C2C Fortnightly News: Frontier/Nile partnership, Equinix Cloud Router, and US Policy Moves - NC2C002

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 your Cables to Clouds Fortnite-ly news episode. We're going to jump right into this one. There wasn't a whole lot of news compared to two weeks ago when we talked about all the acquisitions, but we do have a couple of things to cover here for you today. So, tim, why don't you go ahead and kick us off today?

Tim McConnaughy: 0:48

Yeah, sure thing. And just to be clear, this news is not about Fortnite. This is just Fortnite-ly news.

Alex Perkins: 0:55

So it's very important. I forgot to make that one.

Tim McConnaughy: 0:57

Yeah, it's not about Fortnite For now we might start doing whatever season of Fortnite. We'll do our seasonal Fortnite news as well, but for now, okay. So the first headline has to do with frontier communications. The service provider slash cable provider is now adding a new managed service to its portfolio and it's going to be offering Nile. So Nile the network as a managed service. So I'm curious how that whole pass-through is going to work. But so yeah, for those who already know, nile is a network service company, but it's made like a year or two I guess it's been a little over a year now since it was all over the news as this new offering Network service means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.

Tim McConnaughy: 1:53

Nile's take on it it's probably closest to what you would actually assume when you say the word is network as a service, where basically they're subscription based, so they own the hardware, they essentially install the hardware in your location, license you on a per user model, do all of the port security and all of that, basically manage the network for you. So yeah, and it's all cloud. It's like the cloud based, being able to be elastic with your users and stuff. It's really interesting stuff actually. So Frontier is, I guess, going to be like a pass-through partner for Nile and just be able to add Frontier customers. Or if you as a Frontier customer want to take advantage of a network as a service type of business opportunity, you don't have to go straight to Nile, you can go through Frontier and then Frontier will go to Nile, I guess, and just kind of put their name on the bill for you. I'm not sure how this is going to work out yet.

Alex Perkins: 2:51

A managed service for your managed service. Exactly so I saw it as well.

Tim McConnaughy: 2:56

It's like inception. How deep can we go on this one? But yeah, so what do you guys think about this?

Alex Perkins: 3:04

It is kind of cool Like the article reads kind of you know, this seems like it's going to be more aimed at business users, right, like they provide business networking for people. So it's like an additional hey, not only can we provide your internet, we can also provide all your campus networking as well. So I'm sure there's going to be a lot of other MSPs ISPs, whatever you want to call them that are going to jump on this train too. So I'm sure we'll see more of this.

Chris Miles: 3:34

Yeah, and like you said, tim, like networking as a service means a lot of things to a lot of different people At least. Niles is probably the most straightforward interpretation of it. It's like we own all the gear and we provide you a full Fledge network and it's a fully automated service. So it's not surprising to see this one taking off. Kind of surprised, it was Frontier. I don't know how big Frontier's footprint is at this point, and also as an MSP in that regard as well. So I don't know if they're going to front in some of the stuff for Nile as well, like how that's actually going to work. But yeah, I guess maybe we should relate this to cloud as well, because Nile offers a lot of this through the cloud. Is that right? I'm not the most familiar with their product feature set.

Alex Perkins: 4:26

Yeah, my understanding is like the dashboard that you interact with is all the management is kind of cloud based.

Tim McConnaughy: 4:33

Yeah, kind of like that.

Alex Perkins: 4:36

Maraki style Right.

Tim McConnaughy: 4:37

Yeah, what's interesting about the Nile model is, like I said, it's probably closest to the most pure version of network as a service where, since they own the gear, if a switch breaks at 3am, they actually come out and replace it and, like they or they upgrade it right. If it's time for a tech refresh, they're actually going to come out and refresh your tech. So you keep all that off your budget seat. So that's a really interesting way to do it.

Chris Miles: 5:03

It's probably a great move for Nile as well, because they can not in this way outsource, but they can have the frontier techs doing a lot of this stuff right, because I mean, if you think about that, we're doing upgrades and replacements. Right, yeah, it's scale out of that the human infrastructure to actually replace a lot of this gear and perform the manual labor there. So it's a good move for sure.

