00:47
This is the Art of Network Engineering podcast.

00:58
In this podcast, we'll explore tools, technologies, and talented people. We aim to bring you information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox, and share the stories of fellow network engineers.

01:13
Well hey there friends, it's so good to see you again. It's been a while, but you all know I need my rest in between those happy little maintenance windows. Well okay then, if you can't tell by the sound of my voice, I'm just over the moon with excitement today. I hope you got your canvas ready, because it's about to get real. Okay. I know I just mentioned the moon a bit ago, but I'm sort of feeling like we can't even see it in this picture. Probably not even the sun either.

01:40
Maybe those two finally met up together for some shenanigans instead of just staring across the sky at each other. I'm thinking this picture is about to get very cloudy. There, that's nice. But you know what? He looks a little lonely up there, doesn't he? Let's toss some workloads up there for Mr. Cloud to catch. We'll make him Van Dyke Brown, how about that? Maybe a direct connect first, just so we can make sure those little rascals get up there safe and sound. Would you look at that?

02:07
A couple of always on VMs just lift and shifted their little way right up there. I can practically see the dollar signs already. Well that looks just great doesn't it? Thanks for joining me friends. While we let the paint on this contract dry, please enjoy this very special episode of the art of network engineering. Oh thank you Tim Ross. It's so good to see Tim Ross. It's been so long since he's graced us with his presence in an intro. Tim?

02:36
Thank you so much Tim. Tim Bertino, how you doing? What's going on AJ? Things are going good. I am starting to, I've started up my on again off again relationship with the guitar. I saw that. Spoiler alert, spoiler alert, I'm still freaking terrible. But I don't, I hate it a little less every time I do it. So you see I'm not very good at hobbies so I'm trying to figure that out little by little. Yeah.

03:04
Yeah, so what I'm hearing is that later this year at some time when I see you again, I'm gonna shoot a video of you doing the podcast intro on an acoustic guitar, and that'll be our new intro for a little bit. Yeah, you're gonna have to bring Andy in too. I can't feel those shoes. Somebody actually, I mean, they played along in the survey at least, somebody said that, I know Andy wrote the intro, but could you guys change it up a little bit every now and then? It's starting to get a little old.

03:34
I still remember when when you guys first got the rights to that song and Andy played it on YouTube and it got taken down for copyright infringement and he had to prove that we actually owned the music. Yeah. Yeah. But no, I'm good. What's new with you? You know, sickness has plagued my household. It swept through last week. And so just getting over a little bit of a cold. But man.

04:01
it hit everybody in the house and it took us all down for a little bit. It was, it was gnarly, but glad to be over that. Hopefully my voice maintains for this evening. But other than that, doing, doing well. You got that radio voice. I don't know where you got it, but I keep trying to train mine to do it, but You got that face made for radio. Hey, that's why I do this. I didn't even know till last week that we had a YouTube channel. So now I'm all, now I'm all self-conscious. Oh boy.

04:31
And that voice you heard is Tim McConaughey. He's no stranger to the podcast. Tim, thanks for joining us this evening. Hey, thanks for having me back, guys. Now, Tim, I understand you have some pretty big news to share with us. Which big news do I have to share? Sorry, I get I have a lot of your. Yeah, he's kind of a big deal. He's a very big deal. Tim has recently released a book called the Hybrid Cloud Handbook for AWS, AWS Cloud Networking.

05:00
Thanks. Thanks, AJ. Yeah, I knew he released a book and as soon as I don't know why, but as soon as you said Tim has released I immediately went to album and I was waiting for an album. It's coming out to drop double double platinum Don't yeah if i'm lucky. No, I uh, thanks aj. That's absolutely true. I did just release a book. Um

05:23
Like you said, hybrid cloud handbook for AWS. It's the first one I've released that actually has a physical component, meaning that you can actually have a book and hold it in your hands. Although everybody's doing eBooks now. So I don't know why you would actually want that, but if you want it, it works. Uh, what, what's funny about the old hybrid cloud handbook here is cause I don't understand print formatting whatsoever because I am a cloud architect, not a, not a book architect. Um,

05:50
I opted to go with the standard format size, which it turns out is about the size of like printer paper. So my hybrid cloud handbook is more like a hybrid cloud two hands book or something. But maybe in this next edition, I'll go ahead and fix that. But yep, it's out. It's on Amazon. It's on LeanPub. Thanks for reminding me, if you will. I'm glad to. Hopefully people like it.

06:19
Yeah, I'm sure they will. I picked up a couple of copies and we're going to do something special with those real soon. I'm excited about that. We do have some other guests with us this evening. Andy, Lex and Dan aren't able to join us tonight because we have a very full house. We have some very exciting news to share with everybody, but we'll get to that in a little bit. You have to stay with us. Also joining us tonight is Alex Perkins. Alex, great to see you on here.

