C2C Fortnightly News: Cisco is in love with K8s! - NC2C001

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. Hello and welcome back to the Cables to Clouds podcast. My name is Chris Miles at BGP main on Twitter, not X still not calling it X On Twitter. Joining me, as always, is my beautiful co-host, alex Perkins at Bumps in the Wire and Tim McConaughey at OneGolbez.

Chris Miles: 0:49

So you may be if you didn't hear our last episode, you may be a little confused why you're getting another episode of the pod just a week later after the last one, where we typically release this on a fortnightly basis. So this is actually going to be our first standalone news episode. So not to rehash it too much, we covered this on previous episodes but we're going to start doing a fortnightly news update that's standalone, separate from the podcast episodes, just so we kind of don't kind of time stamp our episodes with guests and things like that. If someone wants to go back and listen to an episode of only guests we had, we don't want them to have to sit through last year's news or something like that eventually, when it gets to that point. So that's what.

Chris Miles: 1:31

We're putting this on its own standalone thing. It's probably going to be a little bit shorter episode, maybe around the 30 minute markers where we're going to try to keep it. We'll see how true to that we actually stay, but that's the idea. So, without further ado, let's get into the inaugural standalone news episode from Cables Cloud. So yeah, like you said, alex, it's been I don't think we've done an actual news coverage for since mid December or something like that. So yeah, you would think during the holidays not much is going to transpire, but a whole bunch of shit happened.

Tim McConnaughy: 2:08

So we've got some pretty news or pretty big news to cover Not just a bunch but like big, heavy hitting news. Yeah.

Chris Miles: 2:16

Even if these like just three major things happened, it would still be a huge news week nonetheless, so let's roll right into it. So, alex, you want to take it away, which? We've talked a little bit about this one already, but let's kind of get into the weeds with it.

Alex Perkins: 2:31

Yeah, and speaking of like interesting timing, I think this one came out like the week right after. During Christmas between Christmas and New Year's was Cisco's intent to buy Isovalent and this one just kicked off. Right, this is the first of the really big announcements, but, man, personally, this came out of nowhere, like I was not expecting such a crazy acquisition. I thought Isovalent was prepping to be like that next big unicorn. For those that don't know, they make a product called Silium. Well, they've basically created EBPF and one of the products that came from that is called Silium, and Silium is basically a CNI or a container networking interface, right. So it's like a networking plugin for Kubernetes and pretty much everyone that has a Kubernetes distribution, that being like AWS, azure, gcp, right, everyone that has one. They've kind of all standardized on Silium. So that to me, I think, was probably one of the most surprising parts, is that Cisco got. This is amazing deal for Cisco, right? This is super forward thinking on their part, so major congratulations there. I don't know what were your initial impressions of this.

Chris Miles: 3:52

Yeah, it was like you said, came out of left field, did not see it coming. I mean mainly because we don't see. Like I say this a little bit in just we usually don't see moves by Cisco like this that seem so smart in the cloud space. So this one was like damn okay. I think Tim, you kind of touched on this on the last episode it's like okay, somebody's, somebody over there is listening and is tuned in and is making the right moves. Right now it's probably more than just one person, it's probably a well thought team and everything.

Chris Miles: 4:24

But I'm very curious to see where this goes. When you think Cilium, you think their integration with the CNIs container network interface and Cisco's products, that I don't see the direct mapping and like what fits in where? Right, maybe a little bit in the security space with the network policies and things like that. But like I don't know exactly what this is gonna mean. But, like you said, this has already been adopted as pretty much the gold standard for CNIs, right, everyone's using that as pretty much the industry standard. So they immediately are gonna have an inlet to a lot of the foreground there. So I'm curious to see where it's gonna go. I don't know how. About you, tim?

Tim McConnaughy: 5:08

Yeah, I mean I covered. We talked about this on the last episode and of course I'm seeing the shorts now come out from the last episode that where are we talking about this? So it's kind of time-leaning funny. So Isevellin is a major contributor to the Cilium project, so I'm curious to see. I think Cisco's always struggled a little bit with that balance between having to show value to shareholders and also being able to be kind of that contributor, if you will, to open source type of projects. I think everybody is holding their breath. Wait and see how the hammer's gonna fall on this, and I don't actually think we're gonna get an answer in any short period of time, right? So yeah, go ahead.

