this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore keys technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information to expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers this episode is presented by the letter a a stands for anything but rip ah yes the classic dynamic routing protocol one of the first the pioneer routing information protocol back in the day if you had a small to medium-sized network and did not want to static route everything then it was ripped to the rescue but then our networks got bigger more complex and did we really want to rely on just hop count from what our directly connected neighbors said was good i mean that's like your next door neighbor saying let's go this way to the party it's shorter we just gotta go over a mountain trek across the desert then cross a river the bridge is out by the way to which you say nah brah let's take the interstate we don't have to stop for any zebra crossings you know none of this really had much to do with the letter a at all yeah maybe i'll try harder next time anyway welcome to the art of network engineering that's awesome i'm so glad they got rid of rip from uh from all those exams man it was so painful going through the learning process uh gentlemen how are we doing tonight andy andy how are you what do you got against rip it's like the easiest thing out there i know but it you know you know how like disparaging it is for like a new learner like learn this memorize it you're going to get tested on it oh by the way you're probably never going to see it in production you mean like frame exactly like frame relay yeah yeah uh yes i am good my kids started summer camp this week that was the first time in 460-something days that they've been out of the house for uh all day so i've been super productive at work yay nice not really but i'm trying and you're back from vacation i am the happiness has faded the santa andy is gone zandy is left standing sandy left the building i'll miss him he'll be back again someday i hope tim how you doing i'm well just trying to get through the day i got a maintenance window tonight and then i am off for a little over a week beautiful very nice going away yeah for a little bit awesome very nice and then it's just kind of trying to recharge and try not to do anything i love it very cool dan where are you i'm out in the middle of absolutely nowhere southern illinois oh southern illinois all right all right visiting family hanging out yep yep yep the uh wife's grandmother excellent very cool yeah yeah dan mayer dan mayer may not be in a garage shop full of axes chainsaws whatever else just building birdhouses you know on this episode of howdy packet and tools i think i saw that show on pbs one time right yeah that's great yeah maybe you could build me a office chair that's comfortable enough that i don't need this back pillow i don't i don't think i can do that i don't think i can do that i don't have the right materials for that one i've got wooden metal up here that's about it no memory foam in that shop no no no i could put you a uh lawnmower cushion on on there that can do that there you go just like a a john deere seat with wheels that's all you say john deere yes john beer there's our new t-shirt design get your jaw into your t-shirt that's great john deere it's just me and andy on a tractor oh man how are we going to tie that to networking we put the a1 logo on the tractor is that how that happens yeah something yeah that's great are we on the same seat then is it like a motorcycle where like you're hugging me yeah i'm hugging oh the image is too much i don't think they put too many side cars on tractors so yeah you're probably gonna have to do it that way yeah that's great anyway aj how you doing brother you know after i uh gouge my eyes out i think i'll be better it's going to be okay oh with the image of dan and i on the tractor yeah with with you guys like spooning on the tractor the john deere just can't quit you diane i can't quit you oh my god oh my gosh i hope we have some material here that's great yeah he wins aj we got lots of wins can you give me a go scream and then i'll read the way thank god let's pivot because this clearly is not one all right uh discord member heath past their jncia junos congratulations keith congratulations uh david alicia huge win for david absolutely huge win for david uh passed the ccnp security core exam the score congratulations david that is oh wow that's nice that's a that's a baby he's so he's so humble about it too because you know he's just working his tail off and he gets it done he just says hey this is cool i got it done you should i'd be screaming from the top of every mountain yeah when i eventually pass another exam the whole world's going to hear about it it'll look very humble it'll happen it'll happen this year too i put money on it he's just he's ignoring what i said i like that that's nice well you don't know that i might be pivoting careers soon and i might not need certs stay-at-home dad mr mom yeah so uh the next win so so a few weeks ago our buddy here had a win and i completely butchered his name uh and i feel really bad about that but i just i i read it kind of like phonetically like yeah that makes sense in my head and i was like way off so uh i i believe last time i called him coeatriate because of how i thought it was you know the way you corrected yeah did you know it was wrong i was very wrong um it's quiet riot which makes a whole lot more sense when i look at it it's like oh yeah like the band yeah okay okay so quiet riot works as a contractor from comcast and uh they recently implemented an automation solution that he has been working on for a few weeks so that's where does he work he works for comcast as a contractor uh my condolences nice very nice what is congratulations yeah so congratulations quiet riot hey aj don't don't feel bad on the names because if if y'all want uh good content good uh blooper content you just have me name off all these names and yeah i mean when you graduate you know go ahead take take the reins like you can do it i can just sit here and look pretty that's fine no you i'm saying you don't want that um mikey oc passed the ms 900 which is the office 365 fundamentals exam i didn't know that was a thing uh i might have to go take a look at that right i do i do a little office 365 on the side so maybe i'll go get myself a ms900 down here okay so uh congratulations mikey and and little shep 99.99 passed the year uh their first round phone interview and they have been welcomed back for round two in an in-person interview for their first it position so big win for lil shep 999 congratulations everybody andy go scream me okay nice we i don't know why we're doing this so old school you know like i feel like we should just have a sound board with some sound