Tim McConnaughy: 5:25

Yeah, I think we'll see a lot more of this with the MSP crowd. I mean, it's almost like a tongue and groove kind of fit, really. So pretty interesting stuff, and I think now we just need to wait and see how frontier rolls it out and see how well-adopted it becomes as a partner. I assume Nile is doing the same thing, trying to figure out hey, is this our go-to market for partners or something like that.

Alex Perkins: 5:47

Yeah, for sure. All right, Chris, you want to move us to the next?

Chris Miles: 5:51

one, sure. So, yeah, next up, we have. So on the 17th of Jan, we saw an announcement from Equinix that they were releasing something called the Equinix Fabric Cloud Router. So it's basically this service, and if you work, probably, in a Megaport centered shop, you probably got your arms back fold in like, oh, equinix is finally coming to the table, because this is something that I think Megaport has offered for a while.

Chris Miles: 6:18

But so, on top of Equinix's fabric, which is basically just a virtual fabric that they build that you can leverage as a service between all data centers that you host within Equinix, they've offered something called this Fabric Cloud Router, which focuses on basically the way they're leveraging. This is cloud-to-cloud communications as well as hybrid cloud communications. So you have the option to deploy these Fabric Cloud Routers. You can connect them over a highly redundant backbone that they built across the fabric. It seems like a big portion of this is that cloud-to-cloud communication, so it could be your multi-cloud environments pushing traffic from AWS to Azure to Oracle, etc. So, like I said, this is something that Megaport has had, I think, for a little while. Looks like they're getting good aggregation numbers. They're expecting to support up to 50 gigs pretty soon and, like I said, they have the fabric.

Chris Miles: 7:19

You know, you know how large Equinix's footprint is right, and they have that fabric built between all those data centers so you could be connecting these remote data centers using this FCR, as we'll call it, across multiple regions as well. There's also a point in here about AWS Outposts being used with this as well. So putting the rack on gear, or sorry, putting the gear on site at your location and then using the FCR on the back end, which is something I didn't necessarily think of, but I'm curious to see how people will be using that in the future. But yeah, I think this is a good move. It's probably them playing a bit of catch up, but also adding a lot of, you know, feature-rich things to their portfolio for Equinix. How do you guys feel about it?

Tim McConnaughy: 8:10

So I don't know the the Megaport side of it too well. I'll be honest, I've really kind of always kind of ignored Megaport, to be honest, not for any regular reason, it just wasn't relevant to what I was doing. But does Megaport have something like Equinix fabric? I mean, they're basically, as my understanding is, megaport basically is just a virtual overlay port type of setup anyway, right. So do they actually have a quote unquote fabric like the Equinix fabric or that is a good question.

Chris Miles: 8:40

I can't remember if they have the option for the fabric to build across the data centers, but they definitely have the local capabilities for building virtual circuits and things like that.

Tim McConnaughy: 8:50

Yeah, that part I remember, and the reason I was bringing it up is because, yeah, megaport's had a virtual router, but not backed by, necessarily backed by something like the Equinix fabric which put those two together, and actually it's quite an interesting offering. So that's yeah.

Alex Perkins: 9:06

Yeah, I mean, I agree I also don't know much about Megaport's solution, but this space just continues to get a bit more and more crowded, it seems like all the time, and it's interesting because so many companies are at a different level or someone will have a feature that someone else doesn't have and you can kind of like see where things are headed. So it'll be just another thing to watch right in the cloud networking space as things evolve and features get added and you see, each company is kind of unique take on what this means, on how to connect multi clouds and on-prem and all the different stuff. So to me it's just something really to watch out for a lot and, like I said, equinix has a pretty large base already. So we'll see.