06:45
Very active participant in the all about the journey discord if you spend any time in there you've probably seen alex Oh, yes hang out in the cloud channel all day basically Some might ask shouldn't this guy be working, uh, maybe I don't know I should I should No, i'm just kidding. I'm just kidding We alex and I quasi sort of maybe not really work at the same place uh, he works for a different arm of the company than I do but um

07:14
you know, if we go, if we ever show up to the same company functions, we might see each other. There's, there's a chance. Yeah, absolutely. I know. I wish you had gone last year to Orlando, but I know your, your son was graduating or it was his birthday, right? It was 18th birthday. Yeah, it was his birthday. Yeah. Yeah. 18th birthday. Yeah, it was awesome. They rented out that whole resort and everything. It was a lot of fun planning on getting there this year. So I'm looking forward to that. Well, I might see you there then. Excellent.

07:39
And last but certainly not least joining us is Chris Miles. Chris, also a longtime member of the Discord and a longtime fan of the podcast. I will tell you that he was one of our very first Patreons to sign up for the program when we released it a couple years ago. Chris, thanks for joining us. Yeah, of course, man. If you ever need any more $5, you know, coming your way, just let me know. I'll throw them to you, bro. Nice.

08:07
And Chris comes to us from the future. That I am, yes. I am in the future. Ah, that's right. How could I forget that perfect fact there? Yeah, so, yeah, one little fact about me is I do live in Sydney, Australia. Obviously I don't sound Australian because I am not. I just relocated here last year and yeah, the future's pretty nice. It's very sunny today, so hopefully you guys get to look forward to that. Although you're probably listening to this weeks from now and, you know, hopefully you have the same weather.

08:36
that we have right now because it's very nice. It's lovely. Down in Australia where just about anything will kill you. Yep. Well you gotta watch out for the drop bears. Drop bears are a big problem. The drop bears? Yeah. I think I need some more. What the hell is a drop bear? I need more context. He doesn't know that these guys don't know the drop bear. Chris, tell them about the drop bears. Yeah, so the drop bear is, I'll go ahead and spoil it. I'm sorry. It's a myth that like Ozzy's like...

09:02
like to trick you with and say that there's this animal called a drop bear that will just fired pop out of just fall out of the tree. So it's like a new and like mangle you. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. It's like the pictures are always like a, it's like a koala with like these like nasty, like gangly looking teeth. Um, but no, they don't, they don't exist, but they do play up to the bit very hard here, which is nice. Like there's even like a sign about it at the zoo. I noticed. And I was like, you know, you gotta, you gotta respect the dedication. Yeah. I see all the different things.

09:31
that live in and can happen in Australia. And people always ask me, you know, I see that. And it's like, that is the reason why I live in a place where the air hurts my face, because I can't put up with the rest of that stuff, man. I will say, come to the city, man. There's none of that stuff's here. All you got is these very cute little possums and some screaming cockatoos and yeah, it's very nice. So we invited you guys on the show because,

10:00
Cloud is so popular right now and I've known you guys off and on for the last couple of years and you are all people that I have seen go from very heavy traditional networking focused and now you're really focused a lot on a cloud. So what's happened? Take me through that. Why are you guys so, why did you guys pivot and what's going on with the cloud industry? I guess I'll start. Well, I mean, obviously I've been here a few times so most people know that at this point

10:30
I was a TSA, technical solutions architect with Cisco, working with SD-WAN. I worked for years with SD-WAN and before that with Route Switch and stuff. And so, very traditional network background. Before that I was enterprise and before that I worked in military networking. I enjoy the cloud because first of all, like technology wise, it's...

10:58
definitely where things are heading. And I want to preface that by saying that I don't think everybody's jumping head first into the cloud, but there's definitely, I think, no way you can really deny at this point that the cloud's here to stay. And cloud networking is just a totally different ballgame. It carries a lot of the stuff that we know from on-prem, but it's just really interesting. And it's just a different way to do networking. And someone like me who's been doing networking for a long time,

11:27
almost 15 years now, it was a real chance to kind of get involved with the new technology kind of right, you know, not right when it started, but certainly right when it's taken off. So for me, that was that was really exciting. Well, you Alex, once you once you go next. Yeah, yeah, there's I mean, I'm in like a lot of the federal and government type spaces. So the fact that they are moving into the cloud should tell you that adoption is ahead of ahead of the curve already. So it's something that

11:56
For me personally, so I like to talk about the DevOps stuff that happened, like all the automation stuff in the networking space. For the last couple of years, it was a big deal. Everyone's talking about, oh, should I learn Python or should I learn networking? That was the big question for so many years. And I tried learning all the programming languages, all the different DevOps stuff, and I just never really grasped, I could never really grasp onto it fully.