effects you know like cheeky dj style or is it more fun to just like do it real time hey yeah i think that's part of it and also if you think about it this wasn't even a thing a year ago so yeah that's true take that into account where this whole thing is at now i i think we were like getting ready to record episode one because we we had to record episode one a few times oh we did i forgot about that why why was that yeah uh so so we recorded episode one and i think we were getting ready like we got up most of the way through it and then aaron's hard drive filled up oh yeah yeah yeah and then um yeah because i'll do that then i forget what happened on on round two there was another technical problem we had we couldn't finish it couldn't do it and then we we sealed the deal on round three wow look at that see just gotta adapt and overcome us three tries to get our first episode yep but then every other episode after that has been you know one take i like the real goat you know it's it's analog it's you gotta reach for it and but the sound board could be fun we could add a lot of fun things in there and just blast sounds throughout the show but then it'll become like a morning kind of thing animated emoji we're still working with uh open gear for our i see it giveaway oh yeah so that the backpacks have been ordered they will be ready in uh less than two weeks and then going to give away a secret are you they're going to be stuffed with some goodies goodies i ordered uh 12 of these off the amazons okay and uh they arrived the other day and i ripped open the bag and i saw a bag full of goats and i was like screaming like a little girl because i was so excited bag bag full of ghosts and so i i shipped them to our contact at opengear so that they they can put them in the backpacks so whoever gets an a1 backpack is going to get a screaming goat thank you opengear very excited yes thank you opengear for your continued support yeah yeah these backpacks yeah they're sweet i i kind of want one i don't know if we can like when we get a little bit closer to giveaway time i will post a picture on the the socials to tease the crap out of that but they look pretty sweet unfortunately we're not going to see those and i'm thinking we should do something fun right like when we get back to like in person conferences if we see people wearing an a1 backpack at a venue we should like you know give them some extra fun swag like on the spot yeah yeah i like that but i digress we are here for episode 51. uh tonight we are talking about s d wade yeah aj ah stewan stowan stwad stewan everybody loves stewart i don't know everybody loves swan what is dwayne yeah what what is sd software defined wide area network it's the the new hotness in the the wan department um so why do we need software defined man so what does saturn stand for yeah traditional wind so it's traditional i don't know i'd like to throw that over to andy because andy does a lot of wind he does a lot more wind than i do when jam um wide area network is how you connect to the world so typically in a data center environment at least the ones i'm accustomed to you have a service let's say an mpls cloud and you have an a and a b-side router both connected to the mpls clouds and you would run some kind of ha either hsrp or you would tweak some routing metrics so that you would have you know one side be primary for one carrier the other side be primary for the other and have failover built into the configs but um it's the data center side and then the client side same thing you want them to have two routers out there they have two circuits coming in and blah blah blah but it's it's it's how your clients get to your uh your services right that's that's the way without the wan yeah there's nothing right there's no internet there's no clients can't get anything right and you're in a very customer-facing operation right so you're you're giving your customers your customers are bringing a wan router to the table that's connecting to your network to access your services and so in an enterprise environment uh you would have a wan router at all of your branches as well so same exact same concept right uh and and so traditional when you had a bunch of centralized services in the data center so that's where your email was hosted all your applications everything came through the data center but that landscape has changed quite a bit in the last couple of years so like no longer do well no i wouldn't say no longer but it's it's becoming more and more common that enterprises of various sizes you know small medium large are sending all their email to a cloud hosted service right office 365 google apps whatever the case may be and it's not just email there's a lot of services that are becoming very decentralized and you know there's name anything as a service right so uh whether it's infrastructure platform software there's lots of stuff that's you know in the cloud which is just somebody else's data center not yours to put it perfectly simply um and so uh sd-wan has come along to help kind of manage that uh migration to this decentralized era of applications and with it there's there's a whole slew of stuff that has come with it uh and it's kind of it's really cool how it has evolved over the last couple of years so yeah you know you think back to the earliest sd-wan solutions and and the one that kind of comes to mind is meraki uh it was like the first kind of that i can recall anyway the first kind of like cloud managed uh network application or or networking kind of system and so um and that was like i don't know the hallmark of sd-wan was the fact that it was cloud managed so if we go back to you know your your scenario andy if you had to like add a new policy or add uh you know a new site you would have to modify how many different routers to to get that to work it was a lot it was manual and you know and even like so even like if you had say you had a client with an mpls primary connection and an internet backup they never use the internet unless the you know mpls went hard down there was no using both connections so you were paying for a backup connection that was hardly ever used yeah let's just kill your own primary which always kind of seemed like you have this router connected to this circuit doing nothing right 99 of the time it never really seemed all that efficient but tell us how sd wan you know i mean it can yeah i want to i want to ask one question first from a time standpoint too in a in an mpls design you know for a client they want to turn up a new site typically how long does it take to get an mpls circuit to i've seen i've seen it take six months yeah like uh like a 90 days i've seen it take six months wow you know depends on if they have to trench and yeah yeah yeah they might not have yeah construction build out whatever