Heavy Networking

Heavy Networking

Heavy Networking is an unabashedly nerdy dive into all things networking. Described by one listener as "verbal white papers," the weekly episodes feature network engineers, industry experts, and vendors sharing useful information to keep your professional knowledge sharp and your career growing. Hosts Ethan Banks & Drew Conry-Murray cut through the marketing spin to explore what works—and what doesn't—in networking today, while keeping an eye on what's ahead for the industry. On air since 2010, Heavy Networking is the flagship show of the Packet Pushers podcast network.

Episodes

HN792: Understanding Agentic AI for Network Operations (Sponsored)

August 15, 2025 • 45 mins
LLMs and AI-powered chatbots are becoming a regular feature of network operations tools and vendor product portfolios. Now the next iteration of AI in network ops and automation is likely to be agentic. On today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by HPE Juniper Networking, we talk about what agentic AI actually means, how AI agents will accomplish... Read more »
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HN791: Should You Build or Buy Your Automation Platform?

August 8, 2025 • 55 mins
Perhaps the biggest question around adopting network automation is whether you should build a solution using open source tools and a lot of coding glue, or buy a network automation platform from a vendor and construct your automation solution on top of that. Either way has tradeoffs. Network engineer Lee Harper joins Heavy Networking to... Read more »
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HN790: From Rule-Based to Goal-Based: Rethinking Autonomous AI Operations (Sponsored)

August 1, 2025 • 57 mins
On Heavy Networking today, AI operations for networking. That is, how do we delegate some amount of responsibility for network operations to artificial intelligence? Cisco is our sponsor, and our guests are Omar Sultan, Director for Product Management of Automation and AI; and Javier Antich, Chief Mad Scientist for AI (yes, that’s his title!). We talk... Read more »
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HN789: How a Global Payments Processor Automates Firewall Changes at Scale

July 25, 2025 • 48 mins
Adyen is a global payments processor whose primary business is providing payment services for merchants, retailers, and venues, as well as online payments. On today’s Heavy Networking we talk about a firewall automation project the company has undertaken. With dozens of change requests coming in every day that need to touch network and host firewalls,... Read more »
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HN788: Behind Megaport’s Network Automation Platform (Sponsored)

July 18, 2025 • 51 mins
We have a network automation discussion for you today from sponsor Megaport. At the AutoCon3 conference earlier this year, Luke Gollan presented on a complex network automation project migrating Megaport’s API-driven software defined network from a legacy VXC overlay to an EVPN framework. This helped improve scalability, but was fraught with practical challenges, not the... Read more »
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HN787: Are We In a Post-SNMP Era?

June 27, 2025 • 58 mins
SNMP is still widely used in today’s networks. But modern telemetry and network observability are bringing changes to network monitoring. Today’s Heavy Networking is a roundtable discussion about alternatives to SNMP and real-world use cases for those alternatives. This episode was inspired by a request from listener Nikolay. He says… While telemetry (gRPC, etc.) is... Read more »
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HN786: From Intent-Based to Autonomous Ops With Cisco Crosswork and Provider Connectivity Assurance (Sponsored)

June 20, 2025 • 49 mins
Service provider networks face a couple of difficult challenges: how to map service level agreements to actual network health and performance, and how to deliver service assurance to customers regardless of what happens on the network. On today’s sponsored Heavy Networking we talk with Cisco Systems about its approach to service assurance, how Cisco is... Read more »
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HN785: How To Take Your First Steps Into Network Automation

June 13, 2025 • 55 mins
There’s an old saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. On today’s show, we talk about taking your first step into network automation with guest Joseph Nicholson. He’s been automating at NTT Data for many years now and has some perspective to share. He’s a network engineer by trade,... Read more »
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HN784: Accelerate Your Network Automation With Gluware Labs and New Ansible Collection (Sponsored)

June 6, 2025 • 59 mins
Network automation is today’s topic with sponsor Gluware. Gluware provides a network automation platform that targets both network engineers and automation builders. On today’s Heavy Networking, we discuss how Gluware supports these two constituencies. We also talk about a recent product announcement, Gluware Labs. Gluware Labs includes a free Community Edition of Gluware software you... Read more »
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HN783: BGP Routing Policy for Enterprise Networkers: Unpacking IRR and RPSL

