Ep 18 - Talking ONUG with Nick Lippis

Chris Miles: 0:00

Welcome to the Cables to Clouds podcast. Cloud adoption is on the rise and many network infrastructure professionals are being asked to adopt a hybrid approach as individuals who have already started this journey. We would like to empower those professionals with the tools and the knowledge to bridge the gap.

Alex Perkins: 0:29

Hello and welcome back to the Cables to Clouds podcast. Today we are talking about Onug with a special guest, nick Lippis. But before we get to that, we're going to cover some bi-weekly cloud news for you guys, so let's jump right in. There was actually a pretty big announcement from Azure about removing the default outbound access for VMs. What do you guys think about this? Tim, you got any thoughts?

Tim McConnaughy: 0:57

This is one of those things where you talk about all the things that are different about the clouds, like between the clouds, and this was always one that Azure could hold up as like. This is a very Azure thing.

Alex Perkins: 1:08

This is like the first one, the first one people point out.

Chris Miles: 1:11

Internet access is just implied, you don't have to do anything. Yeah, it just works. I think it's overdue.

Tim McConnaughy: 1:17

Honestly, it's overdue, right, it needed to happen, but it's not two years. I mean they're not doing it for two years. And then they say something about being targeted for new customers, like legacy customers might keep it longer, or something like that. I'm not sure.

Alex Perkins: 1:32

Yeah, I don't know if I saw that, but I do think the two years thing is really good. I think some other providers might have pushed that way quicker than two years, so I'm happy to see them give people more time.

Tim McConnaughy: 1:45

I mean, there's people still out there running Windows 98.

Chris Miles: 1:47

I mean, I feel like you got to give plenty of notice when it's basically saying like hey, this thing that used to be free, we're going to start. You have to use these other paid services to enable that, right? Because, like Nat Gateway, it's a service you're paying by the hour and by data transfer. So that could be pretty crippling for some customers, depending on how they're using this free internet access today, right?

Tim McConnaughy: 2:11

So yeah, it's a big architecture change too. Not much to say beyond that. It's a big change for Azure. Two years should give everybody time to do something about it, but everybody's got to do something about it.

Alex Perkins: 2:23

All right, we have the now mandatory AI topics that we have to cover every episode, so we got two articles here, right? So data centers aren't ready for AI. I guess we'll just talk about them separately. So to me, this headline's kind of obvious, right? We know that people are not ready to have AI workloads and I think there's a big scramble here going on everywhere. Chris, what do you think?

Chris Miles: 2:50

Yeah, I mean, I think it just kind of plays back to, I mean, we've had episodes already talking about these things, right, talking with, like our episode with Peter Jones and even Will Collins right, the way these things are being consumed is changing and like the network has to keep up. Right, because now, like these GPUs are operating at these rates that you know, the network oversubscription is finally being put to the test. I feel like, right, like these new very data intensive workloads. So, yeah, I think this just speaks to something that we've seen coming. So it's good to see, you know, some backing for the things that we've been talking about. But, yeah, it's so predictable at this point, right.

Tim McConnaughy: 3:33

Yeah, I want to see who's going to win the GPU fight. Will it be the AI the people building AI workloads or will it be the crypto bros?

Chris Miles: 3:41

I think they've already lost man. Yeah, yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 3:46

It's exactly about getting a problem that already existed right. We've talked several times about the silicon shortages and this is just leading straight up like right into it even more yeah.

Chris Miles: 3:57

Not to mention this. One calls out like a lot of the elements about like power and cooling right and then like the you know power and cooling, yeah Like because that's you got to be able to power all this shit, right. So that's that's, I think, the last thing that people really worried about when we're talking about this stuff.

Alex Perkins: 4:14

Yeah, so that Accenture basically announced their full year revenue for generative AI coming to about 300 million and basically this article just talks about how they really want a bigger piece of this six. This estimated $6.4 billion total per year, which is just crazy. I know, tim, you had some thoughts here.

Tim McConnaughy: 4:36

Go ahead, so okay. So two things. One, how were we like, how was Accenture monetizing generative AI to the tune of $300 million in the first place? Yes, that's the first question I have. The other one is where do we come up with this number? You said $6.8 billion. Like who? 6.4 billion?

Alex Perkins: 4:56

or four, sorry yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 4:58

But I mean, where did that number come from? Where's the math on this? Did we go to chat GPT and ask it how much money it's worth, like I don't understand where this number come from.

Chris Miles: 5:06

Oh, I don't know. I'm worth 6.4 billion.

Alex Perkins: 5:09

Yeah, right, if anyone has insight into this, please reach out, because we'd love to have you guys on to talk about where all this stuff is coming from.

Tim McConnaughy: 5:17

Yeah, definitely. I mean cool, Good for them. I mean, if they're getting the money, I mean dude, it's a gold rush right Like this is exploded as such a gold rush so quickly, even faster than cloud, I think it's just a logarithmic explosion. At this point, every time there's a new technological advancement, like it's a logarithmic expansion into it, it's just so hard to avoid, right?

Chris Miles: 5:39

I mean, it's definitely the start of a paradigm shift. I feel like, right, things are changing. There's been a lot of trends and things that have fizzled out over the last few years, but I don't know. I mean, I'm happy to be wrong, but this one feels like it's sticking right. This one feels real.

Tim McConnaughy: 5:56

It's so new and there's such a ceiling yet that nobody actually it's almost like and it's not right but I'm going to sound like the prepper and the group again because I'm harping on that thing but the ceiling, it almost feels like a singularity style ceiling where we literally cannot see beyond. What does the end of this road look like?

Alex Perkins: 6:19

All right, we now have the beginning of a competitor to Starlink, it seems. Amazon's Project Kuiper launched their first two prototype satellites. This is pretty cool. One thing that Chris and I were talking about earlier is it looks like Kuiper satellites are actually lower in orbit than Starlink's, which is just, I don't know, an interesting fact. For some reason that stuck out to me. You guys got any thoughts on this one?

Chris Miles: 6:45

No, yeah, it's really cool. Don't have much to say about it just yet. Obviously, it's a very new thing, right? This is like the proto flight, is that what they're calling it? Yeah, but the two satellites that they launched? Right and yeah they're two prototypes. They're sitting lower than Starlink, so all I can tell you is the latency is probably less. Maybe, who knows?

Alex Perkins: 7:10

30 mile difference.

Tim McConnaughy: 7:11

yeah, it's interesting because, well, amazon has always been a really early adopter of transport technologies. Right, they're 5G. They link straight into 5G with the Sightlink. As soon as it S5G was basically ratified as a standard, they're already out there building shit, right. So this seems like a natural evolution of that same strategy. And we don't have it on the. I don't think we have it on the news, but we probably should have, because I saw the. I didn't think about it before, just now, because while Amazon is muscling in on Starlink, we've got Tesla talking about muscling in on AI, like building their own AI stuff. I saw an article on that earlier today, so it's going to be funny to see these guys compete.