12:25
So when cloud stuff came around, really one of my biggest drivers was I just didn't want to miss another paradigm shift. And, you know, like Tim said, there's so many people moving to the cloud and a lot of them did it without networking in mind in the first place. So it's kind of on the back end, everyone's like, oh, yeah, we need network engineers. And now you're seeing a lot of people that are just being forced suddenly. Oh, hey, tomorrow, I need you to spin this up in Azure. And it's like you have no idea because everyone thinks it's the same as on prem networking.

12:55
but it's completely different. And it's just a lot of fun and a lot of, it's like designing a lot of green field networks a lot of the time, which most people never really have any kind of chance to do in the traditional networking world. So Alex, I think being a network engineer or a cloud engineer working for enterprise customers, I think can be stressful enough, especially dealing with like maintenance windows and changes and all that kind of thing. I mean,

13:23
I gotta think that's almost exponential with government networks. Is that what it's like? Is it stressful? Oh yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot. I mean, depending on the customers, right? Some of the three-letter agencies, right? It's bad if they go down. It's very bad and detrimental to the country as a whole. So I mean, there is a lot of that and there's, each cloud kind of has their own government enclave of the cloud, if you will. Like there's...

13:53
Mag, which is like Microsoft Azure for government, and then AWS has GovCloud. So there's a lot of that, but the way that it kind of works in the government space is a lot of the organizations, they'll connect to those internally, but they're not public facing. So what they'll do is for the public facing clouds, because they will use the public facing clouds as well, they go through the TIC, which is the Trusted Internet Connection. This could have a whole episode about how the TIC works. But...

14:21
It's basically like a security layer that is usually like a higher up organization. So like if you have the treasury, right, you'll have like all these sub departments, but the main component of that is above all these components will maintain that tick. And then each of these organizations kind of connect to it before they go out to the internet for security. So that's how they get out to the public cloud. So there's yeah, it's there's security deep in every single layer.

14:50
Does leveraging TIC in those private offerings, does that help cover the compliance requirements for government or do you still have to be pretty in-depth minded around different federal government compliance regulations? That's a really good question. The TIC is supposed to meet a lot of these requirements. Like DISA, the defense...

15:17
blanking what it is right now, but it's like defense something agency, like security agency or something. Yeah. Information security agency. Yeah. Information security agency. So they usually manage a lot of like the government connections, public connections. Yeah. And there's just like you said, I mean, there's, there's so much it does kind of, it's supposed to be all collapsed into the tick. And this, a lot of this is like tick two dot O right now. And you're starting to see people shifting to tick three dot O, which is much more.

15:46
Instead of like a centralized location, it's kind of a distributed tick. So each organization can have their own and you don't need that parent organization anymore. But it's all supposed to be collapsed into the tick. That's where the security goes. Alex, I just learned about the tick and now you're telling me that there's like a 3.0 version of the tick, like, oh wow. Government at work, man, that's a lot. The only thing that the government is fast is the security solutions. I just want to go back and stress a point that you made that

16:14
You know, there's all these different public clouds, and then there's the GovCloud, which is an entirely segregated version of the public cloud, specifically for the government. So think about all those resources that, you know, Azure, GCP, and AWS put into making the public cloud, and now they have a whole nother set that is just strictly for FedGov. Which is shocking to hear that so soon, the federal government, or any government, is actually...

16:43
latching on to a public cloud type service, right? Like I've known and worked with people who have worked in IT for the government and I've heard horror stories that they're still holding on to like Windows Server 2003. So to hear such an early adoption or as far as like government standards goes, early adoption of something like public cloud, it's honestly shocking. And that should tell you, right? That should speak to...

17:08
the benefits of the cloud. Oh, absolutely. Because, I mean, government is so far behind. I mean, you could ask anyone that's worked on, like Tim was saying, little fun fact, Tim and I both used to work on the Navy Marine Corps network. And, I mean, Tim, you remember how old all those devices are. They still have all kinds of stuff in there. So for them to adopt the cloud is crazy. I mean, even piggybacking on that, like the Pentagon just didn't they...

17:35
basically renegotiate that $10 billion deal to run there. Now they're not gonna pick one cloud provider. It's gonna be multi. It's gonna be AWS, Azure, OCI, Google. So it's like- They split it. Yeah, it's a huge thing. Yeah, the Jedi contract, yep. Yeah. That's right, Jedi. Wow, that is huge. Now Chris, you and Tim have a very strong affiliation with the cloud. You both work for a cloud networking vendor. I've heard the name. I'm not terribly familiar with it, so I apologize. Chris, could you-

18:03
Spend some time sharing where you guys work and what exactly you do there. Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, so me and Tim both work for a company called Aviatrix. We are basically a multi-cloud networking and security vendor in the cloud space. So really, the problem that we originally set out to fix was the networking piece in cloud native.