May 30, 2025 • 54 mins
If you participate in the public Internet by announcing your own netblocks, you should be familiar with Internet Routing Registries (IRRs) and the Routing Policy Specification Language (RPSL). These are tools that help you be a good network citizen. In a world of BGP hijacks and other problems, these tools matter more than ever. We... Read more »
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HN782: Netris Meets Your Network Automation Challenges in AI Data Centers (Sponsored)

May 23, 2025 • 58 mins
Netris is tackling the issue of automating multi-tenancy in an AI data center. Netris has your answer to this challenge, and it’s a solution certified to work with NVIDIA. We’re going to get into the nuts and bolts of Netris network automation with Alex Saroyan, CEO and co-founder of Netris. Along the way, we will... Read more »
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HN781: CCIE Service Provider Free Workbook & Track Update

May 16, 2025 • 59 mins
While studying for the CCIE Service Provider certification, Andrew Ohanian assembled a workbook to help him prepare. It’s packed with lab exercises, and Andrew has turned it into a free Web resource that anyone can access. On today’s Heavy Networking, we talk with Andrew about what’s in the guide, the state of the CCIE SP,... Read more »
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HN780: The Whys and Hows of Automated Network Testing

May 9, 2025 • 63 mins
On today’s Heavy Networking we talk with Dan Wade about testing the network, inspired by Dan’s talk at AutoCon 2: “Step 0: Test the Network.” We discuss why testing is a good idea, and then explore four types of network testing, including unit tests and integration tests. We dig into Yang, RESTCONF, NETCONF and gNMI... Read more »
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HN779: Do We Really Need the Modern Networking Stack?

May 2, 2025 • 55 mins
On today’s Heavy Networking, a roundtable panel considers whether a modern network needs to be built around underlays and overlays. This isn’t just Ethan yelling at clouds. This is a legitimate question pondering the real-world value of an overlay/underlay approach. Is overlay everywhere overkill, or is that the architecture we need to deliver a safe,... Read more »
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HN778: Understanding Model Context Protocol (MCP) with Selector (Sponsored)

April 25, 2025 • 50 mins
Model Context Protocol (MCP) is a very new protocol that provides a standard way to link AI models to a variety of data sources and tools. As the industry heads toward agentic AI–in which an AI agent interacts with disparate applications, data sources, and other agents to achieve a task–MCP provides the protocol glue. On... Read more »
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HN777: Overlay All the Things?

April 18, 2025 • 52 mins
Today’s Heavy Networking is all about overlay technologies, their history, development, and current state, both from engineer and vendor perspectives. We discuss why the industry turns to overlays to solve problems, and look at overlay and segmentation approaches including VXLAN, SRv6, and EVPN. We also drill into the idea that EVPN could become the standard... Read more »
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HN776: Security Platforms: Balancing Efficacy, Ops, and Emerging Threats (Sponsored)

April 11, 2025 • 49 mins
Network security has evolved from stateful perimeter firewalls with maybe some IDS/IPS to a complex stack delivered as numerous unique tools, which often don’t talk to one another and may need to be operated by specialists. In this environment it’s hard to unify a security policy, troubleshoot problems, manage and operate tools, and respond effectively... Read more »
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HN775: How To Train Your Very Own AI-Enabled Slackbot

April 4, 2025 • 63 mins
On today’s Heavy Networking, we’ll discuss building a Slackbot wired to an AI and trained on your own organization’s knowledge. The potential use cases for network operations are fascinating, and today’s guest, Kyler Middleton is here to explain the finer details on how to do it and point us to free resources created so that... Read more »
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HN774: Who Put These OT Risks In My IT Ops? Fortinet Has Answers (Sponsored)

March 28, 2025 • 46 mins
IT and infosec professionals are used to operating and protecting mission-critical infrastructure; servers, databases, load balancers, and so on. But what about valves that control the flow of gas or oil in a refinery? Temperature and vibration sensors that monitor industrial manufacturing processes? If you’re thinking “That’s not my problem” think again. There’s a whole... Read more »
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HN773: Optimizing Ethernet for AI – An Update On the Ultra Ethernet Consortium

March 21, 2025 • 82 mins
The Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) is an industry body that aims to optimize Ethernet for AI and HPC use cases. On today’s Heavy Networking we get an overview of the UEC and an update on its efforts. We’re joined by J Metz and Rip Sohan, both heavily involved with the UEC. We discuss the consortium’s... Read more »
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