Ep 24 - 2024 New Year Special- Goals, predictions, and more

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. My name is Alex Perkins. I am at Bumps on the Wire. On socials I'm joined as always by Tim McConaughey at Wangolbez and Chris Miles at BGP Main. We got a special first episode of 2024 for you guys today, a New Year's special, if you will. We're recording right after Christmas and New Year's just happened, I think. Real quick, we can just go over how that went for everyone. So, tim, how was your holidays?

Tim McConnaughy: 1:04

It wasn't too bad. Christmas was fine. The girls got everything they wanted, which luckily now is more than it was when they were a lot younger Bigger ticket items but fewer of them. So let's crap line around the house after we're done opening stuff. We were supposed to go up to Busch Gardens Christmas Town but that fell through. They had a big rainstorm come through Raleigh and the Southeast Virginia area. They actually ended up closing Busch Gardens. So we didn't go because we were expecting it to rain out and then it just absolutely rained out and they closed it. But New Year's was good. We always do fondue, cheese and chocolate and stuff like that and all the stuff to dip in it at home for New Year's Eve. And yeah, man, it was great. It was great. How about you?

Chris Miles: 1:55

What did Santa bring you, Tim?

Tim McConnaughy: 1:58

I'm dad. Santa doesn't even bring me much, I'm sorry to hear that.

Alex Perkins: 2:05

Wow, yeah, mine was kind of the opposite of yours. My kids are always complaining about how they don't have anything to do. So we got them a lot of smaller things and I swear, if they complain at all that there's nothing to do this year, it's going to be a problem. They got so much stuff, man, yeah. And then we went to. I took my oldest to a Sonic Symphony World Tour in Atlanta. I liked the convention center down there. He's obsessed with Sonic.

Chris Miles: 2:34

It was really cool.

Alex Perkins: 2:34

Sonic the Hedgehog right, Sonic the Hedgehog? Yep, and it was like an actual live symphony and I was not ready for the second half of the show was like a heavy metal concert.

Tim McConnaughy: 2:45

And I had no idea.

Alex Perkins: 2:46

That's cool. Yeah, it was crazy. I ended up getting super sick, though, so that was not fun.

Chris Miles: 2:54

I was going to say some of those Sonic games got fucking riffs, bro Dude. Oh yeah, solos and shit.

Alex Perkins: 3:01

Yeah, I'll have to share the video from the concert because it was like the whole orchestra, like everywhere. Everyone was standing up screaming, like my son screaming in my ear.

Tim McConnaughy: 3:10

The video game concerts are like picking up big time here in the states. Man, it's been a thing for a while. Yeah, it's actually, if you go look, it's been a thing for a while A lot of Final Fantasy stuff.

Alex Perkins: 3:22

Yeah right, they do a lot of symphonic, final Fantasy stuff.

Tim McConnaughy: 3:25

But yeah, dude, like I've seen in the recent years, it's barely really picked up here in the states.

Chris Miles: 3:29

Dude, I'm waiting for the Ken Griffey's home run or the Ken Griffey baseball game on Super.

Tim McConnaughy: 3:35

Nintendo. Oh the idea.

Chris Miles: 3:37

The soundtrack to that dude fucking rocks. And then, like all the like mainurisms and the quiz, like he's out.

Chris Miles: 3:44

Safe. I used to play that fucking game all the time. Yeah, so my Christmas it was good. So basically, in Australia Christmas happens during the summer here, which is very, still very weird to me, but it's, it's nice. It's nice and warm, you can go to the beach, etc. But my girlfriend's family is from a little country town called Goldburn or Gulban, as they say. There's absolutely nothing there, not a thing. She took me on a tour of the city with her mom and we drove past the maximum security prison that's one thing that's located there. So went and looked through some barbed wire fences on a nice drive on Christmas day, aren't you?

Alex Perkins: 4:33

from a small town.

Chris Miles: 4:35

Louisville, Kentucky is not that small.

Alex Perkins: 4:36

Yeah, I didn't know you were from Louisville. I thought you were like outside Okay.

Chris Miles: 4:40

I mean, I lived outside of Louisville once because I was poor, but I was technically born in Louisville. But yeah, this might. I've been to smaller towns than this, don't get me wrong, but this one is like there's a, there's a pub for every man is the way to describe to me.

Alex Perkins: 4:59

So, yeah, awesome, awesome, Okay, Well, real quick, before we kick it off, I just want to remind everyone, if you listen to the Christmas collab episode, we mentioned this. But the news section we've decided this year that we're going to break it out into its own episode. So we're still kind of working out the cadence of all that and how exactly that's going to work. But you will start seeing a separate show that is specifically just for news here soon and we'll talk a little bit more about that in, just a little bit about what the idea and the vision behind all that is. But I just wanted to call that out real quick up front. Since it's the new year, you know everybody likes to set goals and you know, have all these these fun new vision boards and all this cool stuff. We wanted to start out by just kind of seeing if anyone wanted to share any personal or professional goals for 2024. So anyone want to kick it off first? Chris, you want to? You want to go first?

Chris Miles: 5:58

Sure, as far as personal stuff goes, not not relating to anything to do with technology, my 2023 was somehow plagued with injuries in my body, so like I have a slightly torn rotator cuff in my right.