Alex Perkins: 8:00

Yeah, lots of interesting things happening. All right, this is a pretty interesting report. So there was a report on the experience of women participating in the IETF or the Internet Engineering Task Force. I've seen a few discussions on this on TwitterX, but it doesn't seem to be getting a whole lot of traction. But there are definitely some polarizing opinions out there about the IETF. I'll say that.

Chris Miles: 8:26

Yeah, color me surprised. A very longstanding group of mostly old white men aren't that welcoming to women into their clicky organization right, yeah, what it says women and women are less than 10% of the IETF right.

Alex Perkins: 8:44

Yeah, yeah, I think they said right around 10%.

Tim McConnaughy: 8:48

I'll say I'm amazed it's that high.

Alex Perkins: 8:50

Yeah, I was actually surprised it was that high, but in a good way, I guess, have you ever tried to join any of the mailing lists or anything, because I saw Pete Lumbis talking about this and his experience pretty much mirrored mine, which was if you don't already? Know someone, it's like you're just sitting there reading emails.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:10

Dude, it is a popularity contest and that's all right. The IETF has a long history and there's a lot of really big names whenever you read the RFCs and all of this right. But yeah, it's very clickish. My understanding is that it's always been very clickish. It's very much a popularity contest type of thing. It's everybody kind of arguing to get their names on the RFCs. It's exactly pretty much what you expect, right? And so this surprise, or rather this report, is in no way surprising. I really need my shock Pikachu face for this one.

Chris Miles: 9:44

Yeah, I mean I think they closed this one out saying that there's this commitment from the IETF to diversity, inclusivity, right, and they're saying that they hope to take some feedback from this report to actually change things. Whether or not that's going to happen, who fucking knows.

Tim McConnaughy: 10:04

I hope they do, I truly. I think the IETF is a force for good. So I know I just like pretty much tore them all apart and hopefully they'll forgive me for it, but I mean it kind of needed to be said to be fair, to be fair. But I do actually hope that for once somebody will actually take the feedback and do something good with it.

Alex Perkins: 10:20

Well, and it's like I always compare it to, you know, if you look at like the compute kind of field, where they have like the Linux foundation and they have like just giant standards bodies, much more agile, so many more projects going on, so much more support, like I wish that the IETF was more like that personally. But all right, cloud regulation issues. So we know there is this has been coming for a long time right, people are going to start kind of trying to regulate more of the clouds, especially like these hyper scalars that are just getting too big, and this article, basically, is just talking about the mess that this is going to cause and like all the issues that are going to come along with any kind of regulation being put here.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:05

Yeah, but again, this is another one where I feel like it's probably overdue to some degree. I mean, people always say like okay, regulation stymies innovation right. Innovation. You can't innovate because we're regulated, but, like a lot of times, the innovate, you know, some of that innovation that comes as a result of no regulation is like the kind that you really want some regulation to take care of. So I'm curious to see which way this one goes, which side this falls, this domino falls.

Alex Perkins: 11:35

And then, to wrap it up, we got so CSPs are starting to provide their own training programs. This is actually very interesting to watch. We got links for AWS and OCI. They basically launched. They're two separate things but, as I was pointed out too earlier, they actually both cost the same, so they're right around like $7,500 a year. These are I don't know. These are interesting. There's a lot of weird numbers in these reports and it'll be fun to watch to see how many people actually actually attend these things. I think.

Chris Miles: 12:04

Yeah, the OCI one looks. I mean, it looks cool, like it looks very lab intensive, like it's a whole labbing kind of platform that they're offering. I'm confused about the pricing. Yeah, it's like it's, there's this Me too, Kind of it's like.

Chris Miles: 12:22

Even if I look at the pricing package, I'm not fully getting which one you would want to have for you know this, this lab package, because there's, you know, different price points, different names of things. So that could be a little bit more clear cut, I guess. But yeah, it's, it's. I don't know, man. It's also weird to hear what the CSPs think are cost effective in this, in this realm, right, if you're, if you're not, a person that's established and has a pretty, you know, longstanding career in technology, I don't know how you're affording this out of pocket. What?

Chris Miles: 12:57

what they're not some type of payment plan type shit, but then looks like, I don't know, it doesn't seem, it doesn't seem quite attainable for a lot of people.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:06

It's not. It's not. It's not aimed at, like, a person trying to learn and get a job in the cloud industry, the same way that Cisco U is not really targeted at somebody trying to get their CCNA right Like this is really meant.

Alex Perkins: 13:21

Yeah, for these companies. Is the pay for it Right? This is meant for the VARs.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:24

This is meant for the enterprises. This is not meant for somebody to open up their checkbook and go stroke a check and get access to this stuff right and I'd have to look into this more.

Alex Perkins: 13:34

But I when I just kind of honestly I just kind of skimmed through the AWS one, but it seemed very entry level anyway. So it's like For that money.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:42

For that kind of money. Yeah, yeah.

Alex Perkins: 13:45

Like and they include two vouchers, but they're like for like basic level certs, Like.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:49

CCP or something. Yeah, yeah, it's really weird.

Alex Perkins: 13:52

So I don't know. It's something to see. I'm sure it'll change over time and we'll get more details as it gets closer.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:57

Well, and what are they going to do with, not so much the I hesitate to say programs because like, for example, look at Azure. Azure is the outman out in this one, you know not not outstanding GCP, which also has some kind of a. I haven't done the GCP thing, but Azure has a more or less free training track.

Alex Perkins: 14:13

Yeah, yeah, they do, yeah, and it's actually not bad.

Tim McConnaughy: 14:16

Right, it's got labs and stuff in it too, right, I mean? But even AWS and I don't know about OCI, because I never, you know candidly, I never tried but ABS had at least a good amount of material available that was for free. Are they going to roll that away, or I'm curious?

Chris Miles: 14:30

Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in skills builder is what it was called a skill builder.

Nick Lippis: 14:33

That's the one. Maybe a skills builder.

Chris Miles: 14:35

Yeah, some of it's free. But yeah, I remember I've gone back to like, look at some courses that I've seen before and like, oh, I remember that course being good, I'm going to go back and watch this section. And then it's like either gone or now it's a paid thing. So yeah, it seems like there's like quite a bit of flux there, which is which is kind of weird.

Tim McConnaughy: 14:53

I'm not surprised. I mean, like I said, cisco Juniper, like, like all the original, like the OG network. People have been doing this type of setup for a while, although Cisco U is kind of a newer thing, right. But like, yeah, the general idea of some kind of paid training, it was probably it couldn't last forever to pull people in. They're going to try to monetize it now.