Alex Perkins: 5:53

I think the acquisition doesn't close until the end of 2024 or two.

Tim McConnaughy: 5:58

Yeah, I mean it's gonna be a very long time before we see anything. And right, and even after that they're gonna have to go through integration and incubation and just trying to figure out, like what the hell are we gonna do with this? Right, so they'll have a plan, I mean, especially since the acquisition is not gonna close until the end of 2024, like you said, like when they did this with Viptella before the acquisition was even closed.

Tim McConnaughy: 6:19

We had, you know there were Viptella people inside Cisco doing you know we were learning about Viptella and stuff inside Cisco ahead of time, so they're already working on that. I'm not worried about that. I think everybody's waiting with bated breath to understand what Cisco's plans for Cilium. You know, as a major contributor, that IceValan is and EBPF as well. Right, that's a huge deal that impacts a lot of open source projects beyond just Cilium, you know, oh yeah.

Chris Miles: 6:45

And we should probably touch on like just because Cisco is acquiring IceValan and getting Cilium, it's more than just Cilium. Right, like they have the other, what are like Tetragon, is that another?

Alex Perkins: 6:56

one Tetragon's like the observability. Yeah, it's a big, or sorry, tetragon is a security piece, yeah right.

Chris Miles: 7:04

And then service mesh. They have their own service mesh, don't they? Isn't that an yeah Cilium service mesh, yeah.

Alex Perkins: 7:10

And real quick. Sorry to interrupt, but the thing about the Cilium service mesh is that it's agent. It's like a sidecar list, right.

Chris Miles: 7:18

Yeah, no sidecar. And.

Alex Perkins: 7:19

I put that in quotations for those that aren't watching, because there's a huge debate in the service mesh community around what it actually means to not have a sidecar proxies next to all your containers, so that's gonna be another interesting thing to watch play out.

Chris Miles: 7:35

I haven't seen that discourse. Is it just like splitting hairs on technically whether or not you can call it a sidecar?

Tim McConnaughy: 7:40

Or is it like okay, yeah, we should call a service mesh, or yeah.

Alex Perkins: 7:45

There's a lot we need to talk about.

Tim McConnaughy: 7:46

yeah, Go ahead.

Alex Perkins: 7:48

I'll be super quick, but basically MTLS is used a lot right? Service mesh allows all these different containers to talk to each other using MTLS. The problem is that that basically requires some kind of agent. The argument is like how can you say that you're not using a sidecar but you have MTLS going because you need something there to broker that connection?

Tim McConnaughy: 8:10

Chicken and egg type.

Alex Perkins: 8:12

Yeah, there are definitely some arguments on the back end around this, for sure.

Tim McConnaughy: 8:16

Yeah, makes sense. I think we have it planned on the roadmap for this year. But to have these more and more of these CNI type of side, these kind of discussions it's becoming very obvious that most of our listener base might not be up to date on a lot of these stuff that we're talking about. It's coming Well, especially as we see it more and more in the news, more and more in our networking data lives. We're going to put together something to us or talk about Kubernetes.

Chris Miles: 8:43

There's definitely a lot of people going on this journey, whether or not they want to or not, for real. We will do our best to try to help along the way. All right, so let's go to the next one. Probably was bigger than the first one, but I'll let you take it away, Tim.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:03

Man, wow, again, this has just been the time for bombshells. Man, I don't know if everybody was just waiting for this time of the year, when it was going to be quiet, to just drop the biggest bombs possible. Heel of Packard Enterprise is acquiring Juniper Networks, which what no?