18:31
You know, cloud native means you're using the built-in components from the CSP, the cloud service provider, to build these networks or build these topologies and things like that. A lot of times when you're using cloud native constructs to do that, it might be very easy and very simple to do when you're doing it in a single cloud. If you're just all in on AWS, you can launch Transit Gateway, you can peer your VPCs, you can add your inspection VPCs, you can do all that kind of stuff. Right?

19:01
And it's very simple, but the second you need to integrate that into another cloud, it becomes very difficult. And you're managing a lot of things in very different ways. You know, in AWS, you might be using cloud formation. Azure, you might be using Azure bicep templates or ARM templates, sorry, for something like that to manage your infrastructure. So it becomes very difficult to maintain a lot of that and integrate the security piece of it as well. So Aviatrix kind of came along and really kind of...

19:30
Just do the typical thing is whenever you want to add visibility and control to a network, what do you do is you create an overlay. So now we have a basically an NVA, a network virtual appliance that runs in the, in all of the major CSPs. So we do AWS, Azure, Google, OCI, Alibaba. I think there's one that I'm forgetting, but yeah, so there we were present in all those. We do the Gov's as well, actually. Yeah, all the GovCloud as well. Right.

19:59
But you can build these kind of network topologies that you're very used to. You have your BGP routing, you have packet captures, you have a lot of this visibility and control that you don't have with the CSPs, or you probably might be able to get that kind of stuff, but you have to pay for it. AWS will gladly give you flow logs for all your network traffic, but they're gonna charge you for each component of that, right?

20:27
Yeah, Tim, you want to explain that? Well, that's just metadata too, right? You can't do... Well, no, just real quick. That's just meta... Even the flow logs are just metadata, right? Like, just, hey, accept, deny. What do we do with this packet versus like Aviatrix? And this is not a shill for Aviatrix. I'm just saying, building on what Chris was talking about, about getting that on-prem experience in the cloud, off of the Aviatrix network, you can do full packet captures like you could if you were using routers and switches on-prem. Like that's...

20:55
The type of, I think it's sort of both trying to get to is that the cloud often doesn't give you that visibility and ability to troubleshoot. So you get your crown jewels in the cloud. You need that level of being able to take care of that stuff to meet those SLAs. So anyway, again, not to make this a shill for Aviatrix, but I wanted to just add onto that a little bit there. So I think we've got the right.

21:21
audience for this question and I'll ultimately open this up to all three of you. So in the last few years, there's a lot of new technologies and concepts that have come out things like cloud, automation, DevOps, all that good stuff. My question to you is the three of you being what I call traditional network engineers before you got into cloud.

21:45
What would your recommendation be for people coming out of college, people looking at career shifting is are things like cloud automation, DevOps, are those things you feel like people could jump into right away or do you feel like people should get a kind of an upbringing in, in things like networking systems administration, that kind of stuff? Yeah. I mean, I feel like all of those components definitely don't go away, um, in the cloud at all. So it's, it's very important to

22:14
kind of learn fundamentals and own those very much. Kind of the same, because people were, I feel like just in the last few years, people have always been like, do I get my CCNA or do I learn Python? And unfortunately, the answer is probably that you're gonna have to do both of them, right? You can't just get by with one thing anymore. You're gonna have to have at least a good mix of the two. And one thing that the...

22:41
you know, networking and infrastructure people really get to benefit from when moving to the cloud is that we get to inherit a lot of the things that the DevOps people were doing in here, building applications, and the key thing there is it's very agile, it moves very fast. So you have to have some grasp on the automation piece of it as well. Thankfully, I think the cloud, especially when it comes to networking,

23:08
has been kind of like the death of the nerd knob. Like you don't get to tweak every little setting that you want to anymore. So in Just, you don't have to actually go as deep. Like I don't have to, like when you're operating in the cloud, you don't need to be an expert at every little BGP tweak you can make. The CSPs are only gonna let you do a handful of things, right? And they, you need to know communities, you need to know how to build an adjacency, what the...

23:37
you know, how does the TCP handshake happen, things like that. So I think you do have to learn a mix of both. Tim, I don't know how you feel. No, I 100% agree. I mean, we're coming at this from the lens of being network engineers that transition to cloud. I think your question, Tim, was basically like just anyone, or did you mean specifically networking focused, like somebody getting out of...