potentially yeah a couple months a while it can take some time and they're very expensive especially if if your mpls cloud is through you know verizon or att and wherever that branch site is if if the last mile doesn't cover by the same provider then you know they got to negotiate and work with whoever the provider is in the area to to get that link in there and get the circuit tied into your mpls cloud and yeah that takes time so sd-wan was sold as a cost savings right yeah like out of the gate a lot of the a lot of the players in sd-wan sold it as like a cost savings where you would replace your mpls with uh you know just either like a cable connection or dia connection from an internet service provider um i think the real value in that is uh with the sd-wan solution you know it works off overlays which is you know primarily ipsec tunnels or some form of vpn right so um while you're waiting for your mpls connection to you know get turned up you can bring in a very cost-effective uh internet connection and you know get turned up in days rather than months right so where do these ipsec tunnels or these overlays where do they terminate i mean typical ipsec tunnel you'd connect back to a data center or whatever and i know you may still have things in a data center but maybe you have things or a lot of things out in the cloud so where do they terminate right so with with sd-wan you can kind of define like which which uh router or or device in the topology is going to be your hub and you can set up various types of topologies you can have like a full mesh or hub and spoke you could do like a regional hub and spoke and you can tell it like you know here's here's where you go to terminate your connections so they're terminating in a head end somewhere right like on the sd-wan device right like a hub like on another pure device so i guess cons like conceivably you could just get two cable internet connections out of the client site two different carriers sd-wan them up and then just have it you know take whichever path is better right like sure less latency less package like you don't necessarily have to have mpls i guess no absolutely not but i i guess it depends on your your applications right like if you have if you're hosting internally some sort of like low latency application i don't know if like doing that is is the best best option but if you know you're you're using you know public internet and then a lot of cloud services like you know a couple of different internet connections probably is a pretty good option like you might you might have voice requirements right like maybe your shoulder center or something you're going to have to have mpls for like the what is the place of service markings or whatever right right probably have better guarantees over mpls yeah yeah i'll say i think one of the biggest benefits i see is is that flexibility right if you are in an organization where you're turning up sites often things are moving around often and you don't have the time to wait for a dedicated private circuit or again you're a mobile organization and you're not in a physical location long enough where you want to agree to a longer term for a a private circuit like that i really see that that flexibility where you can turn up a site quickly on potentially whatever connectivity is already there broadband direct internet access and you're you're shipping a device so i guess the next question is is yes it's flexible but what does uh configuration and turn up look like from that device that i'm shipping to a site that's a fantastic question uh so it depends on on the solution there's a couple of different ways that you can do device configuration so if the site that you're working is working at has like just a regular old internet connection with dhcp then there's basically no configuration you have to do to the device before it ships uh just plug it into the internet it'll phone home uh there's usually some sort of centralized uh management piece to to these various sd-wan solutions right so once it calls home it'll get dropped into your tenant and then you can assign the device to a site you can you know configure it then and there some of them uh you know can let you stage the configuration of the device before it's even drop shipped from the factory so as soon as it gets connected into uh the the network or the internet it'll phone home get its configuration download it and then just be configured and ready to go um now if you you are working with an mpls connection then there's probably some bootstrapping that you have to do and depending on the solution there's there's various ways that you can do that right like you you can you know console into the router and do some basic configuration and setup um there's one solution uh velocloud so i've done some training on a lot of these sd-wan solutions you know i've done bellow cloud sd-wan i've done cisco i've done meraki and i you know i've done a couple of others uh but the develcon solution is pretty neat because what you can do is send either a trusted partner or or somebody local doesn't even have to be an i.t professional right they don't even really know anything about it uh most of the time these little gateways have the capability to broadcast the wireless network either for use uh indefinitely by end users or just for initial setup kind of thing and you can from a mobile device join the wireless network and um click a link in like a setup email and that link contains all of the configuration information like static ips uh for an interface for web interface uh and everything else that it needs to get set up uh and then that will configure the device so you mentioned some centralized management a little bit ago that that your remote device will check into is that something that i host in a data center that i own is that out in the cloud where where does that live yes it depends on the solution but most of these solutions will offer um either you know a solution where you're taking a vm you can stand it up in your environment in a private cloud you can launch something in you know azure google public cloud aws whatever the case may be or sometimes they'll even host it themselves for you yeah and then there's certainly yeah exactly and there's certainly um offerings that can uh come as like a managed services offering from like an isp or or like a like an msp right so you might be buying into a solution where they're giving you you know a branded device but behind it it's just an oem type solution that they're managing on your so what do you see more often do you see clients operating sd-wans on their own or do you see more managed solutions lately i've seen a lot more managed solutions and it seems like the the customers that i work with are going with managed solutions provided by their service provider yeah