Chris Miles: 6:17

I know, dude, but it's like it's the most crippling thing to me to not be able to do the shit that I want to do, like whether it's just like lifting weights or playing sports or something. It's just like. It's like it's too real, like my age is feels too real at that point. So torn rotator cuff in my right arm, did something with my knee or tore off a piece of cartilage behind my patella, getting surgery for that next month. Two major goals is to fix my appendages, work on fixing my knee and fixing my shoulder. Really want to keep up riding.

Chris Miles: 6:53

As you know, tim and I are working on a book with our friend Steve McNutt as well. I want to obviously get that published, but as well as, keep on, keep up writing. Um, and it's funny, as much as I busted tim's balls about, uh, japan, uh, now I'm learning japanese and it's really fun. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep up with that and I'm gonna try to get that duolingo streak up to you know, at least, at least every day this year 2024. That's my goal. Um, I don't know if I'll go as deep as tim did with uh, with with his studies, but um, just want to keep up a regular cadence right and, uh, try to be consistent with it. Um, yeah, I'm not gonna sit here and give you a phrase in japanese, like tim does every once in a while, but eventually, maybe, maybe, we'll have a japanese version of this podcast for 10 hours Fully in japan.

Tim McConnaughy: 7:46

Well, increase our listener base by uh, by expanding globally.

Chris Miles: 7:51

Exactly. Um, wow, yeah, but I mean that's. That's so. In my personal life, I kept it pretty light. I feel like, tim, you might echo this sentiment as well. I feel like I was approaching burnout and a lot of things this year and I want to like kind of protect myself this year for 2024. Um, I think that was one of the biggest things I learned from 2020 was like don't like kill yourself For anything to do with like the technology, your job or anything, because it'll just like absolutely like eat at you, um, and and it feels like it's killing you slowly. So I'm like definitely prioritizing, you know, mental health and things like that. Um, in my professional life, I will say I promise and which we'll talk about this on the next episode about the news I promise I said this goal before sysco bought isovalent last week, but I we talked about it.

Alex Perkins: 8:42

We talked about a couple episodes ago.

Chris Miles: 8:44

Yeah, yeah, I I want to get more into kubernetes and learning kubernetes. I don't know if I want to be a full on you know k8s admin or anything like that, but Just get for more familiar with it and, you know, learn about these, see an eyes and see what they're all about. Um, I made sure, like, like I said, I want to keep these goals relatively vague so I can go as deep as I want or as shallow as I want, depending on you know what what my workload looks like. Um, some would call that a cop out, and that's fine, you can call it whatever you want.

Chris Miles: 9:14

Um, and then, lastly, you have me and tim need to get this damn book published. Tim's a machine when it comes to riding. I'm very much not a machine yet, so I know this is a. There's a lot of my shoulders there. So, um, we need to get that published in time for, you know, not only to get it under our belt, but also get it out there for people who want to read it and take the AWS advanced networking specialty exam. So, uh, yeah, those are my. Those are my goals for 2024 as of right now.

Alex Perkins: 9:40

Awesome, all right, tim. You want to. You want to go next?

Tim McConnaughy: 9:43

Oh yeah, uh, I've been thinking about those trying to figure it out too. Um, I, yeah, I really um Hit the accelerator in 2023. I did too much shit. Um, so, honestly, if I, if I have one goal in 2024, it's to do as little as I can get away with, probably, um, for a year. That's a good one, of course. Yeah, I mean, the problem is it's technology. With technology, especially with cloud there's, you can't really right, you can't actually take your foot off the gas like completely.

Tim McConnaughy: 10:15

Um, I would say that, uh, yeah, so, professionally, you know, I want to get back to doing more content. I want to do more videos and more writing. Um, stuff I enjoy, but like it has to be Because I enjoy it and not because I'm like under pressure to do it. Like I said, I'm trying to get away with this little, like this year. Um, chris and I are working on this book and with Steve as well I was I was lucky because I'd already written some. So, like you know, we have a certain number of chapters that we have to do. Um, I I kind of told these guys. I was like, look, you guys haven't written a book before. This is, this is tough, so take your time. Um, so I got, I got my chapters in, so I'm hopeful that I won't have to do too much revision, too much stuff. We're gonna get it out. We're gonna get it out the door. I'm not no concern there for either Chris or Steve, but it's tough like it's, it's it is. I don't know if I'll write another one. It is it is. I don't know if I'll get get another one written this year or not. I guess I will see how this one goes.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:17

Um, yeah, so let me think, what else did I have on the list here? Uh, you know, privately, or in my, in my personal life, or whatever. Um, I'm gonna try to do the same thing. I'm getting I'm. I've already started training. I would. What I would like to do is, uh, I'm training now for, uh, I would like to climb, climb mount fuzi. I don't know if I'm gonna do it this year, but I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it, uh, and I need to get in shape for that because, uh, it's not the hardest climb by any means. There's trails and everything, but uh, it is a legit climb, uh, so that's, that's my plan from a fitness perspective. Um, I am still studying Japanese. I'm, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna try to sign up for either the n four or n three this this December.

Tim McConnaughy: 12:02

In the states they only have the what's called the jlp t, which is the Japanese language versatility test. Um, they do it once a year in uh, us. Pretty much everywhere else in the year in the world does it twice a year july and december. We only do it in december, so hopefully by july I'll know if I'm gonna do the n for the n three this year. N three is like just about business level. So you know, we'll see how that goes. But that's I mean, of course, the, the, the usual suspects, right Like? I don't want to. I want to be able to spend a little more time with my kids, especially, you know, my oldest daughter's getting. She's the point now where she's taking driving tests and that's just fucking terrifying. Not because, for the obvious reasons, right Like you know, oh my gosh, a teenager driving right.

