this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore tools technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers my fellow network engineers this is a time for unity you know what let me walk back my opening words we are inclusive here on this podcast bring me your engineers yes but also bring me your admins architects and specialists designers desktop support and help desk too we are nothing if we are not together granted i do apologize if you were one person that happens to have every single one of the roles i just mentioned above christine only joking we know that's your superpower we need to not think of these roles as siloed entities but as one cohesive unit functioning toward a common goal we must put our petty differences aside and find some common ground that we can all agree on like decreasing the stretch layer 2 deficit or maybe even that wireless link budget our power levels don't need to be that high anyway thank you for your time this evening and remember that all are welcome here at the art of network engineering thank you president tim beautiful speech get my vote for another term oh cool get this man i thought it was fired on my first day well good evening i am aj murray at no blinky blinky full house tonight very exciting we have more people joining us on the live stream audience than i think we've ever had uh so so this is uh definitely a notable time in the podcast history so thank you so much to our patreons for joining us tonight dan at howdy packet dan how are you sir i'm doing wonderful aj how about yourself i'm i'm doing very good what's uh what's new in dan's world uh just some more palo stuff at the moment some global protect rocking the palos yes buddy excellent excellent at timber tino i think we'll see soon at president tim on twitter you don't wanna if you if you had any slightest idea of what i've been doing with my campaign funds you would not vote for me anymore anyway aj i'm doing good uh glad to be back again glad we got a full house this evening it's gonna be a good show absolutely absolutely and last but not least at andy laptop permit ipandyandy.com andy how are you hey i'm i'm good is it andy or zandy you've been pretty sandy lately i was andy until about three days ago when we got a puppy and this puppy's just kicking my butt up and down the street all i do is clean pee off the floor it's awful yeah i saw you put a poll out for some names on twitter did you land on one i think you know the kids roll this roost they yeah they named her daisy yeah i was i was going to bring her in here but uh i have a rug in here and we had to pull all the rugs out like the area rugs out of the house because she just she pees on anything with cloths though she's not in here because i was afraid she'd go on the floor but yeah man i'm i'm i'm i'm better than i've been in a while aj for sure yeah i i think that uh i think we've all noticed should i apologize for no no no definitely not i'm starting to wonder if there's a reason why yeah oh he's good he's good taming those leading questions yeah so i guess this is the part of the show where i should make my announcement yeah well what's going on andy all right so um i have accepted a role of juniper which i'm really excited about um i'm going to be a product manager of something they call cloud ready data center platform so um i'm still trying to get my head around the role and i've spoken to a bunch of people have reached out to me already who worked there which has been really nice i when this comes out i'll have been there two weeks but right now i'm in the middle of a month off i i'm two weeks you know through my four weeks off and i just took some time off hanging around the house i went out to colorado for a week hung out with my mom and just um i i was worn out and i don't know if burnout's the right term but anybody who listens to this show i apologize for the whining that you've had to endure but i've i've just been worn out for a while so i'm really excited about this opportunity um you know as high level i think what i'll be doing there i'll have some input and some influence over the products and features that juniper develops and releases so really what i'm what i'm hoping to do my intent is to take my experience as an end user right of networking products like all of us and try to make the networking world you know just a little bit better if i can be the voice of the user and help drive some innovation that helps people like you and i you know i mean everybody complains right about this vendor that vendor this thing doesn't do i've done it myself so um yeah that's that's the announcement i'm super psyched it's this huge opportunity i'm really grateful for it and um i think i'm going to be uh happy well well andy i i want to be one of the first to kind of publicly congratulate you um the you know as as the team of co-hosts we talk and i'm not joking we talk daily right maybe even hourly but if too much time elapses and we haven't heard from each other i think we just kind of check in and and so you know we've been on this you know roller coaster ride right along with andy uh you know and and so to finally be able to talk about it to finally be able to congratulate you i hope you're seeing the chats that are going on everybody's cheering for you right now that's awesome congratulations man so will will this be you know if you're doing juniper data center you're probably going to be focusing on the qfx line a little bit of everything yeah i know that the team that i'm on the qfx is their big bread and butter and i know they knocked it out of the or is it we now i don't even know um they they slashed soon to be we knocked it out of the park last year and they just crushed their their projections so they're you know they're killing it uh it's qfx's i mean i know in my in my previous role we we consumed a lot of their gear that the mx is the qfx's the acx's um i think we bought everything that they made um and you know they juniper has a again i don't know enough to speak uh intelligently about this yet but they um they bought abstra which i've been looking at and that seems really cool it's like a kind of automation fabric management slash gui kind of um so yeah there's there's a lot of stuff going on like i said i'm by the time this comes out i've been there a couple weeks and hopefully i can speak more intelligently about you know what i'm going to be doing i mean i didn't know what a it's really fun like we'll have to do another episode on this but you know i don't know we will yeah i didn't know what a product i didn't know it was even a role you know i truth be told i love content creation i was talking to people about tme roles technical marketing engineer and i'm like oh wow like people pay you to like create content that's pretty cool i mean we get a lot of zeros here aj but you know what it means i compensated you well i'm so shocked to hear that somebody does it better i'm kidding this has been my most favorite part of my career but because i love content creation so much with you guys i thought wow so i was pursuing a tme role and then this product manager thing popped up and i got on the phone with um with this guy mike who just blew me away and you know again that's not this episode and i don't want to take over here but yeah it's i didn't know what this role was a month ago and now i'm like super stoked and super pumped and um i think it's going to be really exciting and i'm excited to go to juniper i've heard great things about their culture culture's a big thing for me which sounds funny because some of the places i've been at i mean just don't play a store alone you look you know they're not they're not known for like hey awesome cultures i'm not talking any smack on any of the previous places i'm super grateful for all the opportunities i've been given you know this role doesn't happen if it weren't for the ones that i've come from and learned and cut my teeth and so grateful for everything not trying to be that guy you know talking trash on on people i was with but yeah man thank you it's just really exciting and i'm really glad to share it with with everybody here so uh you know good things to come for sure i'm probably gonna be the annoying juniper guy soon i do want to echo everything that aj said and yeah as soon as you said that andy i got whiplash from the chat over here from from the patreons that was really cool to see the outpouring of support and i i just want to say man this is this is really cool to to see you get this this is there's not got to be a more deserving person uh given everything that you've gone through and and i mean you're such a hard-working guy you pour your heart and soul into everything and to see that payback and and hopefully in the long run help you and your quality of life and your family we're we're just really excited for you man thanks tim not that this is the audience i want to gloat to but no maintenance windows no on-call that was coming from the guy that doesn't even like you so i'm kidding looks like the chat has turned they've turned on that i i haven't read the chat i'm just focusing on you guys i'll catch up later i'm feeling an edit coming up oh andy became one of them yeah was a good one about us there was a good one about a soapbox earlier see manny knows what's up he said the zandy versus dan rivalry he can sense he can sense the tension well congratulations andy why don't you take some time to catch up in the chat and in the meantime we'll uh we'll check out who's in the winning channel this week and then we'll come back and introduce our guests and now it's time for some wins this has to be the most winning winningest week of the year just some amazing stuff going on this week so let's get right to it network trials has passed the aws certified cloud practitioner exam congratulations black end 0-1 started a new position as a network engineer this has been a journey five years in the making they've been working in tech for a very long time some time as a network manager they got some certifications and they were finally able to pivot to a position as a network engineer and they credit that to andy uh and his platform pushing physical labs he said once he put the physical lab on his resume the hiring manager hired him and said that was the reason why he was selected over other candidates because he was working with a physical lab and putting in that effort congratulations blackn01 jacob has passed the ccie data center exam this is our first ever ccie announcement in the winning channel congratulations jacob uh e-i-t-j has passed the ccna huge congratulations to