HN827: When Buffers Attack: Understanding Buffers to Better Diagnose Network Weirdness

Many network engineers don’t trust AI, in part because the tech is non-deterministic and can behave in unanticipated ways. Simultaneously, the networking industry is baking AI functions deeply into operations, which has proven useful, but engineers still have their misgivings. Are these misgivings still warranted, given just how far we have advanced from chatbots and... Read more »

In this sponsored episode, Alex La Fazia and Daniel Kaczmarczyk of Meter explain how they built an internal tool to automate network topology creation, drastically reducing design time from hundreds of hours to seconds. They share how they relied on a deterministic rules engine to ensure accurate, repeatable network configurations. They also discuss leveraging AI... Read more »

Bart Dorlandt discusses the practical applications and architecture of the BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) for service providers. Bart has developed a BMP application to help his customers monitor BGP. He talks about how he handles data collection, why it’s important to capture pre- and post-policy filtering, how he deals with excessive prefix volumes, future plans... Read more »

Today’s show puts the “heavy” in Heavy Networking with a discussion about Multipath Reliable Connection (MRC). MRC is about getting an even distribution of RDMA traffic across equal cost multipath links in massive data centers, and doing so over plain old lossy Ethernet. Ethan, Drew, and guests discuss how packet spraying, resilience to link and... Read more »

Drew and Ethan talk with Kevin Nanns about his journey from network engineer to network architect. Kevin shares his experience grappling with the shift in responsibilities, increased pressure, and communication and management challenges associated with his new role. They also discuss his content creation work on TikTok and his strategies for translating complex technical concepts... Read more »