Chris Miles: 9:23

had no clue.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:26

I don't even know how to follow up that piece of data. You talk about Adelaide Field and not seeing that one coming. I think we all knew that Juniper had been. Actually, what's funny is, I actually felt like Juniper was finally finding their own way in a way that not just being the the shadow, the Cisco shadow, or the foil to Cisco that had been for so many years, and actually coming into its own identity, especially with things like the MIST and Napstra and all of that. Yeah, this one's really, really surprising. For those who haven't seen it yet again, heel of Packard Enterprise is buying Juniper Networks to just basically, hpe is huge, hpe is gigantic. It's one of those global conglomeration things where they just got everything. They're buying Juniper for approximately $14 billion. The valuation is also very interesting to me.

Chris Miles: 10:22

Yeah, it seems like nothing. That seems, Well, not nothing. $14 billion and something, nothing. You would think Juniper is worth more than that. I wonder if that plays into it.

Tim McConnaughy: 10:32

Well, cisco bought Splunk. For what? $28 or whatever right $28,.

Chris Miles: 10:36

yeah, it's a double, literally double the number. Yeah, yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 10:41

Yeah, so from a, of course, I've already started seeing and, if I'm being honest, contributed to all of the memes out there showing how your router is going to refuse to send packets because it's low on toner.

Chris Miles: 10:55

Yeah, the Juniper, the chassis one with the printer on top was the fucking DOS.

Alex Perkins: 10:59

Oh, I know the killer killer.

Chris Miles: 11:01

Yeah, dude, it was so fucking fun.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:04

Yeah, or the yeah, or like hey, I need you to send these packets. No, I'm low on cyan, but it is important to point out that Hewlett-Pekard Enterprises is a subsidiary.

Chris Miles: 11:15

Whatever, you call it. It's not HP. Yeah, it's not.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:18

HP, your printer company. Right, it's all the same global core, but it is a completely different and well-seasoned arm of the company, if you will. I mean HPE. Like I said, they've got a bunch of other technologies. They're heavy in compute, so there's a lot of speculation about this. I personally, a lot of people are saying, hey, maybe it's going to be. They're doing this to get a strong networking seat at the table. I don't know that. I agree, unless it was just like a target opportunity where it was cheap enough that they were like, okay, well, we can go ahead and buy this and pull this, pick this up. I think all the AI work that Juniper's done is very loud and out there and people know about it and might have worked into it too. I'm wondering how much we're going to see companies getting snapped up like this if they have AI, IP or something, as the race continues.

Chris Miles: 12:09

I mean that has to be it right, because I can't see HPE be like oh, we really want the service provider centralized market. That couldn't have been their target. It has to be. The AI missed all this stuff, right? Daniel did make a great post about this. What does this mean? No-transcript Comments flying out left and right like it's more like I'm concerned to see what dies as a result of this. Yeah, you know what happens with what happens with Aruba, like what? How does that factor into this? And because Juniper missed is is miss the wireless thing there's has miss expanded it to more than just wireless. At this point, it's. It's like there's just a rocky type thing.

Tim McConnaughy: 12:53

It's like that, yeah but if I was it, if I, if I worked for Aruba at this point, I would be probably a little, a little nervous, right Like Aruba, unless they're gonna try to position it as like a upmarket sell right so that they don't impact Aruba at all. You know, let's say which I don't know, like maybe it's. Yeah, I definitely know, definitely nobody thinks I I'm gonna say nobody, I'm sure somebody does that like, hey, aruba is like the same class of of technology and and Hardware as, say, you know, juniper, cisco, whatever you will right it's more definitely I don't, I don't get that feeling. So, yeah, I guess we're gonna, we're gonna see, but that's anyway so not to believe at the point. But that is, that's a big bombshell. I'm not sure when this one's gonna close or I think everybody's just gonna have to wait and see what HP is gonna do. Hopefully they don't pull a broad calm. Well, well, we'll get to that one later.

Alex Perkins: 13:45

Roke, yeah, real quick, because Chris just made me think of something that I hadn't really thought of until now. But you know, as far as like getting the service provider industry, I I could see an argument you know about. Maybe they are targeting that in some way, because a lot of the Press release was about AI and maybe this is like 40 chests and they're thinking ahead of, like you know, as AI expands to the edge more they'll already be there entrenched into some of like the service provider Telco kind of space that's already on the edge building those edge networks, right.