jay i've been talking to him for a very long time watching his journey and just so excited to be able to announce his cca n a win here in the podcast so congratulations jay chris glesner has passed the ccna as well angel has passed the lpi linux essentials exam naroot passed the ccsp pj spyro finished their masters in network technology congratulations peter hunt passed the oracle cloud architect associate jr cortez 25 started a new position as a unix systems administrator and also passed the linux foundation's exam nittany cli made the dean's list last last semester congratulations nittany and ethan interviewed for a core network engineer position and was called less than two hours later after the initial interview and was presented with an offer so he's gone from first line support to network engineer to now core ip network engineer in just nine months congratulations ethan era disabled passed the aws solutions architect associate exam congratulations and our very own andy laptop co-host andy has started a new position at juniper as a product manager for cloud ready data center platform congratulations andy we are so excited for you and finally able to announce this on the podcast so you're going to hear a whole lot more about it in this episode so uh congratulations andy we are so excited for you thank you to new patreons brandon polker adam pawlowski stephen k dallin bryce and quinn snyder thank you so much for your support of what we do here at the art of network engineering podcast if you're interested in joining our patreon program you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of netenge and we thank all of our listeners for your support we've had just an absolutely incredible year we are looking forward so much to 2022 we wish you all a very happy new year and we can't wait to bring some exciting new content to you now back to the show all right let's get going with the show i am very excited to welcome our guest uh this week he is the author of one of my favorite books mastering python for networking please welcome to the show eric cho hey hi it's good to be here um long time friend a long time friend and so it's it's good to good to be here talking to you guys in voice right i'm always on on the patreon chat but uh you know now it's talking to against in person virtually so that's great thanks for having me absolutely absolutely uh i know you're up to a ton um but i have to honestly tell you this has been one of my favorite books in in all my studies um yeah i think you really broke it down in a very consumable way it it's very relatable uh as far as approaching from an uh network engineer perspective so uh i definitely keep this one on the shelf and reference them from time to time um and and i really want to thank you for all your support of what we do here on the podcast and uh i know that you have um very graciously given away a few copies of your book and uh you know we just really appreciate everything you do for us eric so so genuinely thank you thank you very much yeah likewise uh aj i think you guys are doing a fantastic job and in creating this community i uh to be honest i've i've looked at and i've tried to join other communities and try to participate but this is the one i choose to stick around for you know like the other communities are not i mean i'm i don't want to i don't want to uh you know put down other community i just say this this one fits my brain better fits my personality better i always like a warm uh encouraging environment i always feel like you don't have to put other people down in order to elevate yourself up so i think this one fits that you know kind of mindset right like it's always just we're all just part of a part of this path there's no no point in uh having a zero-sum mindset so i think this is a great community and if there's any more i could do for for guys uh you'll be great and i'm i'll be happy to uh you know happy to contribute hopefully i have right but you know i want to do more careful careful what you offer eric we might take advantage of you please do please do just list them out and i'll like try to knock them out and do a put a check box next to it well let's let's start um where do you work now uh and and what do you do there yeah so i work for 810 networks now um it's been i've been with a10 for about six it's going down six years um it's funny listening to andy because i was a cable guy for about four and a half years i was with time warner cable um i did the uh i do the cable run i know home pass you know docsis 1-0 i don't know ubr's universal prop and router those those are right up my wheelhouse we grew them we grew the the particular market that i was in we grew it from about 40 users to about 28 000 users in about three years to two to three years so you know we saw that growth uh when people were trying to get the cable broadband um so i was i was a cable guy and i was also part of juniper networks and it's a very decent company um and i'll tell you one thing right like so decent it's a great company and um i'll tell you like after i left um i left around i think junior's time frame and i think they go by like the uh the accounting year to like june to june or something like that but anyway so the point was they actually gave me a bonus after i left right so like i was entitled for that bonus but um but i chose to leave because of family you know circumstances and need to start a new job so i wasn't expecting it so after i started at the new job my own manager called me up and he was just like oh you know we appreciate everything you've done for us uh you left on a good term and uh here's some bonus and you know i don't know if any company would do that right like after you you left you know you're just you're a stranger to them on the street so but juniper was one of those companies that did that so you know kudos to juniper and i wish you the the best of luck congratulations and you know i i wish you all the best really just like the rest of the patreons the rest of the the hosts on this thank you eric so just for context i've been working a long time and i've never received a bonus so the fact that i'm going to a company who gives bonuses to people after they quit two thumbs up yeah i've never heard of that i mean obviously it's not unheard of now at this point but that's that's pretty cool i'm just excited to receive my first bonus anyway nice yeah and they're very down-to-earth so i used to work in so when i was working for juniper i was actually in the headquarter right so juniper has this weird structure where there's like building one two and three and two is actually the headquarter uh one and three were on the side so it was just kind of weird structure but i was in building two and that's where the cafeteria is so people will come from all three buildings go to the cafeteria i see the ceo there all the time i see the all the you know management i always feel comfortable walking up to them just shoot some breeze with them so it's a very i mean granted this was like uh i forgot where it was like 2005 but i i think like you mentioned culture matters it comes from the top down so uh hopefully they kept that culture and it seems like they did so it's it's cool hey man thank you so um you said you're at a10 networks now what do you do there yeah so i am actually a security researcher so a10 is a kind of f5 competitor so f5 you know 18 starts with low bouncers they now call it adc application i don't know what they say but you know but anyway so f5 has the biggest market share it's like more than i don't know whatever percentage and then uh citrix i think it's the second uh biggest market share for adc providers and a10 is number three um however we're pretty big in japan so i i want to say where we're number one in japan as far as market share because the relationship previous founder that sort of stuff so um so that is what we do for the majority of our uh i guess revenue stream but also um adc's not uh shall we say like a growth market so you know we're uh you know heavily pivoted into security and so our other product line is uh ddos prevention so i work in that group so we started um you know almost started along with that product on um the tps product line um but right now i'm actually so i was when i first joined them i was in professional services and that was in sc kindling one of the top accounts and then and then i left i went back to azure microsoft azure and then um and then i came back to 810 to start with my manager on the security research team and um it's been six years since we did that we grew the team from just me and him it was a brand new team security research and we grew that team to about five go soon to be six people uh it's been fun so i i should say i'm probably just like a plumber right like whatever is necessary to to get the job done i'll do so i do you know application development um i do a lot of devops stuff um i talk to the customer um i talk to vendors and just do all kinds of stuff like whatever needs to be done like it's almost like we have a start-up mindset because it's such a small team so i would like i would go physically rack and stack stuff and i would go and talk to at the same time i would talk to our top customer and try to sell our service and tell them why we're better at you know our competitor or whatnot what's our advantage and so on so that's just you know kind of in a nutshell i want to say i'm just a janitorial staff so you hit on you hit on kind of a hot button trigger word i'll tell you i'll take dan's phrase you triggered me uh and you mentioned devops so you said you you did some devops can you kind of give a high level explanation of of what devops is and what you were doing to make it work well and also to just to add on a little bit to tim's there is and how does that how does that relate to security research yeah that's it that's a good question so devops is pretty big topic right so i'm not sure if we could cover all of it but to me devop is a combination of development and ops so you have to take both of them at the same time so you look at things in the systematic view so if something you do is great for development but sucks for operations then it's it it doesn't do a good good grade right but if something is good for operations but very bad for development then that too is not a a good a good devops principle so i would say devos the first principle is look at things in totality and the second is to do fast iterations so you do small changes all the time so you could back out and uh implement stuff at a rapid pace so i i don't want to do the facebook you know move