

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

Nov 11, 2022 • 45min
Heavy Networking 655: On-Prem VPC Networking With Netris (Sponsored)
Heavy Networking welcomes sponsor Netris to the show with a special episode for you network nerds who are really getting into automation, infrastructure as code, pipelines, and so on. Netris is all about bringing that public cloud VPC experience to the network you’ve already got. Imagine being able to consume your existing network with APIs and being able to stand up VLANs, VXLANs, elastic load balancers, firewalls, Internet gateways, and more the same way you do in the cloud, but on premises.

Nov 4, 2022 • 58min
Heavy Networking 654: What’s Up With DPUs?
Today on Heavy Networking we have a round-table discussion about Data Processing Units (DPUs). These devices let you bring networking, security, and storage capabilities closer to server workloads without burdening server CPUs. Guests Pete Lumbis and Aaron Glenn help us dissect DPUs, identify use cases, discuss adoption and operational challenges, and more.

Oct 28, 2022 • 1h 3min
Heavy Networking 653: Design, Deploy, And Operate With Nokia Data Center Fabric Solution (Sponsored)
Today’s Heavy Networking, sponsored by Nokia, dives into Nokia's fabric-based approach to data center automation and operations. That approach includes its SR Linux network OS, its Fabric Services System intent-based platform, its NetOps Development Kit, or NDK, and how all this ties together to address your operational life cycle across Day zero, Day 1, Day Two, and beyond.

Oct 21, 2022 • 1h 12min
Heavy Networking 652: Why Networkers Should Want Routing Protocols Written In Rustlang
On today’s Heavy Networking episode, I talk with Nick Carter about Flock Networks, his routing protocol stack startup, as well as Nick’s love of the Rust programming language. As a network engineer, maybe you don’t think you care about Rust. Nick’s here to explain why the discerning network engineer might prefer their routing daemons to have been written in Rust. We also talk about the pleasures and travails of startup life.

Oct 14, 2022 • 47min
Heavy Networking 651: How Juniper Networks’ SMO Enables Network Slicing (Sponsored)
As carriers and service providers look to embrace disaggregated infrastructure and software, and drive new business through technologies such as network slicing, it’s critical to have management and orchestration capabilities to coordinate hardware and software resources in the RAN, the transport layer, and the network core. On today's sponsored Heavy Networking, sponsored by Juniper, we dive into Juniper's Service Management and Orchestration (SMO) platform, which is designed to provision, manage and monetize custom network services on demand.

Oct 7, 2022 • 1h 11min
Heavy Networking 650: Whether And How To Adopt Whitebox Switches
On today’s Heavy Networking podcast, Kevin Myers joins us for a whitebox conversation. Kevin helps Internet Service Providers build their networks, and has noticed increased adoption of whitebox switches. Why? Are the problems whitebox solves for these ISPs the same you might have at your company? Should you consider whitebox instead of Cisco, Juniper, or Arista? Maybe…and maybe not.

Sep 30, 2022 • 49min
Heavy Networking 649: Cisco NSO 6.0 Boosts Performance, Improves Usability (Sponsored)
On today’s sponsored Heavy Networking we dive into new features of Cisco’s Network Services Orchestrator, or NSO. NSO is a network orchestration platform for large enterprises and service providers that offers multi-vendor automation, configuration management, service creation, ongoing monitoring and upgrades, and more.

Sep 23, 2022 • 1h 2min
Heavy Networking 648: Using Zero Knowledge Middleboxes To Enforce Policy On Encrypted Traffic
Encrypted traffic poses a problem for enterprise policy enforcement. On today's Heavy Networking, we explore the notion of zero knowledge middleboxes, which use a variety of techniques to allow firewalls or other middleboxes to enforce policy without the need for decryption. Our guest is Dr. Paul Grubbs, whose research into zero knowledge middleboxes prompted this episode.

Sep 16, 2022 • 43min
Heavy Networking 647: Fortinet’s ZTNA Differentiation Starts With The OS (Sponsored)
A full zero trust architecture goes up and down the stack, bringing in policy and enforcement strategies from the application layer, all the way down into the network. On today's Heavy Networking podcast we discuss zero trust network access, or ZTNA, with sponsor Fortinet. ZTNA is but one part of a robust zero trust architecture, but what a crucial component it is. Alex Samonte, Director of Technical Architecture, joins us to get into nerdy specifics about Fortinet’s ZTNA.

Sep 9, 2022 • 49min
Heavy Networking 646: Networking For Spacefaring Rockets
Today on Heavy Networking, aerospace networking. We talk with Lexie Cooper, who works for Blue Origin as an Avionics Integration Engineer. That’s right. Lexie does networking for rockets. We talk about the challenges of building networks for spacefaring vehicles, differences between aerospace and the typical enterprise, continuous learning, the pros and cons of building a social media presence, and more.