Tim McConnaughy: 12:44

But yeah, man, like you don't realize where the time's gone quick has gone until these milestones pass and you're, and they just was by you on the freeway if you don't pay attention. So Anyway, uh, so, yeah, that's, that's the other thing. I'm gonna try to make the extra time, so.

Chris Miles: 13:00

I think that's it. We'll see what happens. So we try to make a cables to clouds. Meet up at the summit of mount fuji.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:08

Hey, they have a table up there, um, for you to sit and drink sake and watch the sunrise, so that it is a legit thing.

Chris Miles: 13:16

And I am. I am very interested. I love sitting at tables drinking sake and watching the sunrise, so I'm there, perfect.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:24

Cool, All right yeah.

Alex Perkins: 13:26

I'll. I'll be pretty quick with mine Because I I don't have a whole lot that I was gonna gonna talk about, but, personal wise, um, I started giving a lot into trail running this last year, um, so Personally, I really want to complete some form of ultra marathon trail run, which is just really anything that's over it's technically anything that's over a marathon distance. I'd love to get up to like a 50-mileer, but I don't know how optimistic that is. But I really enjoy trail running, so I've been doing it like every weekend since, like last summer.

Chris Miles: 14:01

That's crazy man That'd be so sick. That's a big one for me.

Alex Perkins: 14:04

Yeah, and then professional goals. I guess this is I'll just consider this a professional goal. I've been really looking into starting up college classes. I just think it would be nice to I actually want to study something outside of IT, just because I think it'd be. I enjoy learning, right Like all of us have as we go through our career. You just get in the habit of constant learning and continual learning everything every single day, right Like you're always studying in some form or another. So I think it'd be cool to kind of break it up Like after work I can study something else and then I can come back to work and be excited and not get that burnout that people get from studying the same thing 24, seven.

Chris Miles: 14:46

Yeah, 100%. I felt like whenever I started learning cloud, that was like one of those things where it like the learning aspect was really fun and like I had missed that for so long. So I think yeah, because it was different, right?

Tim McConnaughy: 14:58

Yeah, yeah you guys will see behind the scenes.

Chris Miles: 15:00

But Alex is always sending us links for these things sometimes that are just very like sciency or whatever and we're just like nerd. But no, I think it would be. I think it'd be very fitting for you to, for you to get back into it. That'd be, that'd be really cool.

Alex Perkins: 15:13

Yeah, so cool, all right, yeah, so let's, let's go into some podcast specific goals for 2024, right, so we kind of came up with a couple of points that we're just going to elaborate on a bit. I don't know, Tim, do you want to kind of kick us off with with the point you had here? Yeah, absolutely.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:34

So what we want to and we're trying to engage our listeners and try to understand, you know, basically what our listeners want to hear. Obviously I mean every podcast does that but kind of something we we have played around with a little bit Sometimes it works, sometimes it didn't was the idea that we could focus more on some solutions and stuff, meaning that, rather than doing an episode about, hey, what's a VPC? You know not that the you know that content's very useful but honestly it's a little, it's a little dry, it's a little it's a little basic and kind of kind of boring, especially in a podcast format. What I would like to think we want to focus on more is the idea of okay, you know, you can go learn about what a VPC is from way better sources than us, right, but then let's talk about the part that you can't read a book about and that's you know how to leverage a lot of these things that you're going to pick up as you start transitioning over to cloud learning some of that stuff. So we want to talk about solutions, like you know, not pieces of the puzzles but the puzzles themselves, and kind of we're thinking, you know we might do some more YouTube stuff with solutions.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:42

You know, hopefully with, or you know with or without, you know some of the people that work at the CSPs and whatnot, like kind of like we did last year, but really just focus a lot more on hey, cloud network is awesome and here's like, here's a solution, here's a, here's a, here's where you use it, maybe even here's where you know the hybrid piece of it for on prem looks like, or something like that. Right, because we're still very cognizant of the fact that a lot of our listeners either haven't, you know, joined us in the cloud network pieces or they have to learn it or, like most, we've been saying this in the beginning right, future's hybrid. So we're going to. I think we need to focus a lot on the hybrid solutions to really bring bridge the gap and bring it up all together.

Alex Perkins: 17:25

I think a great example was that episode we did with Steve too, right, because it was it was like we started talking about. He went from like how security appliances were used on prem and then like kind of how you start using them and the different methods you can do with the different CSPs. So that was just a great example of kind of the direction I think we'll head in.

Chris Miles: 17:45

Yeah, yeah, I think it's good. I think you know, like Tim said, we really want to focus on the stuff you're not going to learn in. You know the one-on-one sessions on these constructs or you know these primitives as.

Chris Miles: 17:58

Jesse would say Primitives, yeah, but you know like I will do our best to not talk about red tape, because I feel like that's always the crux of the thing that comes into play is red tape. But you know, in addition to that, you know we want to focus on solutions, but we also want to know what you guys would like to hear about. Right?

Chris Miles: 18:19

We also understand, we're not experts in a lot of these verticals, but, you know, no subject that you could offer to us is too miniscule or too broad or whatever. So if you have any ideas on things that you would like us to talk about, or bring on a cool guest that wants to talk about something, let us know. You know, like, reach out to us. You know we're on Discord, we're on email, twitter. We're not saying X, alex, we are not saying X, we're saying Twitter, it's X. Yeah, definitely reach out to us, because we're curious. You know, what do you guys want to hear about in addition to what we're coming up with? Because you know we don't have the all the tricks figured out just yet. So definitely let us know.