fast and break stuff but that's almost you know kind of the common way of thinking about it right you want to do incremental small changes and then the third part is the feedback so you want once you do the do the change you you want to get the feedback immediately so you know how well we did or how well it did not do and then either roll back continue and so on so you just kind of rinse and repeat these three things system system view a quick iteration and then feedback so those to me are the the kind of the three pillars of devops and for me in particular when i when i say devops because it's kind of tricky doing security research especially if you have a small budget so we work with multiple cloud providers so we we try to make everything opex as opposed to capex we don't have a lot of money to spend and we need to do things really quickly so we know whether it works or not and then so we either continue or we back out and we probably since the start of this team will probably back out just as much project as we have going on it's kind of a 50 50 split so in my day job i try we try a lot of different things just to see whether it works or not whether it's honeypot whether it's you know interaction with the command and control center whether it's trying to decode you know some kind of vulnerability so we we try a lot of that and we try to do everything in outbacks so therefore the end result is actually we work with maybe four or five different cloud providers and so logistically that makes it very difficult right like you you don't have something that works across all all of them so you do have to be agile you do have to be um kind of find common places i've certainly made my share of mistakes but also i learned a lot of lessons along the way so i hope that answered the question but let me know if something is not clear no that makes a lot of sense thanks for going through that yeah yeah so eric i want to go back in time to a place where maybe you didn't know anything about network automation or what a devops was yeah that's like yesterday or yeah no so i definitely um was a network engineer in the very very traditional sense so when i started this field i worked for a a small isp back in southern california so that is when i first started knowing what you know networking was or what the ethernet was cat 5 that sort of stuff and so when on the traditional route like the cisco cli so the way uh this was 2000 right the turn of the millennium so the way to move forward was actually to get more and more familiar with cisco and cisco provides you with this you know nice path of certification so i went and get my ccna got my mp i got a bunch of ccmp specialization in fact i think at one point i have all the np specialization that they offer it's like security voice over ip whatever um and then i went on to uh went out to get the ie back in 2008 um but at 2008 i was already working for a top cloud provider i was working for amazon so at that time you know they were really pushing the boundaries and um they were aggressively moving away from any you know like vendor-based technology so so it wasn't offered me it did not offer me any additional value to continue to pursue like des i mean in fact i don't think de existed back then but um but i did renew my cciu once and then when it comes to renew again it's just you're just like you know there's so many other stuff that i had to do and take priority so i decided not to renew it so my so right now i could not claim i'm a ccie because it expired like i don't know back in whatever but two two four six zero i don't think anybody could take that number though it is retired it is retired it will go to the grave with me i i hope but um i don't know but eric was it hard to let that expire you know i thought it would be but it wasn't really that hard because at the time i think i was very head strong into network automation already and um you know it was just like you only have so much brain space right so my brain space was already like half of it was work and the other two thirds was automation like python automation how do i get this done so there doesn't really leave a lot of space for like worrying about um certification and all that and i would say you know for companies such as microsoft and amazon which was you know basically the two companies i stayed for 10 years um certification really wasn't that big of a deal um it was it was like oh it's nice especially if you're already in right if you're already in it's like your your value is based on the the trail of work that you've done rather than you know like external validation um especially you know i don't know if i don't i don't know if i would piss people by saying this but i would say these cloud providers they live in their own bubble right and in a way they have their nose up a little bit so it's almost like oh you know yeah it's nice that you're ccie but what about x y and z right like what about this this thing that we thought was so cool and like we're pushing the boundaries and you know we're we're changing the world and you know thumping the chess kind of stuff so it wasn't really hard to let it expire i would have to say when you're in that environment you kind of take that mindset as well now that i'm not i know they're in a bubble i know they're you know there are a lot of stuff that's unrealistic about them um but at the time wasn't hard to let it expire so if i'm here and you're right eric you kind of made it sound like the cloud environments made you start to think more vendor agnostically is that also what pushed you into network automation that you had to do things more quickly more efficiently or what really pushed you toward automation yeah well it was to survive really that was the truth um i i i told about this story on on david bumble's uh once one time but um but i'll repeat it again so there was when i joined amazon it was like six months into the into the job and um uh i was in this group uh troubleshoot there was like an issue that came up and me and this other person were both troubleshooting this issue and we're trying to find out whether it was a networking issue or not and we're both looking at just tons and tons of logs and we're trying to make make ways out of this this just jumble of information and um i i just i struggled with it i was trying to troubleshoot and this other guy was just like oh you know if this i'm just going to write some script and then so he wrote like a pro script and um went through all the logs and to prove that it wasn't his issue so it was just like and he went on at five and me on the other hand i was like looking at network logs i was trying to correlate the timing between like different devices i was looking at a monitoring tool and i stayed like four additional hours or something like that and i don't i don't think i even even solved it it was like four hours i would i almost died it would be like i better just go home so it was just like oh my god it's like i gotta get me someone died yeah it's just like crazy right so i was like okay i gotta give me some of that pearl magic but um yeah but it wasn't like smooth selling back then right it wasn't smooth sounding ever since it's like oh i discovered pro and then now enlightenment it wasn't like that it was just like i struggled with pearl um it doesn't fit my brain it almost feels like you know um there was this book called learning pearl right and it was like it's thinned and i feel like every time i i want to write a new script i have to open up that book again because i would just immediately i wrote my first script and i resisted so much i would just close that book and forget everything i've learned and then next time i would need to write another script i need to go get that book again and then you know it's the camel book i still remember the cover i remember like it was blue and i so hated that book but i i needed that book and so until i found python so python really kind of stuck with me i think just the way they structure it um the way that uh this the community behave or you know the syntax was was presented um like really stuck with me so i think because of where i'm in now like a lot of people ask me you know should i learn python should i learn go link should i stick with pearl like whatever it is and um my answer is always be to find something that fits your brain right like go give it a shot and uh there's no religion here if there's something fits you better then go for it you know learn how you learn and that's the most important thing because i was that way like i i couldn't i couldn't write a pro script if my life depended on it so eric i i think you said something important in there well you said a lot of awesome things but um when when you like for me when i saw aj wave his magic ansible one once in a demo it's the first time i saw automation and realized what it could do for me you know like when you saw your buddy because i i troubleshoot the same way i do everything manually i go through logs it's awful you're trying to correlate i mean i think that rings true you know for a lot of people probably listening but when you saw that guy just run a script i mean my jaw dropped when you said that he ran a script and proved it wasn't his network i'm like holy crap like that sounds amazing um and even at my last job i mean we're you know running an mpls network you got to touch like 36 devices anytime you touch the network and i watched this python magic that they built i mean just be untenable i couldn't touch four dozen devices every window to update all the lsps but poof python so i'm just saying that once you see that like oh my god look at this because prior to me seeing that magic that aj did or the magic at work it's like what is this and what am i going to do with this and it's all so confusing so just for me that's been a real helpful thing and i'm nowhere near i have a lot to learn right but um i'd also want to call you out like in your community engagement i mean you reached out to a couple of us and offered to help personally you know with with our python journey and that just really not to take us off you know off track here but i just think it speaks to you know you're a busy guy you're an author you have a job you know you have a family and then you're like hey guys if i can help you one-on-one let me know i mean that just really i really appreciate that i just want to thank you publicly because i think that says a lot about you know you and how much you care so yeah thanks man i appreciate that i think when yeah uh i was i was gonna say i think one thing for me uh where automation really