24:01
college and maybe they went to college for just an IT degree or did they go with a networking focus or like? Yeah, I'm coming from the lens of I don't, I'm trying to, so I went back and had a chat with some college classes at the school I graduated from last week and that was one thing that I talked to one of the instructors is I don't even really know from a generalist perspective what's being taught.

24:29
in colleges today, because I've been so far removed from it. So I think from anybody just either getting out of school or looking to pivot into tech, it is our specialized things like cloud and DevOps, something that they can jump into with maybe even the bare essential of fundamentals or no fundamentals at all. Or do you feel like they should get a base in things like

24:54
the networking stack and maybe systems administration such as server and Linux and that kind of thing first. That's a, I think that's actually a really good question. So I've been asking myself that question and obviously I don't know the answer myself like in my own situation, cause I'm not, I was a network engineer first, obviously before I moved to the cloud. But what I've noticed is that actually there's a lot of college courses and college even degrees now.

25:21
focused on either cloud or DevOps or like, you know, development in general. I mean, dude, when I was, and this is dating myself now, when I was, you know, trying to get into college right out of high school, man, the only thing you could get was like computer science. So, you know what I mean? Like, and they still had classes with fricking punch cards. Now to be fair, that was old, that was old even when I was gonna take those classes. So, but I mean, that's my point, right? CompSci was an awful.

25:51
degree and I did not want it. So I dropped out. I'm actually going back now. I'm almost done with Western Governors University. Actually, I'm doing their cloud computing, multi-cloud computing degree, but that's neither here nor there. But actually, I guess it is kind of relevant. The point I want to make, I guess, is that I think someone who is new to the industry, who has no other experience, has a better shot now, certainly, than they did even probably three years ago, you know, of making that jump.

26:20
And I do think, I mean, experience wins all, right? At the end of the day, if you have the experience, you're doing well and you're gonna do well in a transition. But I do think that you can probably come out of college and move into tech and have certainly an easier time than you would have even just a few years ago. Yeah, that's a good point. Cause I guess back, even when I was in school, it was still very much.

26:46
computer science or computer information systems with concentrations in networking or web design and that kind of thing. And when I got out of school, I mean, with college alone, like you said, it's all about experience. And with college alone, obviously I had no real world experience. So I needed to jump into something like end user computing to then pivot into networking and that kind of thing. But like you said, I mean, you're with Western Governors, you're going through a cloud focused degree.

27:15
Like me, I couldn't imagine jumping out of school and going into something like development or cloud or whatever, because that wasn't the training that I had. But with those programs in place now, now that you mention that, I agree that things are a lot different than they were even a handful of years ago. Yeah, and even like just kind of piggybacking on that, even if you didn't wanna go that traditional route, like actually getting like a degree in cloud.

27:40
If you're focusing on Linux, you're focusing on some type of networking thing, like cloud really enables you to have that at your fingertips at a very much easier than it was for even me, just like, you know, maybe like 10 years ago. It's true. It's like I could, I can spin up because each CSP also has a free tier. So it's like, I could, I could build a little, you know, a system of, uh, Linux systems in a VPC or something and play around and do whatever I want. Right. And, and.

28:09
The learning is going to cost me doughnuts for that. So yeah, it's crazy how easy it is compared to just a while ago. That's a really good point, actually. Just the playground and the materials out there, too. There's so much good material out there. It's like exponentially growing the amount of good content, good material, easy way to learn stuff. And Chris, you nailed it, right? The ability to make it. Yeah, free content. I mentioned the degree because that was the context of the question.

28:39
you know, what I happen to be working on just because I never got a degree. You know, I'm just kind of going back and doing it, but dude, yeah, you do not need a degree to get started in this stuff. I would definitely, I would definitely say that. So let me ask you as, as you know, folks that have made the journey from traditional networking to cloud in, in your opinion, you know, what is probably some of the biggest hurdles that a traditional network engineer might face when moving to cloud architectures or public cloud? Alex, do you want to take that one? Yeah.

29:08
I think a lot of, for me, probably the biggest thing is mind shift. Right? Like you have really have to shift kind of how you're looking at things with, with traditional like on-prem networking. You're usually talking to other networking people. Like maybe every once in a while you'll talk to like sysadmins or you basically never talk to the devs. Right. But the cloud is for the devs. Like they're the ones that started this whole revolution. You really need to change not just how you look at things, but you need to kind of understand.

29:37
how the cloud is consumed before you actually start building and designing things within it. And they make it so easy that just kind of back off the last question, it's, I mean, because they make it so easy, you don't have to know as much. So it's kind of better that you can come in without as much experience. But what really helps is that architecture background and knowing how to design things properly and understanding how applications flow together.