Alex Perkins: 19:00

Yeah, that's a great point, Chris. That was going to be the next point is basically like growing our audience right, which sounds generic on the surface level, but you know, we really are trying to figure out exactly how to bring you know new stuff to you guys and take any feedback that we get and open up more avenues of feedback. You know, and Chris said a bunch of things that are great. Also, you know us being more active on socials, right, engaging more from like the cables to clouds account, right. So there's all kinds of things like optimizing SEO. All the boring stuff too, of course, is stuff we'll do in the background, but your feedback, right, all the listeners feedback is super important to us and something we'd like to get more of and focus on what it means going forward. So, chris, you want to take us away with the last one.

Tim McConnaughy: 19:49

Well, hang on, let's take, don't we have a, we have the. Should we go ahead and point out the survey now, since we just specifically mentioned that.

Alex Perkins: 19:57

Yeah, we can do that, yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 19:58

So we I mean we're just we're to save you on that actually we have a. We have a survey that we are putting out. We will probably post it to Twitter and some and LinkedIn and and, and you know, we would love to get some feedback on it, because it's really going to help us figure out, like, first of all, who's listening and, second of all, what do you want to hear. Like we hate the idea that you, you know, you'd listen for five minutes and be like, ah, this is boring and turn it off right. So, because you know, we love making it, but we love making the content, but we want to make sure that we're making the content that people find interesting and engaging as well. So there will be, I think in the show notes and we'll get them out in the socials as well a survey. We really would appreciate taking the you know three minutes to fill it out for us.

Chris Miles: 20:47

Yeah, it's. I know you're probably hearing this like, oh my God, another survey. You know a listener survey, a Google form that I'm going to fill out and it's you know, five minutes. It feels like wasted time, but you really have no idea how much it would help us out if you could fill it out. So we would greatly appreciate it and I will personally commit that every person that fills out the survey, tim will do one favor for you, for every person that fills out the survey. So if you can show us that you filled it out, tim will do Tim will very kind of oh you won.

Chris Miles: 21:15

Yeah, it's very nice of you, tim, yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 21:17

Yeah, that's good.

Alex Perkins: 21:18

Yeah, yeah, I'll get right on that, wow All right, Chris, you want to talk about what we're doing with the news.

Chris Miles: 21:26

Yeah, so Alex already touched on this at the beginning of the episode. But you know we mentioned in our last episode the Christmas episode about wanting to change up the news, just because we felt, yeah, I guess just to go in. The reasoning why we wanted to change it in the first place is that you know, we know a lot of people find podcasts at different times. Right, you might find something after it's been going on for years and years. You may start at day one, right, but you know you go back and look through the feed and you find interesting guests and things like that that you want to listen to. Like, if you want to go back and listen to you know the episode we did with Gifted Lane, or you want to go back and listen to Steve McNutt, will Collins, etc. You're looking for their episodes.

Chris Miles: 22:05

We didn't want them to be coupled with, like, time-stamped news as well. Right, because we know you want to. We have a guest on because we want to showcase their ideas, their you know the things that they want to talk about, and we don't want you to have to sit through you know, news that could be, you know, months or whatever old at that point, right? So we really want to give the chance for our guests to shine within our podcast feed as well as still bring you, you know, our takes on the you know fortnightly news updates that were that were providing to you, right. So as of now, we are going to split it out. It's going to be in the same podcast feed, so you don't have to subscribe to a new show or anything like that. But one good thing is it's going to be a separate show, right, and it's going to release on Wednesday as well, so you'll actually get a weekly episode from us here on out. I think the next the first, alex, keep me honest the first one that's actually going to publish will be what's the first news episode.

Alex Perkins: 23:03

It will be on the 17th January 17th. It'll be the Wednesday after this one releases, so that'll start the new cadence of every Wednesday you'll get a new episode from us, whether it's a news episode or a regular episode.

Chris Miles: 23:16

Perfect, yeah, so you'll get one episode from us every Wednesday. So from here on out you'll hear us with the tagline, you know, Cables to Clouds every Wednesday. So that's going to be going forward after the 17th of January. Those will still be the shorter ones, you know, like maybe the news episodes. Maybe you end up 20 to 30 minutes tops.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:38

We don't try to overwork, but how much news there is, unless some crazy shit happens right.

Alex Perkins: 23:45

An open AI debacle happens again.

Chris Miles: 23:47

Right, it's right too. But yeah, we usually keep that around 30 minutes and then you know we'll make sure the episodes are tagged with, you know, like a marker or something You'll notice. Like, on the one week you'll have a full episode from us, whether it be a roundtable or a guest episode, and you know we'll keep the episode number in there, like C2C, you know, 032 or whatever the episode is, and then we'll have our Fortnite Lee news episode that comes out on the opposite week. So, yeah, look forward to getting that out to you guys and you know, as we said before, any feedback on that as we, as we move along, feel free to reach out to us directly and let us know.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:28

Yeah, you do need to clarify, though our Fortnite Lee news is actually not about Fortnite, so I'm sorry if you were listening.

Chris Miles: 24:34

Don't tell them. Don't tell them, that'll get more people in, right yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:39

Well, I'm sorry. Yeah, actually Alex is going to floss on our first episode, so bro, I'm sad.

Chris Miles: 24:44

I'm sad to admit 36 year old man. Recently I found Fortnite is fun.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:48

It's not bad.