comes in uh or wows me i guess is when there's something that's just a pain in my ass and it's repetitive i have to do it several times that's whenever it's like all right we're going to figure this shit out that's that's when i start going to trying to i'll be a script kitty i don't care you know you call me what you want to but i'm going to figure something out in that sense and it sounds like that that was kind of your scenario there that you know you you were running through all those logs and apparently about killed you i've never seen logs kill anybody but i believe you um so it sounds like something you know you know you had a major pain and then that like triggered your i mean because because would you would you say automation was kind of a life-changing event for you because i mean now you've wrote a book about it now you know you're you're diving so deep into this so from that pain in your life like you transitioned into something completely different that's just uh that's crazy yeah so i think um to answer that question i think i could go back to what andy was saying as well which is context matters right like you if you look at something if you if you could see a mirror of yourself and the problem that you could solve then it becomes so much more motivational it becomes so much more relevant to you you're solving the problem in front of you so i think context matters um but when i first started in you know a pro land or or getting in touch with python there was no context for network automation and python i think um uh uh what's his name edelman um so i think i think he had the he was yeah jason edelman he was in the process sorry he was um he was a guest on my show but anyways so jason um o'reilly like he wrote like a booklet on the o'reilly but he started with that and then he was in the process of making into the the uh eventual book that already had but he was delaying it for like three years and he was in the process of doing that and i was the the tech reviewer for the first 50 percent um but at the same time there was no other context for using python for network automation there was no net mico there was no napalm there was no no near there was nobody else really i mean i'm sure somebody else was doing it like jason for example he with his you know one pk and and all that but you know somebody else was doing it but nobody was publicly saying how like this whole path right so so i sat down and like okay i sure poked myself in the aisle like i sure you know bump my head against the wall many many times how about if i just like summarize them so to have this representation and to say well you know here's here's all the things here's this book that i wish i had when i started out this journey and so my target audience was the younger eric when he started this so to you know each of your questions to to andy yes so context matters absolutely like now that you see all these other people are doing network automation and python and we could carry each other up and help each other that's great right and then of course to dan's point that you know you have to solve the problem in front of you and obviously it changed the trajectory of my career for sure and thus you know by extension my you know my my family my wife and um going along that publication line you know so i uh you know of course you always want to improve and you want to take more control of your content and so on so you know getting to self-publishing and all of that so yes that that was that started it all it changed everything it changed my trajectory network automation changed my life and um you know now i get to talk about it with awesome guys like you guys so i i guess while we're talking about it like what what was kind of like the catalyst that directed you to creating the book well you know um like i said i think i think representation matters and context matters um it's just like you know when people talk about uh female representation in network engineering when people talk about you know minority representation in upper management um context matters representation matters so what i really wanted to do was to go out and show people that there's this this i mean i understand data science is cool and like um you know just straight up programming is called web development's core security core which all exists within the python realm but i don't see anybody out there on the mountaintop waving the flag and say python could be used for network automation as well so that was the biggest driver is for me to go and say um here it is right here is something that i thought was cool and here's something that i've been pursuing and hopefully somebody else will find it useful um in fact i'll tell you a funny story aj so when when packed so the whole thing that led to the book was because i've been blogging about um you know these uh the stuff that i've been doing mostly sdn and one of the uh article on openflow ranked pretty high on google at one point so they uh so pax saw that they reached out and said did you want to do a book and i'm like okay good um networking for python and i actually you know even after we finalized the the detail i went back into pack and said are you sure this is what you want right like because networking in python could be like server networking it could be like sockets it could be udp streams tcp stream and that's what most people think of when they say python and networking so i went on a double check with them go are you sure i'm happy to write a book but are you sure this is what you want this is okay and they came back twice and said this is fine and i'm like okay but nobody's nobody's gonna buy it right so i was just you know i was um so i wrote the book really really quickly before they find out they made a mistake and i even thought about um i i calculated the break-even point for the publisher i'm like they gave me a chance i shouldn't make they shouldn't lose money on it right so so i even calculated the break-even point i'm i'm like okay six months after the book published if it doesn't hit this point then i'll probably spend my money my own money and um and buy half of that quantity so they don't lose so much money so that was how insecure i was and how unsure i was of the topic but um but of course you know it it found an audience and i'm uh super great grateful for it um you know thank you guys for your support oh god of course of course now did you hit the break-even point i think i did i did i did but um uh the funny thing was i think two weeks before the book was published the first edition that was um i saw the uh i i saw the the creator for the request package and he was also the co-author for a hitchhiker's guide for python i think so he actually said he was going to donate all of his book proceeds to pie girls to promote you know uh programming stem you know education for for ladies in tech so i was like okay if he could do that i could do that as well so so i'm actually you know as then i actually uh you know very publicly on the blog say i said i'm going to donate all of my proceeds to to charity and all of that so so it did hit the break-even point but it did not benefit me financially uh which is which is great you know i'm happy to happy to do that that's really totally what was the charity that you you put all the proceeds to so it was it was a combination so i actually um i don't want to just blindly donate money i want to know what the charity does what the purpose the driving tower and so on so initially what i did was i asked the um people who helped me like my uh my manager or the book reviewer or the editors what they're passionate about and then you know if there's a particular charity that they want to do uh donate to so they would say oh you know yeah so um i'm you know i did i like unicef or somebody else was saying you know i feel very passionate about homelessness or you know the environment so i would make contributions to each of those and then later on i would um go out and research some of the some of the charities and i have a default charity which is the tsuji foundation which is a buddhist compassion relief foundation that does a lot of charity work so that's my default for donations but some of the other charities is you know whether people you know whoever i bump to like for example if um you know jason gooly who was on your show and he was on my show and asked him you know afterwards what are some of the uh you know homelessness was his biggest uh passion project at the time um so you know make donation to there um i think i i i started try i started blog posts and track all the charities i donated to up till like march of 2019 or something like that and i just got lazy i still do it but i just don't don't you know track it and like you know i don't want to feel like you know like look at me you know i'm doing all this great stuff i just want to make sure like they're accounted for and i think by that time people should know i'm serious about it um and so on so is that still in place today so if somebody buys a copy of the book are you still making donations to various organizations i still do it but but it's not 100 so the first two edition the first edition the second edition is 100 but starting from the third edition i start to have some overhead like you know hosting my own site um you know doing the podcast hosting and all of that so those stars to have a cost um associated to them so i would you know and again i i don't want to feel like i i want more publicity or like hey you know look at me i'm i'm so great that sort of stuff so i don't say it anymore but i still do a large chunk of it to charity but i reserve the right to like pay pay the podcast hosting company instead so uh so for the third edition it's not a hundred percent and for the uh the kafka book is i haven't even seen a dime but when i do you know that would certain part of it will go to charity as well is just like i want to be more low-key about it sure sure i mean you're trying to grow the brand and then you can continue to give more back in it's it's like a balancing act right and and yeah i mean you feed you got to have a platform you got to cover those costs and and i think we we do the same thing here right like we have we have the patreons we have our merch sales and stuff like that so we cover our costs and then we'll go ahead and give the rest back to community and so yeah we feel you we feel you yeah so i think it's interesting go ahead now please go there no i was gonna say like when i talk to other content creators they get it right like or open source project maintainers it's like some dude