The Fat Pipe - Most Popular Packet Pushers Pods

Certificates are the socks of IT—everyone needs them, and you always lose track of a few. On today’s show we dive into the ACME protocol, an IETF standard to help automate how a domain owner gets a domain validation certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA). Our guest, Ed Harmoush, a former network engineer with AWS... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with a critical vulnerability in Cisco’s Unified Contact Center Express. On the news front it’s a Cisco triple play: the company brings AI to professional services and tech support with Cisco IQ, debuts converged infrastructure for the AI edge, and launches a new cert geared for running AI data... Read more »

How do you architect a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) to provide critical security services to millions of endpoints distributed across the planet? How do you build such a service for scale, performance, and resiliency? One option is to build your own PoPs or use colocation facilities, run your own infrastructure stack, and connect everything... Read more »

What does network testing and validation really mean? How do testing and validation fit within an automation workflow? Is it possible to run meaningful tests without coding skills? Dan Wade from BlueAlly answers these questions and offers practical insights into building trust in automation through test environments, using AI for ideation and problem-solving, and personal... Read more »

MACsec is a protocol for encrypting Ethernet frames on a local (though not always local) network. Ethan Banks and Holly Metlitzky have an ELI5 (explain like I’m 5) discussion as to what exactly is MACsec and how it differs from IPsec. They talk about when and whether you need to implement MACsec with all the... Read more »

If you think managing Kubernetes clusters is hard, what about managing Kubernetes clusters across three different public clouds? We dive into the challenges that arises from running multi-cloud Kubernetes workloads. These challenges include workload identity, DNS query resolutions, and security. Here to help us navigate this complexity and offer possible solutions is Goutam Tadi, Staff... Read more »

Did you know college students are snooping on satellite transmissions? On today’s news roundup we discuss new research in which university investigators use off-the-shelf equipment to intercept traffic from geostationary satellites and discover that a lot of it is unencrypted. We also dig into the credential hygiene lessons we can learn from a corpus of... Read more »

Cisco Workflows is a new platform that makes network automation easier, smarter, and safer. On today’s episode, sponsored by Cisco, we get introduced to Cisco Workflows by Stephen Orr, Distinguished Solutions Engineer; and Reid Butler, Director of Product Management. They break down how Workflows helps you ditch repetitive tasks, roll out changes faster, and plug... Read more »

Take a Network Break! We start with some educational content on Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, and sound the alarm about a sandbox escape affecting the Firefox browser. On the news front, a DNS issue triggers a major Azure outage that affected numerous services and caused problems around the globe, Palo Alto Networks announces enhancements to... Read more »

On today’s show, sponsored by Itential, we talk about automation in the real world. Guest Jesse Ford is an automation architect at Itential. We talk about his career journey, how he got into network automation, how he decides which is the best tool for a job, and why tool diversity isn’t the same as chaos.... Read more »