Chris Miles: 24:49

I mean it's they've released they've released the grown person mode, where there's no building you, just, it's just all killing.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:57

If you ever tried Apex Legends, it's basically the Fortnite without it's like the adult version of Fortnite without the building. It's that's what it is.

Chris Miles: 25:04

You should probably be careful to say adult version of Fortnite, that might.

Tim McConnaughy: 25:09

That's why not.

Chris Miles: 25:09

Yeah, ok, yeah, I don't, I don't, yeah, ok that's fair, the grown grown ass man version of Fortnite maybe.

Tim McConnaughy: 25:17

Well, because women can play it too, though, so it's not really the grown ass sexy ass grown folk, there you go. Sexy ass. It's the sexiest grown folk version.

Alex Perkins: 25:24

Yes, yes, yes I mean just play Call of Duty, right, Can't you just play Call of Duty?

Tim McConnaughy: 25:29

Well, it's not the it's all Battle Royale thing. Oh no, I guess. Yeah, I guess they do have that field that that's set up now too, Don't they? I don't know, man, that's too many of them.

Chris Miles: 25:37

We're spinning off here, but I've started playing the finals lately. The finals is awesome. It is so fun.

Tim McConnaughy: 25:43

The finals.

Alex Perkins: 25:44

No, I don't know what you're talking about it's like an embark thing.

Chris Miles: 25:49

I'm new to these kind of like free game things where you don't pay for anything and you just yeah, just Anyways, if you want to play the finals, hit me up. Dude, I'm down.

Alex Perkins: 25:58

All right, all right, cool, good to know. Yeah, if anyone wants to, you know, hit Chris up please.

Tim McConnaughy: 26:04

Yep, he will personally play with every single one of you that hits him up, all right.

Alex Perkins: 26:09

Let's we're going to. This is the last little part before we wrap up. I thought it'd be cool to do some kind of predictions. You know personal predictions from the three of us for specifically hybrid networking, but that can you know. You can say one specifically for enterprise on-prem networking or cloud networking specifically, or just any trends or something new you think is going to come up, something that will go away, really, really anything. Anyone want to kick it off. You guys want me to start it off on this one. All right, so mine. I've been already kind of talking about this in 2023, but I really think 2024 is going to be the year of the Linux desktop Right now. So it's going to be. I think it's going to be the year.

Chris Miles: 26:49

The next desktop in IPv6 is all going to happen. Yeah, exactly, it's all the same time. Yeah, no.

Alex Perkins: 26:52

So for real, I think, platform teams is something that I think we're going to see a lot more focus on. It's already big. It's already been from what I can tell. It's like growing and growing and a lot more people are starting to talk about it. But I really think networking is going to be brought more and more into the focus of these platform teams.

Alex Perkins: 27:13

Somebody that I want to get on to talk about this actually at the Network Automation Forum Kion Thana, I think that's how you say his last name. He had a talk about building a platform engineering team, on-prem right and not in the cloud focus, which is what so many people are used to using it for. It'd be cool to just bring him on and kind of get some other people that are working on these platform things and ideas and kind of start figuring out how networkers can be brought into the conversation. And, of course, service mesh. I have to talk about service mesh because I think eventually it's going to get into people's heads, especially now that Cisco bought Isovailin because, they do have a Scyllium service mesh and it's very full-featured and there's a lot of cool stuff they're doing there.

Alex Perkins: 28:02

So it's something that I think for sure we're going to explore a lot in some future episodes. So just be ready for lots of talk about platform teams.

Chris Miles: 28:10

I mean, how are you? First of all, I'll say I will agree, I think there is going to be a stronger focus on platform teams, especially from the networking piece, probably coupled with the Cisco acquisition. I feel like people are looking in these areas that they weren't looking before, and we've said this on the show before. But with that prediction I'm curious to get your take again, Alex, is where do you see the skills gap playing into that? Because that's obviously we're talking about platform teams, but we're talking about multi-cloud platform teams as well, right? So I mean, I feel that's going to evolve.

Alex Perkins: 28:42

God, that's a good question. Yeah, there's definitely a huge skill gap at the moment, especially in this space. I think the easiest way to start overcoming some of that skills gap is just going to be additional products that come out that simplify multi-cloud networking, especially right. Of course, you guys work for Aviatrix, there's Prosimo, there's Alkyra, there's like F5. There's all kinds of competition in that space right now. There's a lot of people that are building things that are adjacent to that space. I think those products specifically are really what's going to start people down the path of understanding it, whether they realize it or not. To me it's kind of like how ACI made people really step back and understand application networking, even whether that's intentional or not. I see your look.

Tim McConnaughy: 29:35

It actually makes them understand application networking.

Alex Perkins: 29:38

Not make them understand, but you have to take a step back and kind of think about how your tiers of your application are designed right. It's more about building those application flows between your back end, middle end, front end, all that. I think the same kind of thing is going to happen with platform teams. It'll force people to take a step back and really start understanding infrastructure in a kind of different light.

Chris Miles: 30:03

I'm wondering if this is going to cause you remember how I swear to God, even a little bit before Cisco bought Viptela. Then, a couple months later, it was like everyone has SD win. Everyone added one thing and they have SD win. Is this going to be like?

Tim McConnaughy: 30:19

is service it's a gold rush. It's a gold rush.

Chris Miles: 30:21

SD win 2.0 now I'm curious how that's going to maybe everyone just has CNIs, I don't know one or the other. I don't know if it's going to build down that way the thing is.