is doing in basement you know donating his time writing these open source projects but they're not really getting compensated for it even though like thousands of people use uh use their project so when i talk to other content creators when i talk to other creators in general they get it but there's a certain portion of you know like the audience out there who think open source should just be free or you know content should just be free or like you know creators shouldn't make any money because you know they they built a project upon other projects which is very true right like if the open source community doesn't exist my book wouldn't exist right like it leverages all these knowledge so it's very true but it it's also about sustainability right like you you have to pay the bills you don't have to be you know it doesn't have to be retirement money or it doesn't have to be you know millionaire money but you still have to sustain your operation you still have to have a reasonable amount of standard so when i talk to other content creators they tend to agree with me but i also met people online who's you know kind of against the idea of content creators you know making profit out of it like any time it doesn't matter if you're discounted 99 or it's like no you're making one percent you make you're getting a dollar out of that uh you know 49.99 book so it's just like you know it's it's um um i think it's a balancing that's a whole other episode i think i that i could talk to you for an hour about that eric like valuing your time right i mean i have instances in my life where i didn't value my time enough to charge friends or family for services that skills that i have and then the you know when they need you know when i need something from them you know they come out and help me that i get charged so like the difference really is i didn't value my time and they did right right i mean that's the difference so we we set our we set our price and i don't think you should be time is the greatest resource we have and if we're spending time creating content writing books like you said i mean there's no shame in being compensated for our time because we have you know specialized skills i i wanted to go back really quick and and i apologize if you touched on this maybe i was reading um patreon comments so we could cut this out if you did but you said something that caught my attention you know you're this heavy-hitting very smart engineer python author guy and you said you were a cable guy at one point right so my ears perked up so then i started researching i mean stalking you on linkedin so how does a finance major you know how did you go like you're a finance major you were a cable guy you became a network engineer how because a lot of our listeners you know how do i get in how do i get that job how do i and and i've had a ton of people come to me because i put out a video about hey you know how i went from cable guy to network engineer like that's not an easy jump so your your your origin story kind of gets caught my attention how was cable guy before college after college how did you go from cable guy to network engineer i guess is the question and all that rambling yeah so how long do you have no i'm just kidding no i'll try to do it in five minutes right um so the biggest thing i think i would recommend people to do is to do internships and to try out the things that you think you want to do as much as possible so when i was in college i'm always working in work studies internships so i interned at various locations i interned at kmart out of all places right so i was i was in retail i was at kmart for internship for one semester uh a one quarter and then i interned at morgan stanley dean witter for financial wealth management because i was a finance major and then i interned at a local isp so um oh i should say i was a finance major but i also was a mis minor so i think there was like a total of two people who was a finance major also mis minor but um but i'm also have this like multi-interest and even even my major was f like at cal poly was frl so finance real estate and law so i study all three and then i have a minor on computer so i have this like multi-interest level that i always want to explore and then so i did all these internships and i found out that i hated finance right like i hated uh you know just i just i just don't like it right and i think one of the things that stood out to me really big at the time was in finance it's really at least at the time it was a lot about seniority it was about relationship building and like pay your due when you're a junior financer and then move your way up until you manage bigger and bigger portfolio and so on um whereas when i was interning at an isp is that you could make an impact right away right like i was i was like building kernels i was taking customer calls i was handling a lot of projects that i felt i made an impact on so so i decided and also you know this was the year 2000 so i graduated in 2000 so the few years before then was a dot-com bomb.com boom right it eventually become the dot-com bomb but it was dot-com boom so um so it was so much easier to get a job to get a meaningful position in um in tech than in finance so you know so that internship in a local isp turned into a full-time position and from that full-time position i sort of outgrew um outgrew the agreed the position and at the time time warner cable it wasn't even time on a cable it was a roadrunner so roadrunner was a joint venture between multiple msos which is cable companies they pulled their money together and they put they built like kind of this backbone that they all share so like bright house and time warner cable att broadband um and adelphia i don't even think adelphia at back then but anyways so a bunch of cable companies uh built roadrunner and uh they were launching markets in each of these uh uh cable cable locations so at the time they were they were saying hey you know who wants to move to um california desert to launch this roadrunner service and um people with family didn't want to go because it was the desert more senior engineer like you know they have plenty of options they didn't want to go so i was there and i raised my hand i'm like you know just give me the exposure i'm willing to you know live in the desert and so on so that's how i became a cable guy so um i shouldn't say a cable guy because it was a hybrid right so i was half of it was it's just like the you know andy you know what i'm talking about hfc right hybrid fiber and they were a coax network so i was a hybrid so i was you know half of my job was dealing with like the cable new you know stuff like frequency division multiplexing coax fiber and the other half was dealing with the core of networking so it's very much bgp very much you know sonnet at the time very much backbones so so it was a hybrid but i think the difference was that i was actually in the division i was there you know um driving around doing home paths i was doing the planning i was looking at a sub count i was uh talking to the the head and engineers about how what's the upstream downstream ratio and so on so um so in a nutshell that's what happened yeah you weren't a cable guy to be fair i was i was uh i was just gonna say i didn't know what bgp was when i was a cable guy well you know by that time i was the i think the reason i got hired was because i already got my mp back then so um you know so they thought i knew some stuff i didn't know anything but you know they thought i could i could learn if i if i put my mind to it so they gave me the option they gave me the chance to to learn and grow into the job i just think there's a valuable lesson in there you try different things right you know through your internships and you're able to you know a finance major to wind up in tech i think is pretty cool and you know you were able to do that by investigating different things and being curious so it's when i hear cable guide to like python author guru like wait a minute how did you do that so thank you i i appreciate it i think people find that helpful yeah so i think i think it's so erica yeah go ahead no no go ahead finish your thought no i i was just going to say it's um it's it's crucial to just try different things because you could read all about it as you as much as you want you could uh talk about it as much as you want but until you go there and do it on a day-in and day-out basis you don't know what this is about so i was very glad to to have that mindset and just try out different things and eventually found out and i was super lucky to find the things i i want to do early on so i don't you know go go take all these uh this path that you know i might end up maybe regret or going back on but sorry to cut you off aj go ahead no no no no right all right so um one thing i wanted to to do is i think while you were explaining your journey i think i heard you say you worked at aws and azure uh so i kind of want to pivot a little bit to what's it like working in the cloud it was it was really interesting it was really fun uh it was really tiring and uh just um you know exhausting i would say but it was fun um because remember i joined in 2006 there was no cloud back then it was amazon was very much a retail site so they launched s3 in 2006 like march of 2006 and i joined in august of 2006 so we knew the cloud was going you know like upper trend but there was no way anybody could have predicted how big it was going to be it was until the next year they launched ec2 and then it just kind of blew up so what was really fun was this hockey stick growth and any time that you could join a service that has a hockey stick growth so i was lucky enough to join you know roadrunner when you know cable broadband was rolling out right and then i was lucky enough to join aws where cloud was taking off so it was just so much learning and there's so much work to be done that you could be relatively inexperienced and just you know fresh out of college and it would put you down in like multi-million dollar uh you know projects so it was really fun because it was in the early stage and um you know i was the team that launched uh cloudfront right like and i was the guy who uh and it was super fun to do that and i was the guy who eventually moved to like business development and negotiated a lot of the deals for um you know amazon's footprint on cloudfront you know was able to go to china to get the integration with yoyo.com was able to negotiate deals with you know various telcos um for you know footprints that's that's where you learn a lot so i would say it's