so they're getting you know a velocloud solution but it's just been rebranded by the the isp and they're putting those devices in the customer's premise and do you think it's that's because the the customers are already comfortable with getting a you know a wan solution from uh an isp that they they know they need to transform but they don't want to lose that comfort level or what's the reasoning i i think it's cost right because you already have to go to the isp to get the service and if they're going to bundle the service with the management then then why not it's one less thing that the network engineering team probably has to to worry about a concern themselves where they just have to worry about you know the the kind of the overlay network so does that mean you can never leave that telco provider because you just tied that service into their yeah you become even more tied into them than you were before so the advantage of building it out yourself is you have a little bit more autonomy to yeah definitely i would say those if you want that a lot of our customers are curious about sd-wan at least the ones that that that i've worked with too so like if they're not already bought into a solution you know that's that's like an msp provided solution they're asking us to come in and do like an sd-wan kind of survey or audit like they're they're curious about sd-wan there's a lot of options out there um the market is is very active i'll say because there there's companies buying up other companies and solutions there's solutions that are coming out with you know new add-ons all the time and it's they're a struggle to you know keep up with the change and figure out like which is the best solution for them uh and so we're kind of doing it out of their environment like what are you using for applications what do you have for connections now how many branch sites do you have what are like the the top business uh cases for you know what you would consider for an sc-wan solution and then we'll tell them like you know based on what we see here you probably don't need to go to sdwin but i don't think we've said that to anybody yet right because everybody's using based applications uh so what we will do is we'll say here's here's kind of all the players in the sd-wan market and based on your business needs uh here's the ones we feel can satisfy your requirements uh the most are customers coming to you asking about sd-wan well that's something that you're trying to upsell nope they're coming to us and asking about it so let me ask this aj if let's say let's say like in our case we have multiple isps like it different site might have a completely different isp like comcast or something like local mom and pop shop you know so in our case we use uh meraki you know that's that's what we use for all of our sites but uh you were talking about providers you know providing that sd-wan solution so let's say if uh if i have a site that has spectrum but then i have another site that has comcast but i went with centurylink's sd-wan solution would centurylink support that even though those providers aren't centurylink that's a good question i'm not familiar enough with like the managed services end of that if if as an isp i would have to imagine as an isp they would allow you to connect those other connections to their device right because that's that's part of why you would have an sd-wan device and and not all sd-wan solutions are created equally like the the way that one handles multiple internet connections can vary how another you know i don't wanna i don't wanna start advertising for the the various uh oems here but um if if you dig into it it's really cool how you know one of them handles it over over another one so definitely do your research there um there's there's some that offer like wayne acceleration uh where it's like a local branch cache of the things that get accessed most frequently over the the network not all of them offer that uh and so it or or if they do offer it you know maybe it's not built in you have to have a license or whatever the case may be um but it's it's definitely something to take into consideration when you're shopping around for these different services i want to talk about security for a minute so you know we've got traditional networks you've got remote sites that connect connect back to a single or dual data centers and you got these big old honking firewalls at the edge that get all your content filtering and then out now all of a sudden you decide hey we're gonna take a lot more things to the cloud we want direct access to the cloud we're gonna use our sd-wan devices to take us straight to the internet how do you secure that great question so um because of the nature of all these cloud services content filtering services and stuff going to the cloud or these uh extra security services you can do something that's called service chaining and part of your policies you can send that traffic out to that solution for you know the extra scrubbing before it goes out to the internet so a lot of these providers will support building tunnels from your branch locations to their services or maybe you're doing like a hub and spoke you're sending your branched connections to a centralized data center and then that makes the connection to your your security provider so there's there's there's a bunch of different ways to spend it sometimes you you know can host something in their cloud like a a virtual version of the the sd-wan router in their cloud to to be able to make that connection but there there's there's a few different ways to to do the service chaining that allows for your for that traffic to get scrubbed and some of the sd-wan appliances also serve as firewalls too right that can actually be your absolutely do your filtering there yeah there's certainly a level of filtering that you can do it's more like a classic firewall than it is with like not something that you would see in like a palo alto or or like a safari firewall interestingly enough i can't tell you the vendor but i talked to my resident sd-wan expert today and in this particular solution the the sd-wan appliances come with um you know regular old-school firewalls right like not stateful but you can install next generation firewall software within this appliance so like if you want to put like a fortinet or a pallow or sure so it actually acts as like a hypervisor yep and you can start installing third-party firewall software into the wayne appliance which kind of blew me away i was like whoa because that was my first question too tim as i'm talking to him like well where is the security like this thing's at the edge and like where where does the firewall fit in he's like no this thing is the firewall oh wait okay and and then when he showed me that you can build third party firewalls in