Alex Perkins: 15:12

All right, so that's going to wrap up our bi-weekly cloud news section so we can dive into our episode, which again is we're talking about O-Nug with guest Nick Lippis. You guys have any thoughts on this episode before we dive in? Chris?

Chris Miles: 15:28

Yeah, I mean this was fun. I mean I've been a follower of O-Nug for several years, right and it's. It's. It was really good to get. I feel like Nick, he's seen a lot, you know, being a co-chair of O-Nug, right, and there's in the we kind of give this take on the state of cloud networking, which is obviously very relevant to us. But I think a lot of these points that were made in here just kind of speak to the adaptiveness of network engineers. They're mostly told how to do things or, you know, given the worst tools and the tool belt to to implement these, you know, these enterprise grade things. And he also talks about how there was like a need for design patterns that CSPs just won't really cooperate with. So there's, you know, this idea of maybe standards coming in place to help with that. But I don't, I don't know if we'll see that come to fruition. But yeah, it was a really interesting conversation. I enjoyed it quite a bit.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:19

Yeah, I mean I hesitate to just say ditto on that one because it's pretty close to what I was thinking as well. But yeah, I mean Nick's Nick comes from a networking background, we're from networking background, so it was nice to kind of commiserate and talk about that shared background, but also kind of how O-Nug got started and then the transition itself from traditional network engineering to cloud network engineering and basically the skills gaps and how network engineers need to need to fold that in. So that was that was a good conversation.

Alex Perkins: 16:48

Yep agreed on all points and I got a call out. I loved how he a lot of the talk was around combining network insecurity, which I think we all agree with, so it was really cool to just see that he got that from the industry as well. So, yeah, it's a great episode. Hope you guys enjoy.

Tim McConnaughy: 17:07

All right and welcome back to Cables to Clouds. I am your host this week, Tim, and with me, as always, are my beautiful co-hosts Alex Perkins and Chris Miles, and we are talking with Nick Lippis, who is the co-founder and co-chair of Onug. Nick, it's great to have you with us Awesome.

Nick Lippis: 17:27

Great to be here. Love the Cables to Clouds podcast and actually what you guys talk about and what you do for the industry. So happy to be here.

Tim McConnaughy: 17:37

That's awesome. I'm glad to hear it. Ok, so before we get into some of the topics that we wanted to talk about together, actually, I would love to start off with what is Onug? How did Onug start? And you, as a co-founder, of course, I assume have lots of insight into this, so I'd love to hear the story.

Nick Lippis: 17:56

Yeah, well, onug was started actually about in 2012 timeframe. It was the other co-founder, the gentleman named Ernest Leffner, and Ernest was working at Fidelity at the time and this was at the time when there was a lot of talk about white box networking and open networking in the market and how it might change the building patterns, about how we built that networks before, and so, anyway, I started Ernest at this conference and he was like there are so many other large consumers like me who are architects and run these networks that we don't have a place to gather and to kind of just talk with each other about what works, what doesn't work, what problems that you might be having, what's really successful. So he's like, why don't we put together a meeting and we can see if there's interest in doing that? So that's really how Onug started, and so Ernest hosted at Fidelity. So the first one was at Fidelity in February in Boston and we had a good timing on that. But we were lucky in those snowstorms and we were surprised. We had about 140 people show up and we invited 10 companies and we really had everything separated. We wanted to have consumers talking with each other and then large breaks like a two-hour break where we would actually interact with the vendor community.

Nick Lippis: 19:32

And right after that we realized, because of the input that we were getting, was that OK, no, we want to do this. And so Citigroup wanted to be on the board and JP Morgan wanted to be on the board. Goldman joined at that time. Credit Suisse jumped in at that time.

Nick Lippis: 19:50

So it's like all of the large financials kind of realized that, yeah, this is a value, we can learn a lot from each other and also we can disaggregate the vendor speak that we're getting, because there's a lot of discussion in the vendor community and there's nothing wrong with this. But it's like they might say, hey, your competitor is doing this with us and you should too, and maybe they are and maybe they're not. So you really had to like this was a way to kind of cut through all that and to really get a perspective as to what's really happening in the marketplace. So, anyway, that really was the birth of Onug, and then the next one, jp Morgan hosted us in their facility in Park Avenue, and then it was Citigroup, and then Credit Suisse, then Columbia University, then NYU, and then we grew too big. We couldn't go into any facility that was owned by a corporation, we had to go to a third party facility.

Chris Miles: 20:52

So I think that's the end.

Nick Lippis: 20:54

Yeah, no, it was good. It was a little scary at the time, but now we're kind of used to it. And that's the story of how it all started. And then the thing that there was one meeting that we had it was at UBS, ubs's boardroom. So we got to use their boardroom and we were talking about, ok, well, what do we want? We were planning for like the next meeting, right, what are the topics? And so we were like, ok, well, somebody brought up OK, well, ok, we want to really embrace openness. So they said, ok, what about OpenFlow and what about OpenStack? And they all looked around the room. It was like there's no frigging way we're going to implement any of that shit. Right, it's so true. None of that.

Tim McConnaughy: 21:39

Amazing science project. Right, Amazing science project. None of it was enterprise ready.

Nick Lippis: 21:45

At all and also like just like there was no use cases. So that was like the first meeting where it was like OK, you know, we're not going to talk at all about any of this stuff that the Vendor community has been really kind of pushing everybody towards. They then they started kind of focusing on things that were really important to them and at that time it was trying to get away from almost like the name of this podcast, getting away from kind of cables or hardware infrastructure into more software, you know. And so then it was around virtualization. It was like you know soft bridges and soft routers, you know, and like just the whole virtualization. You know part, and then how can we move down that road? And then that's really where you know kind of only started to really focus on just like you know it's the needs of the community that kind of drove the agenda.

Alex Perkins: 22:39

Did you guys always have, is it? You have two, two conferences per year, right? Has it always been like that?

Nick Lippis: 22:45

Yeah, actually, yeah, it looks like we. Actually this is our coming up in fall and another couple of weeks and we're going to be in Manhattan. That's our 24th, you know, and so we've been doing two. A year before the pandemic, we were doing three, we were going to London and so yeah, we did that twice and they were actually really successful, but we haven't gone back.

Nick Lippis: 23:06

So that was like crazy. Actually. So in 2019, so it's Halloween, so we have a really great on it. Fall is like our biggest one, you know. It's like we thought, ok, we cross the chasm and this is about to really explode. Then we get this. You know, I get this text. Oh, I forget Chris's last name. He's really big into containers, you know, a member of the community for for a long time Then, anyway, so he lives in London and he, you know, was really trying to get us, you know, to come to London. Bank of America was hosting us. So we, we, we got this facility and then I get a text on Halloween nights. It was supposed to be there December 15th. I get a text on Halloween night saying, hey, it looks like the facility just went into bankruptcy. You know there's a big red sign on the floor that basically they were supposed to have a meet up.