very exhausting and tiring but it's always very fulfilling and professional growth was unparalleled um and it was kind of the same thing with uh microsoft as well because when i joined microsoft you know azure was in this infancy in fact i think the automation bits was more on the bing side um they have this team this is all public information right they have this team called autopilot so autopilot was under bing which uh which chi liu presides over and they were they were doing a lot of automation and azure was just recently got out of like the red dog stage which was the code the project code name red dog and they were trying to get their footings so it was really fun to be in that early stage as well it was kind of political being microsoft and multiple billion dollar you know verticals but it was dirt different learning experience but i would say you know it's it's um a lot of professional growth but at the same time you got to be willing to put in the hours you got to be willing to put in you know the effort and all of that and um i wasn't joking about burning out right because after azure and i was just so tired and my second daughter was born i knew i wasn't you know i'm just not going to be put into the same amount of hours that i could before so i went to like a very traditional enterprise network after azure with like total of two network engineers so i would just go from this this whole totally different spectrum it's like okay forget it i i'm just not i'm so tired i'm not even gonna go to like arista or these vendors i'm just gonna go and finish my job so i could go home by five and have dinner with my wife and and my young kids so um yeah so that was kind of my experience in a nutshell how was that transition going from like azure and aws to a trade more traditional type enterprise network because my perspective i've only been at an enterprise network right and so i it's always like this it's always like this magical world that you know oh my god you work at aws or you're at azure you're at microsoft you know like you know so i'm just curious like what was the transition the opposite way yeah um it was i i i hate to say this but it was kind of boring um so i i went there and then i left after three months don't do that to it yeah no no i mean i'm sorry i just try to be transparent and honest right so so it was almost appreciated and then you all of a sudden you you wouldn't you go to the station and everything just go zoom and it just all slowed down in like slow motion right so um it was a bit boring for me and um eventually i think i stayed there for like three months or four months you know barely stay out of my probation period and then um then i joined a10 so so it was turning out to be so i wanted to find a happy medium right between like oh it's you know whatever it is and then um you know like life in the fast lane right i want to find a happy medium yeah boring boring just go ahead and call it like this no it was um it was a stable right so it between something like it's really stable and then something that was uh not as fast as the cloud like the speed of the cloud um so so i actually when went to uh 810. so my friend was uh one of my good buddy uh join a10 and so we were talking about you know the possibilities and and all of that and back then i think a10 was pre-ipo so of course that was like a big draw for me at the time i've never worked work for a company that was pre-ipo'd and um you know my uh my ipo dream so i kind of kind of checked that box very cool very cool i i have to imagine that's like i i i'm not really into drugs but this is the thing that i can relate it to right like so you know working for a large company like azure or aws has got to be like being on some some killer drugs man and then you take a step back to like a uh a smaller company and it's just like you know i what is this aj your point of references hard drugs you know i didn't really know what else to liken it to here but i just it's it's just like it's tickling so many senses to work at this large company like that at the speed and the pace and the scale and then to come back down and those would be your withdrawals okay all right he's like he's like he's saying aws and azure is like cocaine and the traditional enterprise network is like benadryl aws is a hell of a drug yeah my friend's listening but um but i would say also you know they're both they're both good companies right like enterprise and they're all valid work that's um that is valuable to the society but what i also think is it takes a certain type of personality and certain type of like adrenaline junkie almost to in order to sustain like 10 years yeah right so so if you put that into a contact so it wasn't that the job was bad the the enterprise job was bad or boring it was just the person that i was or the person that i am it wasn't a good fit you know what i'm saying so it's like it's it's really about more about fit it wasn't about the job was bad um so i just want to make that clear i'm not trying to you know make anybody feel better or anything i'm just trying to be honest and say well you know oh no no and i i wasn't saying it was bad or good it was just just different right like yeah you know you're working for a such a large company that at the speed and the scale that they were moving and growing aws and then you step back to a normal company right the majority of the companies and it's just such a smaller scale comparatively speaking right like even even if the company you were at moved at a quicker pace than other companies it maybe didn't seem that way because of where you came from you know having experienced what you experienced yeah and also i want to also point out that just that relativity it was also a a different time period for aws right so i know aws is like it's always day one but trust me you know it's it's it's a different time when you're experiencing that that that growth in initially versus now aws is like you know this thing that everybody knows about imagine like i had to go to uh nanak uh multiple times in apnic or whatever and then i have to explain to people what the cloud was and like the first thing people asked me is like what why do i want to put my data in your in on your computer and what about security like what about like you know vlans and what about all these other stuff so so it was a very different time um and uh yeah it was just it was just exciting times for me and like i said the professional growth was really really huge um made the biggest leap i would say in you know both of those locations yeah but i think also too and i think you've kind of hinted to this a little bit but being part of something that's brand new that no one else has you know there's there's some excitement around that right like uh you know if if we were coming up with some technology and we were the only people who were doing this i could see the excitement there of like well shit i want to see this thing through you know see uh be the latest and greatest on this um so i can definitely understand that perspective yeah how many times can you say i'm the person i'm the original team that launched you know this so and so service right um or you know you can only do that once really um so i i could i could emphasize with people who are you know just cop from startup to startup because you don't you don't get that rush anywhere else it's like you're on a mission right you're on the mission to launch the cloud you're on a mission to uh to get the service rolling you you you truly believe that this is gonna change the world and you're part of something that's bigger than yourself um so 80 hour work week it is that's crazy hey a1 fans aj here for an ally you ever heard of netally sure you have they came from the same group of engineers that brought us network tools from fluke networks netscout and now their net ally they know networking i'm a network engineer for a partner and when i go to customers and see they use netaly i know it's going to be so much easier to troubleshoot issues we might run into the name may have changed in that ally but the way they build tools hasn't changed a bit they ask what would a network engineer want to help make their job faster and easier and then they go build it just like this etherscope nxg netally is here to help netally simplicity visibility collaboration visit netally.com today now back to the show eric i want you to put your educator hat on for a minute and okay you talked about earlier when people are learning automation abstraction orchestration to find context so i want to ask you something that it's going to be a very similar question that i asked john capobianco when he was on here and it was what's your advice for for people getting started so so traditional network engineers we can say hey go pick up a network plus book go check out the ccna and it'll kind of step you through different topics that that you kind of need to know to become a network engineer would you go grab a switch suggest something similar with automation go pick up automate the boring stuff pick up your book obviously or do you really think you need to find that context first find that thing that you need to fix or the thing that you need to do first before you get into the fundamentals yeah that was a great episode by the way i enjoyed john's episode very much he's so passionate and he's like everybody's his best friend and you can just like even through virtually you could feel his passion off the screen um yeah and i don't remember john's answer but my answer would be yes you you you want to you want to find that small win first it's it's so demotivating when you hit that wall and you don't really know you know why you're doing this right just because somebody else you know tell you that's great just because you know somebody said this is gonna increase your paycheck by you know 20 those don't fly when you're like bang your head against the wall 2 a.m in the morning right however but if you could find a small win if you could solve a problem for you and you only um that'd be great that's it that's the biggest motivator and the bonus point is if you solve the problem for your team right so i remember i was um just doing this for myself i was writing some small script and so to help me you know do some operation in the lab and one day we hit a problem and there's a very very bizarre problem where um i'll quickly describe this problem because i i think it would put into better context so the problem was you know the upstream we utilized bgp for ecmp but um but the problem was the vendor had a buck where they're not low balancing