HN843: From Network Engineer to Network Architect with Kevin Nanns

Today, Drew and Ethan cover the brand new Certified Kubernetes Network Engineer program with Nico Vibert. Nico helped create this certification, and is writing a study guide for the program to be published by O’Reilly in 2027. They discuss what the CKNE covers, who should take it, how to prepare, and how it can advance... Read more »

Amazon AWS is not new to the high-bandwidth, elephant flow-oriented data center traffic pattern requirements of AI. In this sponsored episode from AWS, Distinguished Engineer and Network Core VP JR Rivers and Senior Principal Networking Engineer Stephen Callaghan join Ethan and Drew to discuss running AI workloads on AWS. Together they break down why inference... Read more »

Packet Pushers has been acquired by Meter. On this special Heavy Networking episode, guest host Scott Robohn talks with Ethan Banks and Anil Varanasi, CEO of Meter, about the acquisition. Ethan and Anil explain how this relationship will work (including full editorial independence for Packet Pushers), why it was the best move for Packet Pushers,... Read more »

John Capobianco returns to Heavy Networking to discuss his latest open source project, NetClaw. NetClaw is an automation assistant for network engineers that leverages MCP and has a robust security architecture to ensure production safety. John is here to explain why and how he built NetClaw, and ways network engineers can use it in their... Read more »

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 »

Q-Day signals the public emergence of a cryptographically relevant quantum computer that can break public key encryption. The date of Q-Day is unknown but the tech industry is making preparations now. Bill Dockery joins Drew and guest host Scott Robohn to dig into Post Quantum Cryptography (PQC), what network engineers need to know to test... Read more »