the hypervisor it's like wow they really thought of this like yeah i think there's definitely yes some of these cons to both delivery methods i mean the the the hosted offerings where you're actually sending your traffic out there you know you've got the what i'll call ease where you're not having to host that locally um yeah but then on the other hand if you're maybe worried about latency and and that kind of thing then maybe you want to be able to have that uh inspection happen locally and then just egressed wherever it needs to go directly on the internet what seems really nice to me like is a specific use case so i again this guy was talking to i said well he's walking me through the solution i wanted to prepare for this right and come to the table with something so he's walking me through the solution and i said well what's what's been the end user's experience like has this changed like do they have any idea any of this is happening or it's just you know and what i thought was interesting was the old design was dual mp dual home to two mpls providers so like out whether it's a corporate office or whether it's a client two routers with two mpls circuits two different providers and you know most of these cats are just hopping on the internet right so they have to hairpin out to the data center get to the internet service you know they're not going from the mpls circuit out to the internet they have to go back to the head end to get to an internet service so their internet speeds were usually slowish because of that hairpin you always have to go to the head end to get somewhere and then he said that the implemented sd-wan got rid of one of the mpls circuits replaced it with a fast broadband um so now these cats that are going out to office 365 or the internet or you know as long as they're not hitting an application in the head end their internet speeds went from like you know five megs to like 500 because they're just going direct i mean you know they're fast internet connections right but they're just going direct to the internet getting out to the cloud or you know somewhere as opposed to constantly hair pinning so the business gets to save all that money cutting the mpls cost in half and then the end user gets this super fast experience now you know out to the internet because that sd wan box is making those decisions i go office 365 go to the internet you know you got to get to this application go to the data center and it just i was happy to hear that the end users not only is the business saving money but it really seems to make a difference for the users um because it's yeah so so it's a win-win yeah because it's the sd-wan appliances are application-aware they they know you know in all those rule sets like okay you're going here go to the internet you go in there and just it seems really cool i'd actually like to dig a little deeper into it i've i've successfully avoided it but because of this episode i i started talking to the guy and like wow this stuff is actually pretty darn cool yeah it's it's it's kind of amazing and it's all gui based which is neat there's a controller and it he brought me to this analytics thing and you can see the whole everything out there like what it's doing and there's a dashboard analytics and is anything having a problem you know if if a policy got violated or an sla for packet loss you'll see it and what happened and it gives you a lot of visibility into the performance of the wan which i can tell you traditional way and you know you know we we never had you know if if a circuit went hard down the failover happened easy but you know you're looking like a brown outage of like some packet loss it can get kind of definitely it can get hairy well one i think one thing for like for us on the meraki is everything's like template based right and so let's say you had to i don't know change your ntp server or something something simple like that right well you know we have hundreds of routers out there well i had to ssh into every like single one of those if i didn't use some kind of like automation like ansible or something like that uh and so you had to sit there and manually configure all of them just to make one simple little change and with like the meraki like i said it's template-based so you add all these different routers into a template and if they basically get a cookie-cutter config now you have to you know obviously do addressing and stuff like that if you if you want all of them to talk to each other you have to do addressing uniquely right but um but other than that like all the all the overhead the management all that stuff it's it's pretty much the same across the board but that's what you were saying earlier aj kind of how you're pushing configs out and and that's what i saw too talking to this guy it's it's all template-based pretty much every you know every edge that you're going to stand this up in there they're going to have the same you know yes you got to get to office 365 and then that template has all the ports you got to get to and you know it's instead of like you're saying you got a dan you got to go into everything you know every device and just set it all up granularly it's really nice having the templates and just the controller pushes it and bing you know you're up that's really nice yeah well and it also speeds up deployment right because uh like so when i when i first started here um we had we did a refresh a uh equipment refresh and we sat in a basement uh in a room in a basement and i had you know 200-ish routers and i had to sit there and apply a config to every single one of those and then ship those out to our you know our road texts and then they would install all of them and then we had to make sure the tunnels come up and all that stuff and we had to get on the phone with them and all that you know to walk them through any oddness or anything like that uh but then when we went to meraki dude we did we did a full refresh in like less than three months incredible i mean it was insane it would just yeah you set up your you set up your uh like i was talking about you set up your template you you configure your networks and then add those networks to that template you know the the devices in that network and then when kind of like what aj was saying at the beginning uh you know you plug those suckers up and they get an internet connection and then they just pull they phone home to the dashboard and rocky dashboard and then they pull down their configs and then bam bam thank you man you're up and running in like 15 minutes it's insane no i think it's wham bam thank you dan i do uh step aside from the technology a bit for a minute and and kind of talk about the planning behind getting in to sd-wan so so let's say you're a network engineer you've run through everything you think this is a good