30:05
To me, that's really the biggest part is that shift in how you think about things and what you're actually connecting in the cloud. Because it's not just, oh, this server that has all these VMs on it needs to talk to another server in the cluster. It's a completely different kind of way of looking at it now. I got to say, as we've talked here tonight, it's become really clear to me that there is tons and tons and tons that we could just talk about and we could go on for numerous episodes. And luckily,

30:34
Tim and I don't have to. I am very excited to announce that after three years of doing this podcast, the art of network engineering is turning into the art of network engineering podcast network. And we are releasing today a new podcast called cables to clouds. And what you've been listening to is a little bit of a snippet of what you're in store for. So these three here are your new co hosts for this new show. And I'm just really excited to finally get this out there.

31:04
This is a project, a little Skunk Works project we've been working on for the past couple of months. You guys have recorded a bunch of episodes. The A1 team has supported in various ways, be it editing, preparing some sort of digital collateral to help get this thing ready. And man, it's so exciting that this day is finally here. So you can find episode one now in your favorite podcatcher. And I don't want to steal the show, guys. Share a little bit of what you have coming up, Chris.

31:32
Yeah, so just want to start out by saying, you know, we're so grateful to come in under the a1 umbrella man because it's you know, it's obviously where we've been a part of the same community for for a while now and You know that that's really what makes this right is the people and and you guys have done a lot of work and and you've Helped us, you know a ton I mean hell if we didn't have your all's help we probably wouldn't got the shit out till November because you know, we've would have found a lot of the the problems along the way that you help us identify early, but

32:01
Yeah, we're just really like that is kind of the premise, right? We are network professionals. We spend a lot of time in networking, becoming, you know, crafting our expertise around networking, and then we decided we want to transition to cloud. And we understand that's very intimidating, you know, kind of piggybacking on the piece that Alex touched on with the change in mindset, you know, the change in mindset is a piece of it, but also intimidation is a huge factor as well. Like people don't, like I wasn't interested in it.

32:30
because I felt like I was, you know, I was like, I don't want to learn networking on someone else's terms. You know, AWS is, you know, they've built all this software defined networking to do the things that they want. Azure's done the same thing. So with GCP, I was like, I don't want to learn it on their terms. And I'm happy to admit I was very wrong about that. It was kind of like starting fresh. You know, I think in this community, there's a lot of professionals that are just dedicated to lifelong learning. And this one was almost like,

32:58
I got to just like completely pull out a blank sheet of paper and just start all over. And it was fun to learn like the real basic components and get into the more, you know, very complex architectures and things like that. And we would just want to showcase that. And we want to help people that maybe want to transition to the cloud or share their journeys as well. You know, we've got guests coming on that have already done this journey just like us.

33:24
and maybe a lot further on it or maybe just starting and we wanna get their perspective and see how we can help. Tim, I don't know if there's anything else you wanna add there. Yeah, I think that's great. And also we wanna, not only do we wanna help everybody that wants to transition, but we also wanna help the people that don't necessarily wanna transition. So if you're a network engineer, you gotta work in the cloud, but you don't actually want to be a cloud network engineer, we're here for you as well there. We wanna help.

33:53
you know, the same people that want to stay network engineers, but need to be able to speak cloud, you know, to some degree. I think, and we say this multiple times in the episodes that we record, the future is going to be hybrid and the hybrid meaning we're going to have some workloads, you know, some programs, whatever apps that are going to run better on prem, they're going to be 24 seven static workloads that are always on. We're going to have some stuff that we can do kind of more elastic and, and, and fit better in a cloud model.

34:22
And we're going to have a big network, and all these things are going to have to talk. And so we're going to need to bring together the networking piece of it, the cloud piece of it, and that's, I think, where we're going to really shine. Alex, do you have anything you want to add? Yeah. I mean, I just want to call out things that each of you said, really. So like you said, hybrid is the way of the future. So there's a lot of, you still need to know all the normal traditional on-prem networking stuff.

34:50
But you might need to know some of the cloud stuff. And it'll be very helpful to have people that understand what some of those things look like. Like you said, if you're going into one cloud, if you're going into multiple clouds, everything looks a lot different. So that's definitely a big part of it. And then touch on what Chris said about the blank canvas. I mean, this is what gets me real passionate about the cloud is it's fun. Like it's...

35:17
traditional networking, you have all these different options and you really do have to really think a lot about how each protocols are fitting together. But in the public cloud, like cloud networking, there are some constraints that you have to design within, but there's so much freedom and it's so much fun to learn new things. And again, like Chris said, a lot of people in our field are lifelong learners. And man, you could just go on forever.