Nick Lippis: 23:57

there is like this facility is into, like receivership you know, he says me a picture, text me, and we're like you know. So, anyways, the bottom line is that we had a scurry around and find a new facility in roughly about six weeks, and so we did, we got, we got it all sorted out. But that was like the start of like, oh my God, like okay, great, we got that in. So we got that kicking the head in London and then COVID happens, you know, and so we're hoping that, like I think we're back this year to like that trajectory that we were on right before the pandemic, you know so when did?

Tim McConnaughy: 24:33

when did you do the? I guess I could probably go look this up, but I'm curious when do you? First of all, when did you do the one in London? Like what time of the year? Because, like spring and fall, was that a summer or is that a winter, winter?

Nick Lippis: 24:45

December 15th. We always we love London during the holidays.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:49

Okay, just make it true.

Nick Lippis: 24:50

Yeah, like if you, if you've ever been, you know it's like I don't think New York and London seem to be like the best places to be. You know, during the holiday season, everyone's party in. It's a great place to be. Decorations roll up, you know.

Tim McConnaughy: 25:03

And the follow up I had for that, because obviously you already mentioned that it was originally going to be the winner. I guess what I meant to ask was do you, when you go back to doing it, like the next time you do it, are you going to aim for to keep it on that same winner rotation or you take? I don't know if I've never been to London in the summer, maybe it's terrible, I have no idea.

Nick Lippis: 25:18

Yeah, it's hot and you know, yeah, I don't know Like there are no plans in 2024 to go back to London. We have we did add a new board member from London, from HSBC, and we have a couple of board members James Walker, he used to be a Bank of America. Now he's over at IBM. He's in London. He actually hosted us at Bank of America in London once. But anyway, there's a draw to go back. You know that I'm not sure we're ready yet to go back. You know, maybe 2025. Yeah, we get a lot of inquiry to get back, to get back into the European market. The really good thing is that, like once we did the once the pandemic came, actually the attendance and only a new increase by a factor of four because it was virtual and we now yeah sure people all over the world you know now, so that the brand got really expanded during that timeframe, which actually is no one anticipated it, but actually it's a nice thing.

Tim McConnaughy: 26:13

It's a lot of conferences around the time of COVID, like everybody was predicting like the whole conference scene was going to just like dry up and disappear because of because of COVID. But no, it actually went the exact opposite direction, didn't it? I mean, now you don't get the same networking and by networking I'm talking about people networking right you don't get that kind of experience. That's kind of the big drawback, because two fully conferences that really is the one of the biggest things you get out of a conference is the ability to network with people. But yeah, from a from an attendance and engagement perspective, yeah, it's kind of what the opposite direction went. It grew during the pandemic.

Alex Perkins: 26:46

Did you guys have a virtual platform before all the lockdowns and everything happened, or was that built after COVID?

Nick Lippis: 26:52

No, it was after COVID. Like no conference organizer wanted to do hybrid. Because, like you're like, you want everyone to show up, right, right, yeah, of course, yeah, all right, you know. So, like, why provide access? You know it's like, you know after the fact, yeah, but now we do, and now it's like it's, you know, we're almost like an NFL team. You know it's like well, blackout, you know, kind of the local team, local community. You know and just kind of broadcast it.

Nick Lippis: 27:19

I think it's like a radius of, like you know, 400 miles or something like that you know.

Chris Miles: 27:23

Yeah, so it's not even like. You know, providing a virtual component isn't just like a button, click right. It's not that easy. There's there's a lot of coordination that goes into making that happen and you know, get like, try to keep someone engaged in person is as much easier than doing it remotely right. So yeah, it's not like it's a silver bullet by any means.

Nick Lippis: 27:43

There's a lot of it's not just like not just the conference content, but there's also like the sponsors right, and so there's virtual booths in there. There's those got to be constructed. You know people go online. There's problems that they have tech support you know is needed for them. Also, like, the one great thing that I think came out of doing the virtual piece is that we knew we needed a moderator or moderators, you know, so we started doing MCs. That would, I know. I kind of equated it to Best in Show. You know the movie. You know it's like I love that movie. It's like so hysterical, you know, so it's like, you know they were just like they made that movie and it's like those moderators kind of make you know those events. So, anyway, we tried it and it was like it was usually successful and we actually keep it to today. You know it's, you know, even it's live. But it's also part of the online experience, you know as well, keeps everyone engaged.

Tim McConnaughy: 28:41

Okay, we need. We need to make sure we get the link to oh Nugfall in the show.

Nick Lippis: 28:46

Yeah, October 24th and 25th.

Tim McConnaughy: 28:48

Okay.

Nick Lippis: 28:49

And Hudson Yards. It's, like you know, one of the best parts of New York Hudson.

Tim McConnaughy: 28:54

Yards yeah.

Nick Lippis: 28:54

Yeah, just fun, great restaurants, and you know it's all been renovated. It's hip, it's the. There's the the Mornahan train station, which is Penn Station. That kind of brings you right there. It's World Wide Technologies has a huge facility there. You have the Peloton. Oh, almost like it's not a campus but it's almost like a mall there. So it's there's a lot going on in that area. It's hip, it's got a great vibe and you know it's fun.

Tim McConnaughy: 29:22

Yeah, okay, so we did want to. We had some other topics we're going to talk about. To begin with. I mean, obviously this is the Cables to Clouds podcast, so we're I see you know you post to Twitter and LinkedIn and stuff about about networking, and so we wanted to kind of figure out, because we know now you kind of understand where Onug came from. So what's your kind of take on the state of cloud networking as it is and maybe what where it's going at this point?

Nick Lippis: 29:50

Yeah. Well, there's a couple of thoughts kind of going through my head, like first of all, you're right, the narrative and the focus that we have comes from all the consumers. One of the biggest issues that they have is around kind of multi-cloud. It's not just connectivity, but it's really just like a multi-cloud platform, right, and it's like, what's the whole operation model associated with that?

Nick Lippis: 30:14

Connectivity is one part, security is another part, observability is another piece. How do you control that with all the control elements? And I think so it's a kind of a multivariable, multi-domain area, and so I think where we are. So there's a couple of different ways to answer that. One like maybe on the vendor community we have no assumption that the cloud providers would do anything to help in this.

Tim McConnaughy: 30:46

zero, they have no the multi-cloud piece.