Chris Miles: 14:17

That's like a service offering type thing.

Alex Perkins: 14:19

Yeah, kind of like they'll just already be there and they already have like the data center portion of the AI stuff figured out. I don't know there's something there that I'd have to really flesh out a little bit more, but your, your comments, just made me kind of think about that a little bit more.

Chris Miles: 14:34

Yeah, you might be honest something. Maybe we'll see apsha at the edge. Maybe that's what they're gonna do.

Tim McConnaughy: 14:41

Yeah.

Chris Miles: 14:42

Just gone bro, it's like yeah, I can't.

Tim McConnaughy: 14:44

This is I can't see it. I truly cannot see that apsha surviving this acquisition. But you know who knows?

Chris Miles: 14:51

Yeah, that's this one Like I can't like express how out of left field, this thing was like. I was like it was like that'd be like somebody like oh yeah, blockbusters acquiring Cisco or Netflix or something like. What like is like, this thing that you kind of think of is old and archaic and not necessarily old and archaic In their entire product offering, but in their network offering. You know, you don't think, you don't really consider HPE a Top player at all. Right, yeah, they come out.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:23

They've just been around.

Chris Miles: 15:24

Forever is all right, they just better.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:26

That's their claim to fame. It's just, it's like it's if IBM, you know, bought I don't know, like if IBM bought a Rista or something.

Alex Perkins: 15:34

Hey, you never know, now we got, we got everything else.

Chris Miles: 15:38

We got a couple weeks left in this month, bro. We could. It might be the trend, okay. So, yeah, let's onto the next one. So this one yet Well, I, I, I will say this one made me think immediately that it was kind of a doomsday thing for GCP, which is probably not the case now that we've looked at this a little bit further. But so Google has announced that they will stop charging egress fees to transfer data out of Google Cloud, and I think this, like the, I believe the target point in the article was that you know they'll help you migrate to another or they won't charge you to migrate your data to another cloud. But I think that didn't. They have a like a clause in there that you actually have to close your Google account once once that happens. So you got to like, you got to get the hell out Like you can't. It's like you know you don't have to stay here, but you got to leave.

Alex Perkins: 16:27

Don't let the door hit you on your own.

Chris Miles: 16:29

Yeah.

Alex Perkins: 16:29

Yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:30

What was also interesting is that you do it as like they. It doesn't quote, unquote cost anything, but it's on a rebate model, right. So it costs you, but they'll rebate you essentially at the end, right.

Chris Miles: 16:40

But yeah, I mean initially you think like, oh, like is this? Is this? Is this the first like piece of the sunset the sunset dominoes for for GCP. Is this then being like yeah, go ahead, go ahead, we'll see you later. But no, I mean, Tim, you, you actually found some some documentation out there that this might be related to actually like regulations, so maybe you want to speak on it a little bit more.

Tim McConnaughy: 17:08

Yeah just real quick. So actually I didn't. So you know I work at ABA tricks. We have a. We have a, you know, presence in Europe. One of the legal team in Europe was said actually, you know that there's a new data law I forget what the I think it's actually called data law or something like that. It's actually got like a super generic name it's coming out and some part of it had something to do with with killing egress fees, at least in in Europe. I'm not. I have to go read through it. I haven't had a chance to read through it yet because I just found out about it.

Tim McConnaughy: 17:39

And then actually I subscribed to Forest Brazil's Brazil, brazil, brazil, brazil, Brazil, brazil, his newsletter, since you know years so you know two years ago or three years ago now, that he did the cloud resume challenge and all that and he actually had it in his newsletter that he just put out and he had a different take on it. He had really good takes on it actually, you know, and he just actually just left Google. He'd worked there for a while and, yeah, so he had mentioned it. He said I didn't really think it was. That was the case. I'll I'll.