the the uh distribution correctly even though the as path was the same so what we ended up needing to do was to do something really weird it's like we need to do a as brief pen on the odd number of switches or something like that right so and um the quote-unquote programmers in the team they didn't have a way to do that quickly and um i was like hey i have this like small tiny like really you know uh script that i just wrote and maybe i'm able to just do that quickly right i'll just i remember this was like either pair miko or p expect just lot i just able to just specify the switch and log into it put in the asm pre-pen and then move on to the next switch and so on so we're and it wasn't even great it was like sequential it wasn't doing anything fancy but it solved to solve the problem and um right there and then i was i was sold right like these these uh these programmers who are very talented who are hired by one of the big software companies in the world um rely on my this little sucky little script to solve a problem and i couldn't describe the feeling of like fulfillment so i i would say that's that's i don't know about you guys but that's that's the biggest motivation for me was to solve my own problem and at the same time perhaps solve other people's problem as well and um and that goes into like you said tim like put the educator hat on right so i want to share that that fulfillment i want to have other people feel the same way too so i just you know put it down and feel free and yeah the book costs money but the code is actually free right the code is actually just public so anybody who wants to grab a piece of that code you know feel free to do so and i i wish you you know i wish you could feel that same feeling that i i felt before very cool very cool i i'd like to spend some time you're working on a new book uh and so i'd like to explore that a little bit if you could can you tell us about that yeah sure look at this i even have a print copy even though this was a subtitle the other day did you no so i had like a digital copy yeah so um so this is again like i typically um so first of all i want to take take uh i want to have a faster pace of publishing because you know um mastering python networking was great but it covers so much and technology moves so fast there's a time that i want to update like a portion of it but i wasn't able to wait to the next edition to print out and so on so whereas this time when i write this kafka up and running book um i i do it through leanpub so anybody who had purchased the book is able to get the latest update and i'm able to do a lot more experiments so this book i discounted to like 4.99 so you know for the price of less than a latte you could you know pick up the book and hopefully um be useful to you if nothing else you just you know gain again a new doorstop right um but uh yeah so that that's the new book that that i worked on um this i i think kafka is kind of a niche topic in the network engineering uh field so um i also want to use this book to to gain the experience and so i could elaborate on other projects but this is uh so far i'm liking the the experience of you know fast iteration and feedback back to the devops principle right in order for me to get a feedback really quickly and also this book was uh it's only like 160 pages as opposed to like mastering python networking it gets bigger bigger every edition like 600 pages or so so um yeah so that's that's the uh kind of the new experience i am trialing it's kind of a science project for me but thanks for uh thanks for bringing it up and what's it called again it's called uh kafka up and running for network devops so kafka is this new technology so what is that yeah yeah yeah so kafka is this new technology that we picked up and it's definitely not for day one operation it's not something that you take and then you go implement and solve a problem solve a customer facing problem or a user-facing problem this is basically a big buffer in the middle for services to talk to so imagine if you build a service like a web service for example and you have a bunch of users that comes in and the users typically your information doesn't reside on that one server typically information resides on other servers like a database that you query information from other apis that you create from um and imagine if you take that service and duplicate that like 10 times and then that match becomes all the service that you have to talk to so it becomes a spaghetti of a mess whereas kafka would come in and say what you want to do is your service was subscribed or published so it's the publish publisher subscriber model where you could publish to a topic and anybody who needs this topic would just subscribe to this topic and kafka would take care of like redundancy duplication of that topic and multiple subscribers which is a huge thing that when you implement the service like this it's like if i have five subscribers and these are like credit card transactions for example right what i need to do is either the subscriber have to coordinate between themselves and say i already processed this transaction so nobody else should or the tool or your source have to say i already passed the information on to a to aj so dan you're not getting this information right but that becomes a nightmare when you have multiple sources and you have multiple consumers so what kafka does is you just publish to this topic and kafka will be in charge of your low balancing between the consumers say the consumer like five consumers one died and then you know uh i need to distribute it to the rest of the consumers so they could kafka takes in uh takes charge and makes sure like the the data was only passed once low balancing the data make the data redundant um you know and all of that stuff so there's also a it's an open source project and there's also a page that just you know pages and pages of the companies who uses kafka and um what their use cases are so netflix is a huge kafka user they actually have like you know i grab the stat and i put it in the book it's like something like a billion transactions a day or something like that so every time you like pause the video it's actually written to a topic um and also like the ordering of messages right so typically your topic you be order and be persistent um on the timing basis so you know netflix and linkedin so this project was started by linkedin so netflix linkedin ubereats they all publish how they use kafka and usually is when you have like a mash of services that has um you know bunch of publishers bunch of subscribers and you need to make sure the data integrity redundancy and all of all of the good stuff that you normally expect in a uh a scaled out services so what i also you know besides introducing this tool was also to put into network engineering context right like so how does it how is it relevant to network engineers is it uh just for log aggregation is it for monitoring is it for management and all of that so i don't think i did a good job on the second part on you know the relevance for network engineering but hopefully i did a good enough job on the first part that you know you're able to take this into your own service and all that but just from listening to that i think you can be creative with it exactly um so i think you guys um could tell like this is not a day one service right like this is this is not something that you build an api from this is not something you build a web page from it's when after you build a web page after you build an api you know you start to scale it out then you start to worry about all these other stuff so i want to make that clear i don't want to mislead anybody who wants to to buy this book is that this is definitely a day two service um but if nothing else it's it's a good technology to be aware of just because it's so prevalent um in these you know web 2.0 uh well now let me ask this um is that similar to zul i'm not very familiar with wizzul okay all right the way you're describing it sounds a lot like how what my knowledge of zul is and and that's not a lot so but it just sounds like it did you just make up a word dan no no i we believe you no but it's a it's a very common one but it's a it's a common service right so it's a very common publisher subscriber model it's just that it's one way of doing publisher subscriber um so you could you can actually go to like amazon web services you go to azure you know they have they offer this pub sub um i think uh aws is called uh kinesis um but anyways i covered that in the book and you know um it's this pub sub model that you could do um but kafka just does it in a more open source more uh transparent way i feel um so these guys actually so the three creators of kafka used to work for linkedin and they created this project they open sourced it and they went on and co-founded confluent and confluent just went ipo um earlier in 2011 i'm sorry 2021 what year am i uh 2021 and um so the street really liked them a lot so that's you know don't take it from me right take it from all these financial analysts and they're now a public company so you could look look at their run rate look at who their customers are who their threats are um so very much like elastic right so confluent elastic these are companies uh back to our content creation conversation that they're now starting to you know uh bank on the open source project and make profit for it so i'm very excited about these two projects elastic and um you know kafka okay can you give us some network engineer context you know what what where might we see kafka from a network engineering perspective yeah so i think the most obvious is monitoring and uh uh tele telephony right like not telephony but um uh monitoring and telemetry telemetry sure yeah so like just say for example if you grab an snmp stats right so i don't know about you guys but previously in many of the places i worked whenever somebody needs stats from the networking device they just pull the networking device it was it was easier for them to just go to pull the networking device and then to talk to other teams who was already doing the the polling right because um i guess they don't talk to each other so so we ended up having like five snmp polls from the device and as you guys know the snmp pull is in the control plane and you need to interrupt the data plane and your cpu just spike up so there are times where we have like these high cpu spikes just from snmp post so imagine if you have a kafka topic in place where you just pull the pull the information once store in kafka and tell these other you