Chris Miles: 9:52

Yeah, one thing I was looking for that I couldn't find was pricing on this, because I know, at least on the Megaport side, if you try to actually scale this thing out to the level of redundancy that you would have on-prem, it gets pretty pricey right. So I imagine Equinix is probably going to be in that camp as well, Not to say it's not worth it for the capabilities you get and the built-in redundancy it's. You know you're offloading that cost of building the redundancy to Equinix, just like you do with your compute in the cloud, right?

Alex Perkins: 10:24

Yeah that's right, so it's a similar model.

Chris Miles: 10:26

So it's very well, could be worth it. But yeah, I'm curious to see the pricing on this. I probably just didn't Google hard enough, if I'm being honest with you, but I had a look and I couldn't see it. But we'll see where it goes, or it's hidden.

Tim McConnaughy: 10:39

Yeah, I'm not sure I've seen it either. Actually I'm very curious because you know a lot of. Obviously there's other cloud networking providers out there. I mean, how would two of us work for one? You know, just to address that elephant in the room We've. You know, and you know ABA Tricks has been partnering with Equinix for some period of time now with the ABA Tricks Edge fabric offering, you know, in addition to the hardware offering. So I'm very curious to see what direction Equinix takes this and also just like what their, what their velocity is on this. Like today it's a cloud router, we know. How far are they looking to take this offering? Are they looking to build it in security stuff, like you know ABA Tricks has, or do some of the application stuff, the application focused steering, like really the high level application level focused stuff, like kind of like Alkira and Prasamo do as well, you know, like that's you just have, or make it more managed, right.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:37

Right or make it more managed.

Alex Perkins: 11:38

Yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:39

Everybody wants an easy button. You know, is Equinix going to go the route of like actually, let's make this super easy and try to satisfy the whole thing, which, which brings frozen cons as well. You can make it very easy, but then you can't change anything, right? It's like it's the constant balance between pushing it away and bringing it in a house, right? So, yeah, I'm very, very interested to see the. Not only you know what the offer looks like and the pricing especially, but also what is the velocity of feature development? Or is this it? Is this the feature? Is this the offer?

Chris Miles: 12:08

Yeah, I mean it's. The thing is I don't know how much I can make. I mean, obviously I'm sure Equinix isn't going to turn down more, more market cap and things like that. But the the thing is, equinix, they do one thing very well, they do several things very well, but they will one thing really, and that's the fundamentals of the infrastructure. Right, it's that basic component and I feel like I don't know if they want to get into this. You know adding, you know kind of added on capability to the actual data plane of traffic, right, like we own, you know where what's controlling the packets getting from point A to point B. I don't know if they really want to add that kind of this. What software?

Tim McConnaughy: 12:47

They want to move up the stack? Yeah, exactly.

Chris Miles: 12:49

I feel like that's a whole can of worms that they could open, but I mean not to say that they can't do it. They definitely have the capabilities at some point, but yeah, I just don't know. I feel like they need to stick to the basics and I think this is a good way to do that.

Tim McConnaughy: 13:06

That's their strength and what they should do. And you know and I'm not saying this because I work with A Beatrix, but really more like you know, just having been around the industry long enough to learn this lesson, which is, you know, if you are very good at one thing and people buy a lot of that one thing that you do, it's usually better to try to partner with people who also have the same do one thing really well than to try to like overtake them and do that thing Like, unless the net, unless the cap, unless the cap is so high that you have you know that you can take it and you know when it's usually not worth it.

Chris Miles: 13:40

Yeah, that's the thing, though is like, like you said, to just hit that point home, this isn't it all to do with us working for AB Beatrix, but, like. One thing I can say for sure is, if there's one company that I hear very few complaints about that has as much wide adoption as they have, it's Equinix. You don't hear people complaining about what they do. Everything is very simple, it's true. It's like there's no source about it right, it just works.

Chris Miles: 14:08

So you know, I mean, this seems pretty par for the course for them. It's not. You know, they're not reinventing the wheel. I think them just adding more of that core component that they address right. So we'll see.