idea you're in a traditional network today but you you need to build that use case that solid business case for sd-wan where where do you start money well i yeah i i think one thing too is um it it depends if it i know that's our favorite word it depends right uh but like for us you know if if you have broadband connections rather than an mpls cloud or something like that uh it it's super simple right it's it's it if you have let's say you have multiple connections right and kind of like what aj was talking about before how if only you were saying something about the uh like if one gets degraded or anything like that you know it can start moving that traffic over to the other or or make that like your main thing right well i mean if you if you look at like a broadband connection those are generally cheap right so it i think if you want to have a good use case what i'm circling back around to i i'm rambling sorry uh but what i'm circling back around to is if you want to make a good use case i feel like you can get more circuits for cheaper and uh just let it do the thinking on where which which channel the traffic needs to go over and all that kind of stuff so you could yeah i essentially have you know a single carrier single connection today private connection and what you're saying is is a use case is you could say hey i could replace that potentially with uh multiple broadband or direct internet access for the same costs or less yeah i think that's definitely one way to look at it but i also think um andy not andy but uh aaron wrote a an article i think i think it was aaron that was talking about using sd-wan with your traditional mpls cloud and instead of it replacing it he has seen a lot of people uh just it being an extra connection for fell over or something like that right like where you know if exactly like instead of having andy i don't know if you know numbers or not but like if you have to have two mpls connections at a single branch what if you did a single mpls connection and then a broadband connection i would assume that would be a lot of money yeah so yeah so so i could see a good use case and prior to sd-wan there was nothing to intelligently route traffic between an mpls yeah you know what are you talking about we had ipsl right and that's and i think that's the intelligence that is faked into this sd-wan because he had to do all this stuff right you had to do like ipsla and tracking and hsrp like you know in metrics there was there were all these like as time went on people kept trying to figure out how to make use of uh of you know different wan circuits but sd-wan just kind of made it like really smart the intelligence baked in is just insane like it's it's measuring packet loss latency generally like anything you know anything you want and then you have that policy like if packet loss gets above three percent go over there you know it's and then it notifies you like hey there's something going on over here call your carrier like it's it's pretty wild so on the on the business side of it if you're looking at sd-wan as a potential replacement of mpls or some private circuit like mpls how do you plan that like if you're only halfway through your service agreement or your contract with that carrier on that circuit do you hold off or do you potentially bring in sd-wan and leverage the mpls until the end of the term what are your guys thoughts on that i think the translation you might be locked in for like x years right right you can't just right you can't just drop them i mean i would imagine i wasn't i was involved in the planning of the sd-wan solution that i was referring to earlier but i would imagine it takes a while if you're a big organization maybe so maybe the maybe you can start planning it you know like how how many years are left in that contract right and then it seems like it takes a lot of time like how many solutions are out there aj like it it could probably take you six to 12 months just to look at all the solutions and try to see what fits your needs and what's best and how you're going to build it is it going to be vnf is it going to be appliances like how are we going to do it so i would think the planning phase could take quite some time while you're you know while you're waiting for those leases to expire that's a good one on mpls right like you're not going to have a bunch of you know lease lines that are all co-termed around the same time you might have like the majority of them co-term depending on how long you've had them but you're probably gonna have to stagger the rollout but you could probably incorporate your lease line to begin with and then at some point phase it out so that way you're not slowing down the rollout that's a good point and i wonder i wonder if that's uh and i wonder if that's like what aaron was saying like he's seeing a lot of places just use it in line with their mpas mpls so i'm wondering if that might be the reason i think that goes back to dan the the fact that this really isn't or really shouldn't be sold as is necessarily just a cost savings thing i mean it's it's also seen as uh an augmentation to your your current when make it better than it is today not necessarily hey we're going to do this to save money i think that's the biggest benefit right like the business always wants to save money and that's how you get management to sign the you know the contracts to write the checks but you're ultimately providing a better experience for your customers and your users and you know okay guys we got this internet circuit that's been sitting here dumb and happy for three years we haven't used like sd-wan can allow us to leverage this like it's you know it's let's use the redundancy sitting there it makes a hell of a lot of sense even from a business perspective right if you can help the users have a better experience and at that point yeah and at that point you're you're essentially uh you're not spending any money right for that second circuit because you've already spent the money on it you just not use it yeah i'd be curious i don't know what building an sd-wan solution costs you know there's definitely a cost associated whether it's well i mean you got to replace gear and stuff like that but and so what we did what we did was uh we just waited till you know the business was happy with how many years of service we had out of our old routers and you know they started going into life and to support all that stuff you know and then they was like all right here's our here's our chance to get into it so that's you gotta find directions an operating expense too right because i'm guessing on an sd any i'm guessing any sd-wan solution you're you're paying for software licensing if the controllers are being hosted in the cloud you're you're paying operating expense for that so yeah so so based off my