Tim McConnaughy: 18:12

It's a newsletter, but like, I'll get it, get his, we'll make sure we have his intro in the article notes somewhere or you can take a look at it and whatnot, but he didn't necessarily think it was. It was that, you know. But I was originally. I was just like you, chris, where I thought it was going to be where I thought it was going to be. Oh crap, like actually, I took the other track and I thought, oh well, maybe Google's doing this, so people will use Google more that are already in other clouds. But yeah, this whole the way this article is written, it's like it's just like a, like an exit strategy, like which is really, really weird to me.

Alex Perkins: 18:46

I think it's hilarious that right, chris, you were saying how a lot of people immediately thought oh God, is this? It Is this one? Google kills GCP. And and then Tim, in that that newsletter you sent us he had. The part of the article is about how everybody thinks that immediately, anytime, google makes any announcement, you can't blame us.

Chris Miles: 19:06

You can't blame us. No, it's all the time, like, like you know it's, it's if it looks one of, it looks like a whatever like a duck. Yeah, but, yeah, I mean. But I wonder if that's it like, if they do stop charging egress fees in the EU, I wonder how many people are going to start just backhauling internet traffic through the EU. If it's not a sensitive latency, sensitive workload, maybe they'll start backhauling the.

Tim McConnaughy: 19:39

EU. Well, you don't want to do that, though, because then you fall into GDPR and a whole other can of worms comes into play.

Chris Miles: 19:47

That's true, but maybe just Netflix, I don't know.

Tim McConnaughy: 19:51

I'm just like I have a question mark here. Originally I thought, hey, this might be a smart move for them to use, because I think we'd all be clear that they're not the leader, obviously, in the CSPs right.

Tim McConnaughy: 20:04

No, their offers, generally the service offers, aren't one-to-one with AWS and Azure, just the services that are available as a one-stop shop for a cloud, if you will, are not one-to-one. I thought when I first read this oh crap, it's actually really smart for Google. They're going to lean into the fact that they know compute, the fact that they are K8s, the fact that they are AI. They'll make it easier for customers to get in and actually move data out of the cloud to the clouds where they are and just harvest the compute cost. Yeah, now I'm still scratching my head.

Alex Perkins: 20:40

I was hoping to read that somewhere, but yeah, I didn't see anyone even saying that. I agree, it would have been a good play to frame it that way.

Chris Miles: 20:50

Yeah, so interesting. We'll see how that one boils out. Pretty much these three things. It's just the tip of the iceberg thing, right it's all going to grow into something much bigger.

Alex Perkins: 21:02

I saw a quote recently or not a quote, but just like somebody said something online recently that I thought was really interesting, that it was a prediction that years are going to increasingly look different going forward. It's so true. I'm just thinking of the last couple of years since COVID and how everything has changed so much every year. Tech, especially, is just. I'd like this. In two weeks we had all these crazy announcements. Things just move so fast these days and so unexpectedly. It's going to be a crazy year.

Tim McConnaughy: 21:35

I don't know how you plan your career path at this point anymore.

Alex Perkins: 21:39

Yeah, I don't either.

Chris Miles: 21:43

Yeah, dude, I'm glad we're not in our early 20s anymore.

Tim McConnaughy: 21:46

Yeah, I feel for the people who are just starting to get into tech. I wouldn't know how could you spend more than two weeks on anything without it changing underneath you?

Chris Miles: 21:54

Yeah, no kidding, yeah, so I guess we'll round up this last one. I know we're coming close to time on this. Alex, you want to touch on this last one about VMware?

Alex Perkins: 22:07

Yeah, vmware, they already announced this a little while ago. I think people were just surprised when they actually did it. For some reason, they basically took all their accounts private. Is that the wording? I think I'm messing up the wording, but they took all their partner accounts internal.

Alex Perkins: 22:26

They shut off the partner program and it's on hold. They literally told partners don't even apply for reinstatement. We'll let you know when we can start redoing this pipeline. And you have to sell 500,000 a year or something of services to be even considered. It's crazy, man, how quickly they just are cutting things out. They already cut out all these external communities. They cut off the partner program now. Things moved very quickly.

