Heavy Networking
Packet Pushers
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
Mentioned books
Sep 12, 2025 • 54min
HN796: The Why and How of Making Your Infrastructure Quantum-Safe (Sponsored)
Your production IT operations are almost certainly using cryptography libraries that are not quantum-safe, and the time to begin planning a cryptography overhaul is now. But this is likely to be a daunting project because it touches everything: clients, servers, apps, network devices, middleboxes, and so on. Daunting, but doable. We talk with Richu Channakeshava, Principal... Read more »
Sep 5, 2025 • 58min
HN795: Adventures In Latency
Monitoring and troubleshooting latency can be tricky. If it’s in the network, was it the IP stack? A NIC? A switch buffer? A middlebox somewhere on the WAN? If it’s the application, can you, the network engineer, bring receipts to the app team? And what if you need to build and operate a network that’s... Read more »
Aug 29, 2025 • 1h 4min
HN794: How the Bundle Protocol Enables Interplanetary Networking
How might we get network traffic from Earth to a lunar base? Or Mars? Or to spaceships carrying astronauts or probes exploring space? And how do we get it back? The problem, among other things, is latency. The answer isn’t TCP/IP. The answer is…complicated. On today’s Heavy Networking we explore the challenges of getting packets... Read more »
7 snips
Aug 22, 2025 • 1h 35min
HN793: A Deep Dive Into High-Performance Switch Memory
LJ Wobker, a Principal Engineer at Cisco with expertise in high-performance memory, shares insights on the intricacies of switch memory. He discusses the differences between TCAM, SRAM, DRAM, and HBM, and the trade-offs in managing these resources for networking. The conversation covers how Ethernet frames are processed, the challenges of implementing TCAM technology, and the evolution of routing practices. Wobker emphasizes the need for strategic memory management to optimize network performance and the value of community engagement in navigating these complexities.
Aug 15, 2025 • 46min
HN792: Understanding Agentic AI for Network Operations (Sponsored)
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 »
Aug 8, 2025 • 56min
HN791: Should You Build or Buy Your Automation Platform?
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 »
Aug 1, 2025 • 58min
HN790: From Rule-Based to Goal-Based: Rethinking Autonomous AI Operations (Sponsored)
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 »
Jul 25, 2025 • 48min
HN789: How a Global Payments Processor Automates Firewall Changes at Scale
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 »
Jul 18, 2025 • 52min
HN788: Behind Megaport’s Network Automation Platform (Sponsored)
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 »
Jun 27, 2025 • 58min
HN787: Are We In a Post-SNMP Era?
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 »