experience i'll be talking a lot about just because that's what i know right that's what i work in um but yes meraki is a monthly charge uh you have a support and then you have license on top of that and you have got to pay that monthly payment and if you don't they will shut your name is the actual or the actual gear that sits on your edge of that is that part of a monthly cost are you paying capital for that and then you're paying your operating costs on top of that okay yeah yes so you're you're uh you you buy the device and then you buy a license and the license is for like you know you can do like a three five year type thing and you gotta make sure you you buy that uh and you have to pay that you have to make sure your license and your device counts are at least your devices are equal to or less than your license so just to so i got something that i i think is ultimately going to be thrown at aj here because he's probably talked to the most customers um one thing that i've kind of heard about over the last year or so are these for lack of a better term carrier brokers so in an sd-wan scenario you know you can use any kind of any number of carriers any kind of connect connectivity that'll get you to the internet so i've heard of companies reaching out to these carrier brokers to manage their all of their different carrier connections so they can if there's an issue they call this broker and the broker opens up a case with the uh with the carrier the the broker handles all the billing so you don't have to have potentially full-time accounting staff handling all these different um all these different circuits all these different bills that kind of thing are you seeing that um being deployed people jumping on board with those kind of services or are people handling this stuff on their own real quick before i answer that question i just want to to uh add the the what dan's point was saying about the whole meraki thing right like if you don't pay the bill they shut it off they don't they don't shut it off they they just stop you from making new changes to the network and it only operates in the state that you left it if you try to add a new device and you don't have a license for it that won't let you configure it so you can't use it that's not what the emails have devices it says it says we shut all your networks down well i i don't think they do it right away i think they i think you know they give you give you a 30-day bill trust me i i've seen these emails because we get out of our license count nice uh tim to answer your question that is a service that the company that i work for offers uh and we have dedicated account managers we have partnerships with a lot of major isps and they will work with current providers to help you get your bill down help you organize your bill and in the end you pay us one lump sum that will cover all of your services and i mean obviously right like we're not going to do this for free but but it includes like some cut for us to to be doing this management for you but i i can almost guarantee you that whatever you're paying us to do that for you is is worth the the overhead that we're in the burden that we're taking off of somebody in in the it or billing department right like we're just sending you an invoice that covers all of your services through a given carrier or multiple carriers so it's it's definitely a service yeah i gotta think the the value there is is pretty high because i got to imagine you know in an accounting department they're gonna get all of these bills and they're gonna need to rely probably on an i.t contact to help them get through it understand the different terms and make sure payments go out on time so yeah if it takes that burden off of not only the accounting department but also the it department i think that's got to be a pretty big value and you know i think we do like qbrs and stuff like that where we look at you know what are the consumptions on these lines um if you're being billed for your usage or or if you're paying for like some sort of a minimum access like are you even scratching the surface on that can you crank this usage down uh you know we'll go back to the isp on a regular basis and say hey it's been a while you know can we can we up the the data rate or can we lower the bill you know we just do that kind of like regular check-in with the isp to make sure that you are indeed getting the most value out of that so one thing i would like to bring up is um we've kind of talked about what is sd-wan and you know some of the use cases i guess but who who is this for like i i think you know everybody hears about the new hotness and everything like that and and i just sometimes i struggle whenever i hear these new hot buzzwords and everything that's going on sc when uh you know automation this and that and everything like that um but who is this actually for because let's say someone's listening right now and they have maybe three branch offices or something like that you know one one headquarters and that might have some of their servers and and maybe they're not even in the cloud right maybe they don't have any aws or azure or anything like that like is this a solution for them or you know or is it not is is it more for like an msp or a very large company that might have hundreds of locations or even maybe maybe if they have like you know 20 large locations or something like that like kind of what what are you seeing at where you work do you are you seeing smaller people or smaller people smaller clients smaller sized businesses there we go or are you seeing medium large like what what are you seeing i think there's something in it for everybody right like um i i think that even if you are a small shop then there's definitely benefits to having an sd-wan solution because you've got that centralized management you don't have to bounce around to all the different devices because if you are a small shop you probably got like what one or two people that are doing all the i.t stuff like why would you want to manage you know even a small land of like 10 or 20 devices individually when you can do it all from you know a dashboard or a centralized management you know and i'll say like that was that was my one of my big drivers right there was you know because we have a we're a small network team and i did not want to have to manage all those devices anymore it was just a it was a mess you know and and that's why i liked the whole everything centralized but like let's say let's say let's say you don't even have a branch let's just say you have one you have one building is it is it beneficial then is it i don't know exactly what all the cost is for some of these other solutions but i know what it is for meraki um so like on some of the other solutions is it beneficial if you have one building and you just