focus of our chat… and then we figured out it would be great to bring in Matt Stone (the hero of Episode 13). Read mor…