35:45
in learning cloud networking. There's so much. And the fact that there's, like, again, Chris mentioned earlier, their Aviatrix is in five different clouds, at least. Each one of those has their own different constructs that you need to understand and learn how to piece together. So there's a lot to talk about. There's a lot to think about. There's a lot to design. And that's really, to me, that's the point of what we're doing, too, is we're just talking about all of it and trying to link things together in a way that makes sense and is easily digestible.

36:15
especially for people that are transitioning from much more traditional networking background. Yeah, I mean, it's clear that you guys have a lot of passion about this topic. I mean, you can hear it in the conversation that we're having right now. I've certainly heard it throughout the course of the episodes that I've listened to of your show. You guys have fantastic chemistry. You've already had at least one guest that you've recorded with. I know you have numerous lined up and I won't let any cats out of the bag on that one. I'll let you guys do that. But the conversations are really good and they're...

36:42
They're really now, it's things that are happening right now. And the struggle is real, the solutions are real. So this is just really perfectly timed. And it's going to be a really fun podcast. And in addition to the podcast, and just like our podcast here, you guys have a YouTube channel. And you'll be releasing video versions in parallel with all of the audio versions. Can you give us some sneak peeks on some of the topics you guys plan to discuss?

37:11
Some of the stuff we hit on a little bit on this one, and I don't wanna give away the full table of contents, partially because we haven't written the full table of contents. But the first few episodes, we're really just building that strong foundation, I think, around why do we make this podcast and what kind of foundational principles.

37:39
do you need to know, do you need to think about as we transition to the cloud, what is the stuff, what's the FUD out there, you know, the fear, uncertainty and doubt around making either a transition or just learning more about it. And, you know, and then we've got some stuff, like you said, we've recorded with a guest and we were great guests, we were really excited, especially about the stuff we were talking about with them with. So, I mean, and we've got so many more guests lined up and it's not gonna be.

38:07
some version of, you know, hey, you know, what's your name and what do you do? Like, no, we're tackling like real cloud topics that these, these people are, you know, interested in and involved with and doing. So I think that's really, really useful. Yeah. And for all you nerds out there, we will definitely go deep into some of the topics, a lot of like the cloud native constructs, you know, there's stuff that not all of us know a lot about, you know, Kubernetes networking and service meshes and

38:37
All kinds of cool topics that sort of bleed into the networking realm and in some way, shape or form as you start getting more into cloud technologies, you'll start hearing some other things. So there'll definitely be deep dives and all that fun stuff tying everything together. Yeah, because I mean, the cloud market is not static, right? It's constantly changing. There's new things coming out all the time. So we're going to let the show adapt to that, right? You know, there's...

39:03
There's probably a billion podcasts out there just talking about cloud news and new updates and things like that. So we're going to kind of try to keep it focused on the network professional. And, but you know, that's also going to mean that like, what are the other components in the cloud that you need to know about that are going to affect the way you work and the way you architect things, design things, you know, so we're we're going to keep it very network focused, but you know, it's, we're probably going to broad, you know, keep a broad approach as well.

39:29
So what's nice about this project is it's not just another podcast. You guys are three co-hosts. You're joining the A1 family. And from time to time, you may hear one of them fill in for one of us on our show. And likewise, one of us may help fill in for one of them on their show. So this is just one big happy family. And it's I really look forward to you know, what we get out of this kind of new new venture from from everybody, right? So this is going to be really exciting. So

39:57
You can look forward to Cables to Clouds every other week opposite of the main show. So we'll have a steady stream of content coming from the Art of Network Engineering. It is a separate podcast. So you do have to go find it and subscribe. It will be a separate feed. Unfortunately, our podcast hosting platform does not allow us to do a merged feed. So I can't offer a single feed with both shows in it at this time. We'll try to figure that out for the future.

40:27
But yeah, you can find cables to clouds now anywhere you get your podcasts Spotify Apple Google Pocketcasts and a number of other podcast indicators that they're there We have confirmed the podcast is there and ready for your consumption And again, they're also on YouTube so you can see video versions of other episodes as they get released every Wednesday And I don't know you guys might have some additional content as well for YouTube. Maybe dabble in the

40:56
the free online training if somebody is feeling spirited enough to do some YouTube videos on cloud. I don't know, what do you guys think? Have you bounced any of that around at all? Well, Chris has an OnlyFans channel that he's gonna share. That's one direction to take your content creation. That's paid only though, nothing for free. Yeah, I think it would be cool to do some kind of maybe whiteboarding sessions or a lot of the stuff in cloud is a lot easier to describe when you have a visual.