Nick Lippis: 30:49

You mean it's a good assumption yeah, multi-cloud piece, yeah, yeah, it's like all of their constructs are different. They really don't understand networking at all. Like that might sound like oh my God, what do you mean? Like, look at what Google built. They're looking at what Amazon built. Yeah, they know how to build like these big data centers and how to connect their data centers, but connecting into other networks they have no clue, literally no clue.

Nick Lippis: 31:11

We had this one meeting I won't mention the cloud provider, but it was like they wanted to launch a NAS service and so they wanted to get input from consumers. So we had this meeting actually it happened last fall at Onig and so we had a bunch of board members and so there was kind of a presentation along with and Capital One was there kind of as the sharing what they did, and so Capital One supplier was starting to ask questions and then they were. The amount of incoming was huge that they could not answer like probably a tenth of the questions that were coming from their consumers. So and that's, I don't think, a reflective of the. Maybe the they weren't just salespeople who were there, they had the engineers and they had the person who was like the GM of kind of their networking group and it's either they didn't have the answers or that they haven't developed the answers yet. They were kind of still in progress, and so that was really eye-opening.

Nick Lippis: 32:19

And so I think from we kind of knew this kind of going in and we thought, okay, well, let's see if we can help. But I think, once we even help, I think there's a reluctance from the other parts of the business to really invest in networking. It's almost like it's almost like if you think back to like the 80s and the 90s. It's like I worked at digital equipment corporation when I first started my career. Decks sold mini computers and we happened to sell networking. We were about a tenth of the business but we never really got much respect. It's like they were really interested in selling computing and the cloud providers are really interested in being landlords and selling.

Tim McConnaughy: 33:01

You know hosted Development compute all of them. You know paths as right now I agree.

Nick Lippis: 33:07

Yeah, you know that's what they want, so anyway. So, tim, to answer your question, is that you know, I think kind of the state of this is that for networking and security in a multi-cloud environment it is a hard shift, right. So it really means is like it's the companies, like I know that you know you guys, and two of you know, tim and Chris. You're both from ABATRICS, you know. So it's like ABATRICS is part of a tool set you know that is available and there's lots of tool sets that are there.

Nick Lippis: 33:35

And I think and actually this you know as a little bit, this point really came from a discussion with Steve Millenium myself, still in the ex CEO of ABATRICS is that you know, we realize is that what happened in the large enterprise marketplace over the last five years, there was a lot of senior level management really pushing for the cloud and then so there was this kind of rush to try to do it and they do it, and then when a large kind of revenue generating, public facing application would fail, the people who they recall would be the networking and the security teams to fix it Right. They're centralized. They kind of went to like Google for like oh okay, well, how do we organize this stuff? And they say, oh, we got an idea, let's do a center of cloud excellence.

Chris Miles: 34:25

And.

Nick Lippis: 34:26

I, and so we're gonna centralize. You know this excellence in cloud stuff. We're gonna know everything there is to know. And so many companies actually adopted that kind of model. The folks in the silos, basically, you know, when they were asked to kind of like contribute or help, they basically said I'm not doing any of this, because if I do it, you know and I won't have control of it and if it fails I don't want responsibility for it. So that totally separated, you know out. You know the centralized team from the silos teams. What broke? That is when applications broke and that the central teams needed help, and so they went to the silos and then, once the silos came in and they fixed it, then those centralized teams said, well, don't go away, you know, can you help us? And so that was, I think, the beginning of really you know, the rise of kind of networking engineers being at the center of the universe for this era that we're in right now.

Nick Lippis: 35:29

On, how do you do multi-cloud that's why it's shifting right. It's really kind of the network and security teams and those two are merging as well. On how do you kind of build an infrastructure that supports multiple clouds and lots of other things too, kind of the whole remote workforce thing and getting it away from VPNs, but, like, the bottom line is that it's that team and that's really important because, like before that happened, we were all kind of walking through the desert, you know, and we don't like everyone was saying, well, who's responsible for that? You know, and Alex, I'm not sure if you see this in your job you know it's like like there wasn't a delineation of responsibilities in the organization, and so now we're starting to get to an understanding of where those lines are, where the responsibilities are, and it's those kind of network engineers that are now taking up the cloud infrastructure piece and integrating it with on-prem, which is key, and they're the only ones that can do that.

Nick Lippis: 36:30

So they need tools, they need know-how, they need, you know, best practices to help them, you know, be successful. And I don't know if we want to help empower them by exposing them to as many tools as possible and when I say tools and technologies, I mean like companies, you know it's like who are specializing in this area.

Tim McConnaughy: 36:52

I mean, you know selfishly, I completely agree with that. I feel like the skills gap is real and not the fault of the infrastructure people up until now. I mean that's why not the plug, but that's why I literally wrote a book about how to prime people who are network engineers to do cloud networking. And it couldn't be this 400 page book that people, because nobody's got time for that right. It had to be something that was easily consumable.

Tim McConnaughy: 37:18

Because I completely agree, if you're gonna bring the network people in and you're bringing them in after the fact, after you've already built this horrible infrastructure, developer focused, but with no best practice, no security, and you're asking the network guys to come and clean it up because we're now moving our crown jeweled applications into the cloud and they can't break, just like you said. Right, you know the network engineers didn't spend the time learning the cloud because, hey, you've already got your cloud center of excellence. We're gonna be over here. And when you say talking about going from the hybrid we've been calling on the podcast like hybrid networking, which is kind of the whole extra cloud, inner cloud, type of whatever you wanna call it right on-prem to data center you know we, as network engineers didn't have that skill gap or had the skill gap. We didn't have the skills because we weren't kind of invited to the party. So I think that's really insightful.

Nick Lippis: 38:06

And also it's even worse than that. You would dissed. It's like, oh, this is all gonna get virtualized, you know. It's like, oh, you don't need network engineers. You know it's gonna be click, click, click, click, click, click. You know. So yeah, you're totally disenfranchised and ignored and your jobs are gonna go away. You know. It's like what a stupid strategy that was.

Alex Perkins: 38:29

You know, yeah, I hated a lot too, like a lot of things. That I see is like there's phases to this as well, and I'll see a lot of teams that go single cloud and they have the people that are. They'll pick a networking person that's good for one cloud and then they expand to another cloud and, instead of skilling that person up, they bring in another person for that cloud. So, like you mentioned, like the multi-cloud platform teams, that's such. There's such a gap between that as well. Right, it's not only just getting the networking people that were on-prem to the cloud, but then expanding that out and actually having the skill set across clouds is another step. That's just crazy.

Nick Lippis: 39:09

Yeah, it's both human resource sprawl as well as tool sprawl, right, you know, and that's why the clump of waters aren't gonna offer any help, you know. So it's not which is actually. You know, in a way it's kind of good, you know. It's like, you know, we kind of been through this before in the industry, like, you know, back in the. So, all right, this is like before your time, you know, but like in the Maybe not Tim's.