Alex Perkins: 30:33

Without going too deep into this right now, the CNI thing to me has kind of already been one yeah. And this is why the Cisco acquisition is so crazy, because Cilium is the one who won that.

Tim McConnaughy: 30:43

CNI war.

Alex Perkins: 30:45

And since Isolavial is the one who the parent company of Cilium.

Tim McConnaughy: 30:49

The major contributor.

Alex Perkins: 30:50

yeah, it's going to be interesting. I mean, all the CSPs use Cilium. Almost every single major Kubernetes provider in some way they use Cilium as their CNI.

Tim McConnaughy: 31:00

So the question is how many people are right now looking at Cilium and wondering because anytime Cisco buys something, guarantee there will be a counterrevolution, like some other counterproduct revolution for people that are free, you might say the older ones pop back up like Flannel Calico Calico yeah, I was thinking there was a bunch of other ones.

Alex Perkins: 31:22

Who knows Interesting, all right. Who wants to take the next stab at predictions?

Tim McConnaughy: 31:26

What about you, Chris? You live in the future already.

Chris Miles: 31:29

Yeah, I'll be honest With regards to networking, I don't have much to predict outside of what you said, alex. I feel like that's going to be a big player for sure.

Chris Miles: 31:44

I'm interested to see how these things like VPC Lattice, evolve over the next 12 months depending on what other protocols are going to start supporting what's actually happening under the hood, how people are actually going to use it in their day to day, if that's really going to change things over the course, because it was introduced as this game-changing technology, but I don't know if it's quite gotten there yet.

Tim McConnaughy: 32:09

so I'm really curious to see how it's going to evolve.

Chris Miles: 32:14

It's more like a perfect concept. Yeah right, I've heard feedback from people that it really doesn't bode well for multi-region applications. But if you look at anything within AWS, they run everything multi-region. Why would their customers not be running multi-region? I'm interested to see how that plays out. I have more on the broader spectrum of things. I'm really curious how this AI bubble is gonna gonna fizzle out this year. Don't get me wrong. It's gonna continue to grow. They're kind of fizzle, it's well, some of it's gonna fizzle, not like it.

Tim McConnaughy: 32:54

Yeah, they'll start hitting walls with some of the stuff that they're doing. Yeah.

Chris Miles: 32:59

It's. We were just talking about this, this article that we were reading earlier before this, and that you know a lot of the big ticket items relating to AI are either the like low cost, like low cost, easy money grabs, and then the big money grabs, right. It's all that stuff in the middle that's kind of unclear right now. So I'm curious to see, with this year, where you know, vc money is kind of being kept close to the chest, it's not being handed out at will at this point how some of these AI companies stay afloat or fizzle out. You know, tim, I know you have comments about this being an election year as well, so I think that's probably gonna play into it. But yeah, that's something I really want to see in 2024 is how that works out Real quick before we move on to Tim.

Alex Perkins: 33:49

you mentioned learning Kubernetes earlier. Why any particular reason Like do you see more networking people doing kind of similar as you are?

Chris Miles: 33:58

Maybe I mean I was drawn to it just because, like you know, I'm a cool guy and I'm drawn to cool technology, you know? No, I'm just kidding, sure honey, you're cool yeah it's.

Chris Miles: 34:08

no, it is something that I think is very interesting and obviously I see value in it. There's not direct value in it, I think, for networkers and I think we kind of talked about this with Pete Lumbus when we talked about the innovation in the networking space Like I don't think it's a huge game changer for us and for our market, but it is for someone else that is going to be consuming our networks, right. So we need to know how they're functioning, how to build them, and I just want to be kind of closer to that and understand what are the bits and pieces, what are the, what are the primitives and the puzzle pieces that go into that, and how we can, how we can assist there. But I mean, cisco made quite a statement like this is something to pay attention to, right.

Alex Perkins: 34:59

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Chris Miles: 35:00

That it's. Someone was commenting on this the other day. It's kind of amazing how fast the Splunk thing like was front page news and then it was merely gone. So it's like, but I feel like these things together yeah like these things together, like something's going to fucking happen, man, like they're gonna. You're getting ahead of me. Go ahead, go ahead.

Tim McConnaughy: 35:22

No, no, no, no, no finish, finish up.

Chris Miles: 35:24

No, that was pretty much. It is like I don't know what it's going to boil down to, but obviously there's going to be slow integration across that observability and containerization across the enterprise.

Alex Perkins: 35:35

So I want to see how that works out, yeah that and phaletics right Like there's a lot of different stress strategic acquisitions going on at once. Go ahead, Tim.

Tim McConnaughy: 35:47

All right, I'm gonna end up like Charlie Day in front of the board with all the threads and the exactly, with cigarette in my hand, or the conspiracy theory guy. Yeah, it is an election year. I would very much expect the Fed to lower interest rates, which has kept the money out of you know, techno, out of being basically not being borrowed. So I do think that the AI bubble will grow before it doesn't like, but I do. I think we are already realizing that AI is not a panacea. Is that how you say it? I remember panacea, panacea.

Chris Miles: 36:27

Panacea. Yeah, you know put the wrong emphasis on the wrong. Yeah, the wrong. I don't.

Tim McConnaughy: 36:35

Yeah, I keep having a anyway not gonna get there. So we are going to see that grow, but more what I think. So the other thing so, yes, the Fed will lower interest rates, Will that equal larger amounts of borrowing? And I think yes, but I don't think necessarily that actually will end up being a lot of spending, necessarily. Are you serious right now? Sorry, my cat has decided that she wants to visit.