41:26
to diagrams to look at. So, you know, some of there definitely be times when it will be much more helpful to have like a five, 10 minute supplementary kind of video to go with an episode or something like that. Yeah. Today we talked about XYZ, you know, let's step through that with a whiteboard. I think that's a great idea. Seeing how the sausage is made live, live on TV. I like it. Whiteboarding sessions are always fun.

41:50
Excellent guys. So let's start with your social media handles for yourselves if people want to follow You guys more where can they find you Chris? Yeah, you can find me on Twitter at BGP main I do occasionally blog at the control plane net I'm one of those people that keep saying I'm gonna get back into blogging and then I never fucking do it So let's let's hopefully I'm gonna change that but you do have a few articles up there. You can find excellent Thank you, Chris Tim. Yeah

42:19
Twitter on Twitter at Juan Golbez, J-U-A-N-G-O-L-B-E-Z. And my blog, which I update more often than Chris, but only slightly, is CarpeDMVPN.com. Tim, have I ever told you how much I love that name? No, but I'm glad that you do. You know, I once asked someone when I was looking for my blog name, I was like, hey, what do you think about this? And it was somebody like pretty...

42:47
respected and well in the community and everything like everybody knows him and he was like now it's a terrible name. I was like Oh, well, I appreciate it. No, I mean like I appreciate his input or whatever He was like it's a terrible name because you're tying it to a technology and I was like, alright, that's fair And then I just did what I fucking wanted anyway, so I'm glad I did it Wow. Alright. Thanks Tim. Alex, where can people find you? Yep. I'm on Twitter at bumps in the wire

43:14
plan is to have my blog built out by the time this launches. So I've blogged occasionally in the past, but probably stuck to it even less than Chris. So we'll see where that takes me. Well, remember, we do have the artofnetworkengineering.com. So if you guys don't want to go through the process of setting up your own blog websites, you're welcome to blog there at any time. And we would love to see some cloud-related content on our home page. So if you're looking for that, I can certainly get you access to build some articles there.

43:43
How about the show? Where can people find the show? Yeah, you can find the show. So we have cables2clouds.com. You can use either one, but the primary one should be cables2clouds.com. We're on all socials at the same handle, Cables2Clouds, so we're on Twitter, YouTube. We have a Twitch account, but as you can see, we're kind of spitballing things. We don't know where that's gonna go. Yeah, so primarily Twitter and YouTube is gonna be where you find us and the website as well.

44:11
And probably on the ardenetworkengineering.com, I assume AJ is going to set something up for that. So absolutely. We'll have a show, an entire page dedicated to the show. You can read bios of all the co-hosts. We'll have some snapshots from some episodes that have already been recorded and edited. We'll have lots of good stuff there. So all of those links can be found in the show nuts for this episode. Guys, I am so excited about this. This is, it feels like a huge turning point in the

44:41
I'm really excited to be able to help you guys launch Cable's Two Clouds. Tim, Bertino, you've been really quiet for a while. I feel like we got to let you jump in here. What do you think? Well, you mentioned how A1 has kind of helped bring this show to the forefront. The A1 team, yes, I mainly have just shared gifts and other things along the way, but I'm really excited for this. I mean, the three of you have really been...

45:06
prominent figures in the community, both in the, it's all about the Journey Discord channel, but other platforms. Tim, I know you have been big in router gods and things like that over the years. So I think it's really cool for you three to take this next step and create a whole new voice for the things that you wanna talk about. I'm really excited about it. Thanks, man. Thanks, appreciate that. And those copies of Tim's book I talked about earlier in the episode, we are going to do some giveaways to help.

45:35
promote his book and the new Cables to Cloud podcast. So if you're interested in winning a copy of Tim's book, you can look for that on our website and out on Twitter. We will get that going shortly after this episode releases. As always, we thank all of our listeners for your support of what we do here. If you like what we're doing here, please share the podcast with a fellow network engineer or Cloud engineer. Make sure that you leave a review on Apple Podcast or review us on Spotify as well.

46:04
All of that really, really helps us get the podcast out there. And the Cables to Cloud guys are going to need it. They're just launching. So please go find their podcast. Listen to the episode. Leave them a five star review. Let them know how they're doing. Make sure you head on over to their YouTube channel. Like their videos. Subscribe to the content. Smash that bell icon to get notified of all their future episodes. And we really look forward to what we're going to see coming from them. So you can catch episode two.

46:33
Next week, go subscribe to their podcast and you'll catch episode two next week. Episode one is out now. So as soon as this episode wraps, go subscribe and listen to that. I know you guys are going to love it. Thank you guys so much for joining us this week and we'll see you next time on another episode of the Arts of Network Engineering.

46:53
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 net eng. That's art of NETENG. 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.

47:20
and also a lot more news and info from the networking world. Thanks for listening.