Nick Lippis: 39:34

Like in the mid-80s, right, and so we had a lot of PC lands in the marketplace. We had Apple and Apple Talk. We had, you know, oh, there was IBM, you know, and there were many computers. We had DEC and you know and DECnet, there was like Novel, there was Banyan Vines, you know, there was, like you know, and you had HP and their stuff. So you had all these different computing environments and networking environments and everything was different.

Nick Lippis: 40:00

Just like today with the cloud providers, right, because, like, not just like, it's not just like you know, the pass and the, I ask, it's also the SaaS players too. You have to think about two, so it's not just, oh, three or four large, you know cloud providers, it's like a plethora of cloud providers, right, when you start thinking about, like you know, sap and you know, and other big, you know, large, consumed, you know, applications, but anyway, so we solved that problem with an on-prem solution, with bridging and routing, right, so we basically put all of those protocols into one physical network and then the developers can do what they wanted to do, and then that it provided a kind of runway in order for things to converge. And you know, obviously, you know there was OSI at the time, and TCPIP, and TCPIP as well, and they won that battle, you know. And Ethernet won that battle and so, and that was perfect, you know. So that was a nice path. We need the same thing now. We don't have it.

Tim McConnaughy: 41:02

Yeah, yes, you mean like a standard, basically Some kind of like almost like an IETF Do we need? Now the question is, do we need like an IETF to come in? Ietf will not come in, please don't. And then not the actual IETF, I'm just saying like a standards body. I don't really see that one happening, not for a while anyway.

Nick Lippis: 41:21

There are no standards body that are really producing anything of import, right, you know, like in our industry it's like where did the IETF go? Right, the IEEE, maybe the IEEE does work, you know, does some good work around, kind of the Wi-Fi stuff, you know, but I'm not sure to the Wi-Fi.

Tim McConnaughy: 41:41

We also, like we were talking to Peter Jones on one of our episodes, you know, chair of the Ethernet Alliance. I mean, there are bodies out there, but I think they're all still button heads on what will be the standard. If you will, If there will be a standard.

Nick Lippis: 41:55

Yeah, well, those tend to be more marketing activities than real kind of standards activities, right, you know. So one I think TCPPE and V6 is here. You know it's like I don't think we need anything new, you know it'll scale. So, frankly, I think really what we need are kind of design patterns that will incorporate aggregation for multi-cloud. I think the technology can be proprietary, it can be unique to the on-prem companies, but I think we need a design pattern that allows I'm gonna go to Alex, since Alex is kind of a practitioner on the podcast, but it's like design patterns.

Nick Lippis: 42:46

Like in the we had three tier architectures for the campus and the data center and we have a DMZ. We know what that looks like. We know that design pattern. If you wanna build a website, that's a three tier architecture for that you can mix and match companies and that having that provides some level of security because you know it's gonna work, because it works all over the place. That de-risks the project, it allows you to absorb innovation quicker, and we don't have any of that in this kind of multi-cloud world. We're hard to talk about?

Tim McConnaughy: 43:26

I was gonna say multi-cloud. You're absolutely right. Aws puts out a bunch of design patterns, but of course it's completely involving AWS constructs within AWS, right and same with Azure and so on.

Nick Lippis: 43:37

Yeah, yeah, and then well, yeah, those are not the design patterns I'm thinking of. It's like yeah, I know that they do that, they all provide, this is the way you connect into us, and da-da-da. But I think the big thing I'm looking for is a design pattern that's really developed by and with conjunction with consumers, so that solves consumers problems and not sells a cloud provider's services.

Chris Miles: 44:01

Yeah, I think it's a great thing to think about, but also the difficulty to have that maintained would also be extravagant. I think as well, because the CSPs themselves are in this kind of vacuum where they're kind of owning their own realm of innovation right within their own cloud environment. So maintaining, if you developed a framework for building a multi-cloud network between Azure, aws, gcp, that probably accounts for the constructs they have today, but then you throw in a product like VPC Lattice, like where does that fit into your multi-cloud networking standard? Right, and so it's like they can kind of move the goalpost as often as they want.

Nick Lippis: 44:44

Oh, and they do.

Chris Miles: 44:45

Yeah.

Nick Lippis: 44:48

Yeah, yeah, I really think that we need a kind of a. I'm hoping that Ounu can do this, because it's a very democratized process and so no one has control over it, so it's really just gotta be encouraged. But it's like the consumers have really gotta step up and work with the suppliers to develop design patterns that makes sense and that will solve problems and that will allow them to move forward, like in that example that I gave you before, where you have the center of excellence and you have the silo teams. I know one of the largest banks on the planet where that prevented them from moving into kind of the cloud, because the silo teams didn't want anything to do with it, because they didn't know how to do it.

Nick Lippis: 45:36

They didn't want the possibility for it, and so it was only when they had to, because there was a crisis at hand, that they got involved. So I think it's in the best interest of the cloud providers to do this, but I just don't see them doing it. One thing I have seen them do is like, during this year like obviously this is a year of rationalization we've had like that overspend from the, from the time of the, you know, and so like cloud growth was growing at about 30% compound annual growth rate. That dropped down to 15 and talk about freaking out. Oh my God.

Tim McConnaughy: 46:12

It was unsustainable. I mean anybody involved knew that that year over year was unsustainable over any kind of term. Right, like it was huge.

Nick Lippis: 46:22

I don't know. It seems to have taken them by surprise. I feel like.

Tim McConnaughy: 46:26

Well, so that's the thing with the gravy train, right? You never know when it's going to stop. Yeah.

Nick Lippis: 46:31

Yeah, but I've never seen a bigger bunch of cry babies. You know it's like my God, dude, but you got so much money going into you.

Alex Perkins: 46:39

Once you work on it. We only made 10 billion this year, right, yeah, right.

Tim McConnaughy: 46:43

Well, it's a negative growth from last year. We made 40 billion last year or something, right. So but yeah, I mean you're right, they went off and all the CSPs did huge layoffs. I mean lots of vendors, lots of cloud vendors did just massive layoffs. So you know, from over I don't know if it was strictly from over hiring, I mean I think people did over hire during the pandemic, probably because they saw the year over year growth and they thought we have to scale to meet it. That's the problem with scaling to meet it is eventually the roads going to run out.