Tim McConnaughy: 22:55

Yeah, I was joking with someone it might have been Will actually that I was like they have to pay this Apparently. Whatever they spent on acquiring VMware, they must have to pay it back really fast. Maybe it's a 3-1 arm or something like a mortgage or something, I don't know. It's insanely how quickly they are absolutely gutting any kind or moving to capture every last penny.

Alex Perkins: 23:20

Remember the day the acquisition happened. People were posting pictures of like look they've already changed the signs. It's everywhere. They already posted over.

Chris Miles: 23:30

That has an immediate impact on business for them and for all the partners. I will say I haven't been close enough to it to say but is this going to cause partners to die? If?

Alex Perkins: 23:44

you're a VMware integrator? Yeah, absolutely.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:48

If you just lost your entire channel? Yeah, how would that go? If you were a VCP and you worked at a VAR and that VAR lost its ability to do channel partner with VMware? Yeah, I mean, how does that work? I have no idea how that would work.

Chris Miles: 24:09

Was it blanket, like everyone, or do you think there were some backdoor deals where, like look, we'll keep this open?

Tim McConnaughy: 24:15

I think there were one or two huge integrators that they kept but they were the ones that were like I don't know if it was really WWT, but like the WWTs of the VMware partner program, I think were probably the only ones left.

Alex Perkins: 24:28

Yeah right, tim, you're making a good point too. What's going to happen to certification program? There's a lot of downfall from this that could happen down the line.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:42

Yeah, I mean if you cut out the, if you cut a large part of the career track out, where that people would have gone to integrators to help customers do VMware integrations or something like that. Yeah, dude, it's a house of cards that I'm kind of curious. If fraud can't even realize or cares, the answer is no to that one. If they pulled that, you know the rug pull, they've done.

Chris Miles: 25:05

All right. Well, I think we're about time. There are some other articles that we'll put into the into the Fortnightly News document. So if you check the show notes, there will be a link to that. There will be a couple of the links. The first stuff that we found interesting, one about how to break into a cloud engineering career. Yeah, ebpf predictions from Isovalent. That one's probably pretty, pretty topical, pretty good to read, so we'll throw that in the show notes. So definitely check that out for some additional news that happened over the last few weeks here. So with that we will wrap it up.

Chris Miles: 25:36

Like I said, this was the inaugural standalone news episode, so we're going to bring this to you on a fortnightly basis. Again, we have the listener survey out there. We've posted it on socials, we'll put it in the show notes and and all that. So please fill out the listener survey if you haven't. That would greatly help us to make sure that we're bringing you something that you want to hear on on now a weekly basis. You will be hearing Keebl's Clouds once every every Wednesday.

Alex Perkins: 26:03

Chris has been waiting to say that since we started Just so I do we get think if we could say every Wednesday, how good that will be.

Chris Miles: 26:11

But yeah, so we will be releasing this on a. You know, the podcast will have a release every every week. It'll be fortnightly, between news and and an episode with either guest or round table type thing. And you know, we're working on some stuff for this year, hopefully some more technical content focusing on, you know, solutions, things like that. We got some good feedback that people want to hear that, so we'll be working on that. Lastly, any, any closing thoughts from either of you guys?

Tim McConnaughy: 26:41

Slow down. Please Stop buying companies. Just for just a week or two would be fine. Really, you got to catch up.

Alex Perkins: 26:48

Yeah, no same thing. I just echo that. I mean it's crazy, Like there's supposed to be holidays and slow down time and instead we got just our, our our our talking on discord privately. Man, it's been like nonstop just talking about all this, all these bombshell announcements, one after another.

Chris Miles: 27:04

So yeah, please slow down. Well, if in case it doesn't slow down, we'll talk to you in two weeks with the next news update. But yeah, so this has been cables clouds. Thanks for checking it out. Hit the subscribe, hit the like button, all that, all that crap, right and we'll. We'll see you next week. Hi everyone, it's Chris 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 podcatcher, as well as subscribe and turn on notifications for our YouTube channel to be notified of all our new episodes. Follow us on socials at cables to clouds. You can also visit our website for all of the show notes at cables to cloudscom. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.