Alex Perkins: 14:20

Yeah, absolutely All right. The next one is pretty quick. So Google Cloud partners with Huggingface to attract AI developers. I know what a name, right, I actually pulled up their site just because I've not an AI expert in any mean right, so just to see exactly what they call themselves. And it says the platform where the machine learning community collaborates on models, data sets and applications. I guess my understanding is kind of like an open source, like you know, a place where all these things can be stored, where people can kind of host their all these things. Go ahead, tim.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:01

I think I think I think it was like a GitHub type of you know, like data models and data sets, and all that.

Alex Perkins: 15:10

So I think this is I don't know that it's super significant, because I assume everybody's going to either come out with their own marketplace right to compete directly against them.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:20

Some of them already have.

Alex Perkins: 15:21

Or they will partner with Huggingface, right, so right, exactly. So I think this is just another thing that we'll continue to see. A bunch more of you guys got any thoughts on it?

Chris Miles: 15:30

No, I think you pretty much covered this. This isn't that surprising. I feel like there's probably going to be more announcements very similar to this in the coming, you know months, but yeah, it's pretty unsurprising.

Tim McConnaughy: 15:43

The one thing I would add to this and it's not even necessarily about the specific article, but it's kind of a dark horse type thing is I'm waiting for so okay. So on Twitter, there's multiple people who are all saying, basically, that a lot of enterprises are going to go build their own like AI stack because they have to for compliance reasons and they have to for you know for because they don't want their data getting out there. And I personally tend to disagree with this because I think it's absolutely insane the amount of you know stuff that's going to be required to build your own AI workloads. What I think we'll probably see and it's not like I said, it's more like a tangent to this what we'll probably see is the CSP is offering more walled garden type solutions like this.

Alex Perkins: 16:28

Yeah, which I agree with you completely, tim and I mean the cloud exists because companies didn't want to manage a data center. I just don't see how they want to manage an AI center as well. That's just even more stuff. I mean somebody will.

Tim McConnaughy: 16:45

Maybe the government will do it. I mean, if anybody would do it, the government would. The federal government would build something like that. They got that giant mountain in Utah but for the most enterprises, even if they want to keep it or for compliance reasons, and you keep that data separate, the CSPs would be stupid not to offer a Waldgarden version of this, basically for them.

Alex Perkins: 17:04

All right. Speaking of I guess this is kind of related to Waldgardens Tim, you want to have the next one, yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 17:12

Speaking of Waldgardens or more like Chainlink fences, really. So this is really interesting. The Biden administration has basically said that they're launching a new federal or trying to get new federal regulation launched to stop China from utilizing capacity like compute capacity within America. So they're launching this Know your Customer type of regulation to keep China from basically being able to train and advance its AI technology using CSP resources like AWS or Google Open AI Azure. And my first question is how? I want to know how they're going to make this happen. So what do you guys think?

Alex Perkins: 17:58

Yeah, I mean that's a good question. I don't think that this was made with the idea of what it would actually take in mind. I think it was just to get something out there. We should do this. Yeah, get it in place, get the framework and the idea out there and then kind of build the framework and how it will actually work afterwards. That's just my opinion.

Chris Miles: 18:20

Yeah, it's typical government being out of touch with how technology actually works. Right, absolutely. They put the stamp on the paper like, yeah, we should do this. I shouldn't be able to use our technology to build AI models. I was like, well, all right, this is like someone putting together a design at the top layer and handing the shit sandwich to someone down at the bottom.

Tim McConnaughy: 18:43

It's like you guys figure this out, right, you figure out how to make this happen.

Chris Miles: 18:46

Yeah, so yeah, like I read this and I was like all right, good luck, I'd like to see how you do it.