know fools that hey if you want that information just go subscribe to it right and uh and call it a day um so that's one thing um you know you just a very basic you know pops up but also imagine that very much in our world where when we have that information snp for example we need to enhance that data so it becomes a pipeline where you know we need to take that ip address maybe we need to go pull like like our source of truth to to say which data center it's in maybe we would need to pull like you know financial information to get the asset id to get the serial number we enhance that data and then publish it to the next next topic and then we take that new topic transform enhance that data and publish to a third topic so whoever is interesting in the raw data could subscribe to the first topic whoever is interested in the second set of data could subscribe to this topic and you know so on so forth and you become a data pipeline in fact the um the subtitle for this book is called set your network data emotion so it's really about like not just the the publisher and subscriber we already have that technology it's a solved problem but it's more about like treating this data in a new way where it's always flowing always transparent it's always being enhanced and added or deleted um so monitoring is uh you know monitoring is the most obvious but also you know if you have a huge chunk of sources like your iot right maybe you have some sensors where you know these sensors are counting the steps the cal you know step on because they that you know that's very crucial information for you know uh the the timing and so on so then you have this huge amount of services so instead of having them all talk to in real time for an api to do a post which they might not even be able to do that they could do they could just aggregate it into a topic and then that topic could further be processed for you know like uh short-term visibility or long-term uh data analysis but it's all just dumping once as opposed to having a different service that aggregate them at another time so i think these two are you know kind of the the use cases that i could think of um like i said i don't think i did a very good job in expanding the network engineering use cases but hey it's self-published so if i think of more i could just publish it and then people would get the latest update there you go that's awesome that's awesome and i appreciate what you're doing there too like you said like something that's low risk you want to learn the process and then that way as you you know get better at it you understand the disintegrative uh world of book publishing uh then you can go to you know higher stakes you know topics and produce some more books which i'm which i'm sure you're gonna do so yeah yeah so that's the that's the hope anyways but um you know as our conversation shows you know i'm always trying out new things and sometimes they work out sometimes they don't but you know the effort is always there always there excellent well eric you are quite a busy content creator i'd like to pivot now and and uh kind of discuss all the different things that you work on let's start with uh your podcast sure hey thanks for bringing this up so the podcast is called network automation nerds podcast and it's where i a lot of times i talk to interesting people like you guys do and i always you know even just for not for other people just for myself i always want to record them and a lot of times i think back and go well you know i just talked to john capo bianco about something and what was it and like i wanted to capture that moment and i wanted to capture you know the the uh intelligence and the knowledge that they have so you know that was part of the um the the motive and also you guys motivated me you guys inspired me to kind of do that you know i had the pilot episode like 2017 i want to say and then just kind of quiet just crickets for the next four years and then i saw you guys i'm like this is great right like this is such a great community i want to you know just contribute to it as well so what's the best way for me to do that it's almost like okay we'll just you know let me go go find these guys or you know my ex-co-workers or people who are in the like like dan you you were saying about cloud providers right let me just go ahead and get some of my guys from microsoft before and tell tell tell how it is right like how how was it in launching you know like a azure service or or whatnot so so that's the origin story of the podcast um hopefully you know i don't know my my biggest fear is always like i don't do it consistently and um you know but so hopefully i could stick stick to it this time like you guys have done we'll keep on you you you keep on all right that's a deal awesome and you're also uh very active in the in the blogging world too yeah so um so what i did was i took a page out of michael kennedy from talk python so i think starting this year he uh when he record his podcast you actually record video as well so you know because of the pandemic people are more and more used to having videos uh with your talk to a screen they have better lighting they have better cameras so what i did was i just copy what he did and when it has whenever i record i will capture the video as well and it comes in handy because sometimes you know when you talk to somebody you know you want to pull up the web page or if you're talking about like a project that they're working on it was pretty handy to you know pull up you know whatever information that's relevant and so it's a different way for people to consume the same content a lot of times you know um when i you know there are times when i listen to michael's podcast it's like oh darn i wish i'm watching the youtube video because they're showing these cool stuff on the screen and i would like pause that and then listen to the next episode and this original episode i would go watch the video um so that's that's what i've started to do but also the uh the intention to expand on that as well um i think i think there's a lot i could do as far as um getting more people involved and having a easier free on-ramp for you know python network automation and that's the that's the hope and that's part of the very selfish reason why i reach out to you guys and say um you know what are you guys working on how can i help is a very selfish reason to make sure i still solve a relevant problem right like i still um in touch with the practitioners in the field to you know so after aggregating those data what i wish is to turn around and say um here's you know maybe a playlist or here's the the relevant content that you guys could do so that's the next step for the youtube channel so besides all the podcast recording is to have you know some sort of tutorial some sort of playlist for people to consume if they wanted to yeah i think that's awesome hey that's some more secret sauce there because there's a symbiotic relationship eric like you're you're saying hey what's going on how can i help but then for my seat i was like wow this automation guru is gonna like help me learn python so it's symbiotic right you're you're reaching out to help people but then you're getting help too so that's just i i don't know man that's that's really that's going to help in the future as well too so yeah right you know the next people right let me get on my soapbox for a second i think we should all be doing that like how can we help each other what's going on because it really it's it's working right that's really cool and that's what i like about you guys it's like it was never about just you um i appreciate that by the way you know tim aj dan andy everything you guys do is like you know you guys build this great culture a great community like i said you know i've joined other communities but this is the one i decided to stick around with just like i've joined you know i've tried to learn other languages but python sticks to my brain better so i think this one just fits my personality better and thank you guys for doing this appreciate that yeah thank you thank you very much eric we have a lot of bromance here it happens a lot you know it's just you know content creators network engineers it's it's something in the air it happens a lot i love it exactly exactly awesome eric this has been a super fun conversation is there anything that we didn't ask you that we should have is there anything else that you you're working on now on the side that we should discuss no i think it's pretty much it it's been a very fun conversation for me as well you know you guys feel free to reach out to me if there's any questions i'm always creating content so um you know let me know if if there's any ideas that you guys want to hear more about um and you know i'll be happy to entertain the idea you know it has to be a right fit too right like if you ask something about i have no idea about them then i can't but um it's been fun thank you guys again and i appreciate the opportunity to be here uh thank you for the patrons who stay you know all the way till the end and thanks guys awesome well uh yeah the patreons definitely make this a little bit more fun so if you want to join the patreon program with eric and all the rest you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of netenge and join us every week when we are recording the shows you can chat with us you can chat with the guest add your two cents and we'll read it here as we record the show uh eric i will drop links to all of your social presences and blog posts and podcasts uh the books uh and your youtube channel we'll put all of that in the show notes so if you want to check out either of eric's books or his current works you may do that just with the single click of a button or tap of your thumb or finger however you get around the internet these days eric thank you so much for joining us and and really we appreciate the support that you give our community and you can absolutely expect the same in return thanks guys it's been fun keep up the good work all right thanks eric and congratulations again andy for your new victory your new job at juniper and um the goat plays for andy nice i love it i love it i think we'll we'll definitely dive into that in a future topic all right everybody i am aj murray thank you so much for joining us on this episode of the art of network engineering podcast vote for aj don't do drugs hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of netench that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network engineering dot com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you