have like you know three or four isp connections you put sd-wan in front of that or something but i i think you you'd have to take a closer look at like you know your way and what's going on outside your network so something that pops to mind are teleworkers right like very common nowadays and you can get smaller sd-wan appliances that can be like a teleworker appliance right like it has built-in wi-fi it's got some poe ports in there so it's got like the router the switch the vpn appliance an ap it's all right there so an end user can take this home they can plug into their internet connection they don't have to do any configuration it just gets out to the internet builds the tunnels whatever it needs to do and then it'll broadcast a a work approved access point right so they can take their work laptop get on the enterprise network using the the secure 8021x authentication uh and only with their approved work devices and and work wirelessly right at home rather than having to be you know tethered or use the the untrusted uh home network right um and then if they have an ip phone still they can plug into the poe port on the back of the device and power up their ip phone and that'll make the connection back to the enterprise phone system so i i think there's definitely still a use case so i wouldn't just assume if you're a single building or you know smaller enterprise that you might not have a use case for an sd-wan solution so this is a question i was going to ask earlier and you just kind of poked at it again so do you have to be dual homed to be able to reap the benefits of sd-wan because in my mind you need two different circuits to be able to you know monitor and send traffic out different directions and the teleworker model it doesn't sound like it right they're just going to have one internet connection right so you don't necessarily have to be dual-homed it sounds like no you don't have to be the bread and butter of the solution is is when you have multiple because then it can make smart routing decisions on you know if this link is not living up to its sla uh or or a certain standard uh quality connection then you can send it out the other one you know for your video traffic or voice draft or whatever the case may be for a specific application but i mean even if you're only single home like you can still management apply policies like if a new you know security breach comes out and you want to push a policy that will stop that you know as close to the end point as possible you can send it to your single home to edge device yeah i i think that the intelligence of it is amazing to me because like traditional weigh-in is pretty darn dumb like even because like even well no like you know you run into so many different issues over the years and you realize like wow there's got to be a better way an sd-wan seems like the better way like if you get a one-way fiber cut on a circuit if you're not running bfd you're just going to black hole traffic for hours right like it's not working what's going on because the link is up so even if you have hsrp and tracking and like the link is up but it's just the sender that receives busted and there's really no bfd is the solution right but we got burned on that years ago i'm like oh hell we got to put bfd everywhere now like whoops you know we didn't foresee the one-way fiber break scenario and right but but like we're talking about earlier between ipsla and bfd and like udld and like there's all this all the stuff you gotta throw at it to try to make the traditional land intelligent where this just has all that plus the centralized management plus the control plus i was just reading something here it's kind of neat that they're you know i don't know if it depends on the services that you're consuming and where they are but this this one articles you know traditional win was never designed for the cloud right all the traffic and traditional win has to come back to a head end and there's latency involved with that there's there's more hops you got to go through that and it hurts application performance so if people can you know the delay from that back call impairs applications like you know how they're performing but if you could just go right to the internet right to the cloud right out of this sd-wan appliance instead of having everything go through the head-end which is what traditional lan always did you had to go back to the hub to get anywhere yep so you know the intelligence baked into the just the sd-wan you know philosophy is is pretty amazing to me yeah and and to that end you know we'll wrap up here real quick but uh i think the latest hotness is is sassy right everyone's talking about sassy so that's secure access service edge and that's that's uh it's like secure internet breakout you can define a specific sets of policies for trusted applications in the cloud to break out right at the edge device and send that traffic directly to like you know trusted partners office 365 salesforce box you know stuff like that uh and so you know why backhaul all that traffic through an enterprise network when you can just let it leave the the local edge gateway so uh there's definitely a lot of meat left on this bone i try to stay away from vendor specifics uh you know for obvious reasons but there's a lot of good stuff sorry i tried there was only one i noticed that um but i think we're gonna see like you know sd-wan uh part one part two part three because this is a rapidly evolving uh continuously evolving solution that that just seems to get better with age so i'm excited that might be interesting i'm excited we dug into it and i can't wait to keep talking about it yeah it might be interesting to bring in different smes of different you know solutions yeah right yeah right like just to see the different offerings um and and how they differ right because it's got to be overwhelming when you first look at it there's a lot of solutions and a lot of competitors in the market and a lot of ways to do it and you know how do you how do you make a good decision there it seems to be kind of difficult excellent let's talk any last-minute thoughts before we uh do we depart guys uh don't try to record in a metal shop out in the middle of nowhere or leave the door open where bullfrogs can just add some frogs freaking kids yeah it's gonna be a lot of fun and a nice one just just if you're trying to if you're trying to start a podcast that's not a it's not ideal all right uh thanks for joining this week uh joining us this week and uh have a great evening we'll see you next week we got a special guest so make sure you come back for episode 52. see ya 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 net edge that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network engineering.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