Tim McConnaughy: 37:04

But so what I mean by that is it is an election year and, you know, based on how things are, I think a lot of businesses are going to be holding on to a lot of money to see how things go like, whether then, whatever, if there's a new administration, will it be more friendly to business. You know, just the normal stuff that you see in an election year a lot of volatility. Businesses don't like volatility, so I would not be surprised if we saw very little or less, should I say, growth just across the sector generally. Because of that, even though the Fed will lower interest rates, I don't think we'll see a huge boom. I do think they, I think, will continue to grow. I think that's probably an outlier. That's, that's just going to grow because people are piling in as fast as they can to try to make their money Right, so that you know whatever. So that's, that's one, as you correctly observed, with the Cisco thing I have been watching, I mean, honestly, I you know I worked at Cisco right, and so I left Cisco because I didn't feel like they understood cloud, you know, two years ago. I'm still not 100% sure, but I have been very carefully paying attention to the moves they've been making right and I think somebody at Cisco is actually, you know, figuring out some stuff right.

Alex Perkins: 38:19

I don't know what the strategy looks like.

Tim McConnaughy: 38:21

Yeah, exactly Right. So there, there have been some very interesting moves made that make me think that there is not. It's not just throwing darts at the board, right? So I'm in agreement with you on that one.

Chris Miles: 38:32

What do you think Just walking around the office with that cloud suit on?

Tim McConnaughy: 38:36

That's the cloud.

Alex Perkins: 38:37

That's the cloud D cloud, steve, don't give me a start One question for you, because I think we've all paid a lot of close attention to what Cisco's doing in the cloud space. Right, what do you think about the fact that it seems like most of these strategic acquisitions we've talked about come from the security group?

Tim McConnaughy: 38:55

Yeah, that's not really surprising.

Alex Perkins: 38:57

Is it? Can you speak on that? Yeah, yeah yeah. Because to me it is. It's like why security? Why is it coming from there?

Tim McConnaughy: 39:03

So okay. So a couple of reasons. One is, if you think about the other and this is my opinion, right, I don't speak for Cisco, obviously I'm not a somewhat guru that knows what Cisco is thinking.

Tim McConnaughy: 39:12

But if you think about it, right, look at the other business units, like the other big technology stacks within Cisco. You have data center, which made a play at cloud with ACI, cloud ACI and I don't think it was particularly successful, right, they trust, for reasons that they didn't really understand, cloud in my opinion. Right, like that's why cloud ACI didn't work. You look at the EN, so EN, I don't even know what to say about EN. En is EN, right, it always has been. Like, look at SDA SDA was, in my opinion, a bit of a flop. I actually love the technology, but I don't think it's what. I think people will come around to it because I think it has a lot of value, but I don't think it's there yet that people are adopting.

Tim McConnaughy: 39:53

Yeah, sdiwin, well, okay, so ENB, you can pretty much print money with SDIWIN, but that's because that's the, it's what's been around and it was the big thing for the pandemic, right. And then you have, like GSSO right, the security BU right. Security's always been decently successful at Cisco. The budgets that enterprises have are practically blank checks for security, comparatively right, I guess that's true. Look at the security products, the portfolio that Cisco built right. Let's forget firepower. Let's pretend firepower never happened. Actually, firepower was a good product. The problem was I don't think they knew what to do with it and as again, I'm gonna have people from Cisco blowing me up all over Twitter after this, but I don't. Having said that, they made some very smart acquisitions and some. So that's why I say it's not surprising to me that Cisco wants to make the play at Cloud, with security in the leading tip of the spear, because Cloud security by itself is also something that where they can show a lot of value right.

Chris Miles: 41:03

Yeah, I mean security. I don't know if this is exactly how the BU's are structured, but that one seems like it spans all the other BU's, right. It's about integration, right, because their feature set, their stack, is integrated into other products across the other BU's, right. So I feel like you need to put a lot of funding in there. Just give it. We know how much cyber has grown in the last five years, right? Data breaches and things like that, so it makes sense that they can print checks. I mean, to me that seems like a no-brainer.

Tim McConnaughy: 41:37

Yeah Well, and of course, as you know, with cyber crime on the rise, hell, I think we've probably all worked somewhere where, if there was a breach, that that blank check the budget you didn't have to buy those firewalls all of a sudden becomes a blank check to make it go away right.

Tim McConnaughy: 41:52

It's completely reactive, but I think people are coming around out of that. But you also brought up another interesting point that I wanted to make and this isn't like a Cisco prediction thing, but it's kind of tied in which is that, yeah, if any BU could be considered more or less integrated with other BU's across Cisco, it would be security, and so if anybody could tell the integration story which I think you have to have an integration story, especially with cloud, it would be the security side of the house. So I've often said, especially when I worked at Cisco, usually in frustration that if Cisco could get it out of its own way, nobody could really compete with them because their portfolio, their integration story and portfolio would be so massive and so integrated nobody could stand against it.

Tim McConnaughy: 42:39

Right. If it worked together, it would be great, right.

Alex Perkins: 42:43

I mean, it's the easiest thing to like. Okay, you were talking about SD-WAN. You need secure SD-WAN, right? You just add secure. In front of everything. You have SD access. Well, you want it secure, right. Like ACI, you want it secure. You can add security to every single thing, and that sells as well, and it's important to lots of organizations. So, yeah, I get it.