Nick Lippis: 47:09

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, in the networking industry we have we've had that before, but like we didn't have it like to that level, that level was like is crazy. You know, it's like I am, I am, so I know it's one of the point. You know it's like there was I don't want I can't mention his name, but kind of real senior level exec, it exec, and we were kind of talking about this and he was like you know, it's like we had this meeting, you know, with you know a bunch of folks from Google about kind of our applications and how we need them to be supported. And you know, and you know we'd like to work with you and you know, kind of move them into, like you know, gcp. He goes, well, I think you're just going to have to rewrite all those applications and using our constructs.

Tim McConnaughy: 47:59

I mean, don't get me wrong, lift and shift sucks, but come on, be realistic.

Nick Lippis: 48:03

I'm going to have 14100 company you know, yeah, and it being?

Tim McConnaughy: 48:08

was it a financial? You said it was a bank or something. No, logistics, oh sorry, I missed that. Oh logistics, sorry, I was thinking it's because you kept mentioning bank banks, are that it got like banks on the brain? I was thinking of the fact that, like, any kind of financial is going to have the oldest applications running on, you know, AS 400 and kind of. I can't imagine trying to refactor all that.

Nick Lippis: 48:27

Oh sure they do, you know, but also it's not. That message wasn't being told just to this one company that just talks to like how the CSPs view the world? Is that like, hey, listen, we are going to be like that large, you know, sucking sound, and all your IT is going to come into us and we're competing for, like that, market share? Yeah, and I think now there has been a clearly a rethinking of that. You know that you can't relinquish control of these assets because, like you know, all business is digital business, you know, and so you need control over that. You know, and there's no trade-off for convenience versus control. Right, it's convenient maybe to kind of put some applications, write your application, put them in the cloud, but if you lose control, you're going to make the trade. You're not going to make that trade-off, you're just going to keep them in house, you know.

Alex Perkins: 49:25

Do you think we're going to see more trends like Target and Walmart kind of building their own like private cloud? And then burst up to yeah, because I think Target was the one who was speaking last year at Ono events. Right about this.

Nick Lippis: 49:38

Yeah, that's right. Was it last year? Yeah, I think it was in 2021, yeah, 2021 Target presented. Yeah, no, I do when I do see a shift, right, I think that's you know, clearly that's happened. You've seen the slowdown in the growth in the cloud providers. I think you know AI also offers an opportunity, you know, to like rethink and reinvest, and I think you know it's interesting too.

Nick Lippis: 50:02

I just got this, you know, from you know, kind of a CTO of like a large defense builder and he was talking about you know, the security concern that he has with AI is that he doesn't want, you know, his team, or even his executive management team, typing questions into something, that those questions are stored off of his site because they open up the vulnerabilities that they're experiencing right now and they don't want those vulnerabilities shared, you know, and it's little things like that, you know that will force companies to build their own infrastructure. So, you know, I'm not sure if we are maybe in the beginning of a kind of a shift right, where the pendulum is starting to shift that way it clearly has. I'm not sure how far it's gonna go. You know there's a lot of value in the cloud providers, for sure, you know, but I think there's a lot of problems that they're not willing to solve and I think that's frustrating a lot of people, a lot of their customers.

Tim McConnaughy: 51:05

Well, I mean, we've been saying the future is hybrid on this podcast for a long time.

Tim McConnaughy: 51:08

Right, like you're gonna run workloads where they run best, where they make sense to run.

Tim McConnaughy: 51:12

If you can refactor or even start from Greenfield and write your app for you know, whatever cloud construct and it's gonna run great in the cloud, awesome, you're good.

Tim McConnaughy: 51:21

If you're gonna run something on an AS 400, that's always gonna run better in your data center, you're not gonna wanna either spend the money to refactor it or you're not gonna wanna lift it and shift it in the cloud. So we think that the future is gonna be some version of both of those things and if we can ever get on-prem cloud to have that same kind of experience that you can get in public cloud from a usability perspective just spin up and spin down perspective I think that'll be the best of both worlds. So, yeah, before, we were almost out of time, but I really wanted to give you a chance to talk about the kind of the operating model kind of you mentioned when we were talking about this. You wanted to talk about kind of the operating models being in flux, based on you know how things are changing. So I wanted to give you a chance to talk about that.

Nick Lippis: 52:03

Yeah. So I think there's a couple of inputs you know into, I think, why a lot of companies are rethinking about how they organize IT, and usually what happens is that IT organizations are kind of a mirror to the supplier industry, right, so you have networking companies, so all right, you have network engineers. You have storage companies all right, you have a storage team. You have, you know, companies that sell servers. You have kind of the server, you know team. The applications you know you have the application, you know team. So it's usually kind of a mirror image that way, but like now, okay, with both. You know technology consumption models changing, you know, cloud delivery is like one of those, but there's others like cloud delivery is a good example. Then those models, those siloed models, don't necessarily give you the best return and the best extraction of value and the best way to create value for your business, and so I think there's a lot of rethinking about okay, well, how do we create these teams? There's obviously the concept of SRE is an important concept because it does kind of cut across multiple different silos. Platform engineering is now being thought about, but that's kind of a, you know, kind of a coming back, you know, from a DevOps model into, like you know, the way that we used to do applications before for particular platforms. So I think that there is a lot of rethinking around operational models. And one thing in particular so the industry is kind of on a fast pace as network and technologies converge, right.

Nick Lippis: 53:49

So what I mean by that is that, like, if we think through kind of the decades, the attack surface in the 80s was basically zero, right, you know, it was like it really wasn't an attack. You know attack vectors were, you know, maybe tapping into a wire and trying to like sniff out packets, you know. And then in the 90s the concept of attack surface actually wasn't even in the vernacular in the industry. We just started to connect into the internet. The internet boom was starting to happen, mosaic was starting to take off, or Mosaic kind of showed the way. Then we had the dot you know the dot com boom, and then we started to see, you know, the attack surface starting to really expand. Then in the 2000s that attack surface friggin' exploded. All right, and that's when we had Palo Alto. Networks goes public in 2005. We also have the first time CISOs are introduced into the organizational structure of IT. Before it was really just networking teams. It was like in the 80s, it was a telecom team in the 90s it was the beginning of a networking team 2000s.

Nick Lippis: 55:02

Now we have networking and we have security teams In 2010,. That attack surface is boundaryless. We went all in on cloud SaaS, pass IS. There is no way the security marketplace boom like when crazy. It still has a compound undergrowth rate of like 233% faster than the networking market, smaller but faster than the networking market place. But every time there is a new attack vector that opens, that's an opportunity for some VCs to invest in a couple of companies and try to plug that. That poor little bore that's been put in its finger and all those holes in the dyke can't do it anymore. It's like you need a different approach to this, and so, as we're into the kind of 2022 timeframe now, there's a couple of things that are happening when both the networking and technology stuff is coming together. So, from the vendor community, we're seeing mergers and acquisitions starting to happen. Obviously, we started Cisco and Splunk last week, but this was going on well before that. Palo Alto bought what it's not VeloCloud and Buntimey no, I think it's about it.

Tim McConnaughy: 56:19

Was it Cloud Genics that they bought Cloud?

Nick Lippis: 56:20

Genics yeah, kumar's company, cloud Genics. Who else? I'm sorry kind of having brain difficulties, but anyway. So there was already the teeing up of networking and security companies coming together. Cisco did a big one with $28 billion, which Splunk. So we have mergers and acquisitions happening and then we also have most of the new products and services that are coming out from the vendor community that are kind of network related or integrated networking and security. They are just tightly in there.

Nick Lippis: 56:59

The whole new NAS market, the new way to do networking, that is, security, is not an afterthought, it's built into a 5G, it's built into networking. So we're seeing new products and services where those are totally converged. And then on the consumer side, what we're seeing is two things big transformation projects. So as we start to get networking and security more tightly integrated, the whole cloud infrastructure and integrating with on-prem, that becomes a little bit more feasible because, like the biggest problem that most people have, networking and security all right. So that's a big transformation project impacting a really big market the OT market and IT integration. We've been talking about that for decades. It's finally starting to happen.

Nick Lippis: 57:45

Massive, large number of OT devices, what like 15 billion devices, and there's only five billion people who are connected to the internet. So we see a factor of three there, and those devices were always like air gapped. So now bringing them into the infrastructure, micro segmentation plays a role there. Zero trust plays a role there as well. And then organizationally. So now we've invested heavily in SOARS and SIMS and security data lakes, observability on the networking side, and I think what the Cisco Splunk thing represents the culmination of a security data lake and kind of a data-driven operational team that is cross-domain, so where NOx and SOx converge and become transformed hopefully, I think, ai enabled into like incident response centers and so it's almost like the goal being lights out operations right If you can, but that's kind of the goal there and I think that's.

Nick Lippis: 58:59

All of this is really stemming from the integration or the convergence of these two big markets, and it may just be the networking vendors are the ones who really buy most of the security companies and absorb a lot of that market of like during this next kind of five year period. So anyway, tim, that's what I meant. Sorry for the long explanation.

Tim McConnaughy: 59:21

No, no, no, that's good actually, and I think we all, I think we would agree that generally, networking and security are kind of like peanut butter and jelly or peanut butter and chocolate, whichever is your favorite. Because I mean you talk about the attack vector is exploding. A large part of that is simply having connected. You put a computer in a safe and bury it in the bottom of the sea and you're never gonna it's never gonna get attacked, right? So it's the connectivity that provides the attack vector in almost all cases. So it makes perfect sense to put network and security together, right.

Chris Miles: 59:55

And it's funny because, like the, with the expansion in the cloud and everything like that, I feel like the definition of the perimeter itself is getting highly blurred right.

Alex Perkins: 1:00:06

Very murky.

Chris Miles: 1:00:07

Yeah, on what's your response? I mean, they have this, you know shared responsibility model, sure, but that doesn't save your company in the event of something happen, right?

Nick Lippis: 1:00:18

I'm not sure about the shared responsibility for that.

Tim McConnaughy: 1:00:21

Hey, shared responsibility really means mostly means your data is always gonna be your responsibility, because if it gets out you know that's not really got anything to do with us, right? We're just really responsible for taking your money and having the infrastructure.

Nick Lippis: 1:00:33

Oh, that's good. Yeah, you wanna share your budget and you take responsibility.

Tim McConnaughy: 1:00:39

Exactly. Oh, this is great and we could probably keep this going for a good long time. Guys, any closing thoughts? Guys, before Chris, alex, before I wrap up here, before we wrap up with it.

Alex Perkins: 1:00:51

No, I mean, it's funny you mentioned so much about network and security teams because I was gonna make it a point to bring that up and I didn't even need to. So really, this was awesome and echoes a lot of my thoughts and, like Tim said, we probably could have talked for hours more. So this is great. Thanks for coming on, nick.

Nick Lippis: 1:01:09

Awesome. You're welcome, alex.

Chris Miles: 1:01:10

Thank you yeah absolutely, and I think we touched on a lot of points here that really speak to the kind of like adaptiveness of network engineering, and it's always like you know, we're always given the worst tools in the toolbox, but we make it work right. So it's a thing. I think we've shown that a lot here. Is there any kind of call to action that you wanna send out for maybe vendors or something like that to reach out and be a part of ONUG, because obviously that's a huge opportunity?

Nick Lippis: 1:01:37

Yeah, you know it's like one. I'd like everyone to come and to attend ONUG. You know it's like it's open to the. Obviously it's open to the public. We wanna get more as many companies involved as possible because, like every company that comes in, that's another tool into the toolbox and network engineers, you know. So the more that we can expose them to a wider range of ideas, the more successful they're gonna be and the more successful they are, you know, the better the economy is gonna be and the better digital enterprise that they're gonna be. And so, anyway, love everyone to come on in to ONUG.

Nick Lippis: 1:02:12

It's a fun two days and it's jam packed too. So there's a lot of really great topics that we're gonna have. We're actually doing something called a space jam. So, you know, one thing I didn't mention is that we have one of our projects was something called the cloud security notification framework, or CSNF. So we can take now it's an open source project and take all of these security messages from all these different cloud providers and canonicalize them and then, once they're canonicalized, you know, then you can do correlations, you know, across them. So we're gonna do like a capture the flag. You know event, it's a fun event. We're gonna give out prizes, you know. You know it's gonna happen on October 24th and not October 24th, but anyway, we want everybody to come to ONUG in Manhattan Hudson Yards October 24th and 25th and we'll see you there, see you in great Manhattan. Manhattan, in the fall, is so much fun.

Chris Miles: 1:03:07

Yeah, it's really fun. Yeah, it's nice, it's pork musk fun.

Nick Lippis: 1:03:10

You know it's like the weather is great, the drive in it's peak foliage season, you know. So it's like quintessential autumn, you know, in the kind of Northeast Great time that sounds really cool.

Chris Miles: 1:03:22

Yeah, well, make sure to get some links from me and we'll toss them in the show notes. So if you're interested in maybe attending or looking further into ONUG, we'll check the show notes and we'll have those in there.

Nick Lippis: 1:03:32

Awesome. Yeah, it's just ONUGnet, you know, just come on in.

Tim McConnaughy: 1:03:35

Okay, excellent, all right. Well, we've been talking to Nick Lippis about ONUG and all of the other things that we were talking about today. So if you liked what you heard, go ahead and find us on YouTube. Smash that like button, find us on all of your favorite pod catchers and you can listen to us there as well. Thanks for joining us this week. Take care. Thanks everyone. Bye, guys.