Tim McConnaughy: 43:05

Anyway, so yeah, but to pivot away from Cisco generally, because I think that's, I think you were all in agreement that Cisco has a strategy. I think they're starting to finally understand cloud to what degree we'll see, you know, in the next the ICE. Honestly, I was, I thought already that like, hey, these guys are, I think they're figuring it out. The ISEA Vailin acquisition tells me like somebody really knows what the fuck they're doing. Right, like somebody has figured some shit out that, from an integration perspective, I think it's gonna be good.

Alex Perkins: 43:34

It completely blew my mind when I read that. Like yeah, I would have the Splunk.

Chris Miles: 43:39

one was like obviously it was huge, but like totally part of the course, right you?

Tim McConnaughy: 43:44

could if someone told me yeah, that makes sense.

Chris Miles: 43:47

And then you saw this one, you're like, oh shit, okay, yeah, exactly, somebody made a smart decision.

Tim McConnaughy: 43:52

So, yeah, I think what we'll see, though, is so. So, getting back to the prediction piece, I think we will see I don't know if we'll see a product or suite of products or integration product. Probably we'll see something from Cisco this year. I don't know if it'll be like a secure cloud offer or some kind of secure cloud offer that's going to try to pull these things together. Maybe, or maybe they'll do like Zscaler and they'll make a secure cloud or something. I don't know, but expect something. I would say. I don't think they're going to rest on their laurels. How long will it take? That's the question of how long it takes. Usually, it is a question of dollars. Incubation just because of the big incubation thing, they put a lot of money into it, they want to see returns, but there's going to be a lot of weight from the on top to start making money on those things too. So I don't know.

Tim McConnaughy: 44:39

Yeah, so something away from Cisco, from, and I think what we'll see is a lot more of the simplification and abstraction of networking this year. I think people are want that. I think specifically, specifically the spills gap yeah, right. Platform engineering, specifically speaking of skills gap, though right. I think that exists across the industry and I think, like VPC, lattice, for example, is an acknowledgement from, say, like AWS, and I think we'll see more of that type of abstraction. Is that good for us? I don't know, I can't decide. I mean just because whether it's good or not for us is really irrelevant, honestly, because the business, if they could get away without paying network engineers, I'm sure they would right. So we'll see, right, happy.

Chris Miles: 45:28

New Year. I think it's a good point because since this whole thing started, this isn't unique to networking or even infrastructure, right, it just feels like people have been put on the tech treadmill. Like you say, tim, it's a treadmill and we're just slowly increasing the speed, like every month. Right, it's like learn this, learn this and like maintaining all that shit is becoming. It's becoming like not able to be managed for many people and totally understand it, so there's going to be definite value in abstraction, more or less like, I think, just out of burnout, like you know, like people are just tired of it right Like do I need to know how this thing operates at the most granular level?

Chris Miles: 46:10

Probably not. Would it be good to know? Yes, eventually, but right now I just need a break from some of it, and it's about whether or not companies or services or people can offer that with confidence to the operators that it's going to do exactly what they need to do. So, yeah, I can see that, that being the thing.

Tim McConnaughy: 46:29

Probably. I mean I have more, but probably just one more thing is I think you know how many times have we seen the Bandcamp article about repatriation, this repatriation everybody's leaving the cloud and we're going to repatriate.

Tim McConnaughy: 46:43

I think what we'll see well, I mean, but you were talking about predictions, right? Are we going to see everybody leave the cloud this year? No, of course not, right? Are we going to see everybody jump to the cloud this year? Obviously not right. Like those are obvious. That's not even a prediction. I think we might see more. As I said, I think businesses are going to be more even more than last year probably watching the bottom line, especially in an election year, like I said, with it being very volatile. So I would expect to see more of that eye of Sauron pointing at the cloud expenditures, and some people will be probably pulling out of the cloud or figuring out how to refactor it so that they don't have to stay there, or whatever. I don't think we'll see huge moves this year, though, I think, because everybody knows it's volatile, so everybody's, I think, it's going to mostly sit on their ass and just focus on the costs instead of actually re-architecting or moving one way or the other. Probably that's it. That's for me.

Alex Perkins: 47:43

All right. Well, yeah, I'm sure we could keep going for a long time, but we've got to wrap this up at some point and save some of this for some episodes.

Chris Miles: 47:51

Future episodes.

Alex Perkins: 47:53

All right, any last words before I close this out. You guys good.

Chris Miles: 47:58

No, Well, maybe we'll do a recap episode where all these predictions are wrong. Yeah, At the end of the year we need to be like where was our tarot?

Tim McConnaughy: 48:06

Should we quit and become tarot card readers or not?

Alex Perkins: 48:10

All right. Well, thanks everyone for tuning in. As always, like and subscribe if you're watching on YouTube, rate us five stars if you're listening on your favorite pod catcher. Thank you all for tuning in Again, check out the listener survey. It's still out there. If you haven't filled it out, feel free to reach out to us anywhere on socials on X or on Twitter, linkedin. Yeah, so thanks for tuning in, guys, and we will see you next time. Hi everyone, it's Alex and this has been the Cables to Clouds podcast. Thanks for tuning in today. If you enjoyed our show, please subscribe to us in your favorite pod catcher as well as subscribe and turn on notifications for our YouTube channel to be notified of all of our new episodes. Follow us on socials at Cables to Clouds. You can also visit our website for all of the show notes at CablesToCloudscom. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.