Tim McConnaughy: 18:55

I mean to be fair, I mean you know. So we and some people don't know that, some people in technology don't even know this, but we've had export regulations for things to China for a very long time. Like anybody who's worked at Cisco or with Cisco Gear and tried to put anything in China is aware that, for example, you can't get HSEC licensing, like the high security, like high encryption licensing, stuff like that right, because they don't want China to be able to steal some of that encryption technology. How effective that's been, I don't know right, but I'm just saying the actual idea has been there for quite a long time and I understand that the idea is that, hey, we don't export these highly advanced you know, I don't know chips, silicon, whatever AI technology, whatever the hell it's looking like or whatever whatever they think it looks like, to China to let them build their own stuff. But I'm very confused on how they plan to stop the utilization of four you know, four lease, four, rent, compute payments.

Alex Perkins: 19:57

Yeah, that's the thing. The article even talks about the chips, like you said, and I do agree with the sentiment. Right, it makes sense that they would want to restrict it. But, yeah, the practical implications, like how do you actually do it, that's just I don't know.

Chris Miles: 20:13

It's probably just one of those things based on accountability and fear right If they can prove that you didn't make any kind of effort to stop this from happening, then they can sue you type thing. So I imagine that's where the ball is rolling towards, but I don't know. Like you said, we, as people in technology, know how much you can manipulate the system to try to do something and make it look like you're doing it from somewhere else, not inside China. It's not that hard. So yeah, exactly, yeah, I don't know, we'll see.

Tim McConnaughy: 20:47

Yeah, so let's just see, I guess, how this one goes as well. I'm curious to see if any actual legislation comes out of this and, if it comes out of it, what the actual enforcement, what the actual teeth of the thing, will be.

Alex Perkins: 20:58

Yeah, 100%, all right. Last one before we wrap up. So this one is kind of timely, right, with the recent news about the acquisition of Isovalent by Cisco. So Bill Mulligan he's like the community manager at Isovalent he wrote an article called the Future of Service Mesh is Networking.

Alex Perkins: 21:21

I think this is great, right? Yeah, I've talked about this stuff, how I see it all combining and how there's not enough network engineers talking about this stuff and Bill's not even a network engineer. So it's funny seeing all this coming coming from different angles. But to some it's a pretty long article. It's really good if you take the time to read through it. But to sum it up, there is a key takeaway right at the top, and I'm just going to read the last one. It's the Future of Service. Mesh is as a networking feature, not a product category, and to me that makes a lot of sense, right, because at a high level I'll just say that I was telling you guys this earlier. As network engineers we work like layers one through three or four, right, we don't really go up too much higher in the stack, and ServiceMesh is kind of more about those upper layers, like layer seven routing.

Alex Perkins: 22:08

So just combining that and doing a full stack networking that's really the gist of what this article is about, and I definitely agree. So what do you guys think?

Chris Miles: 22:18

No, yeah, I agree with your sentiment there. One thing I really liked about the article is he kind of walks through the story of how networking got integrated into ServiceMesh or not necessarily integrated network. As we know, networking is in everything.

Chris Miles: 22:30

Right right right, the story of how it evolved right and how things slowly move from user space down to kernel space. And, you know, servicemesh kind of took over that layer where EBPF is right. So that was one thing that I thought was really informative to me. So if you're kind of not familiar with even EBPF's journey as a whole and into the ServiceMesh world, I would recommend reading this just because it gives a nice overview of you know what problems we're trying to be solved at certain layers, you know, in certain, you know, user space versus kernel space. I found that very valuable, so pretty cool.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:07

Yeah, I think it's great. I think it's certainly past time that we're compressing the stack so that we can do this kind of networking and pay attention to all the layers. What has stopped us from doing this in the past, of course, is that anyone who's ever run a firewall knows if you turn on you know deep packet inspection, you know you tank the capacity right. So I don't know if we just got around that with this or if you know we're not worried about that, like because you know we're dealing with much bigger capacity of compute, like that's the one that, as a network engineer, I scratch my head on a little bit because I agree that this is awesome. We should have always. It should have always been this way if it could have been. But I wonder how we've kind of got over the hump where it can be this way.

Chris Miles: 23:54

I think it's. I think it's kind of gone the same way that QoS has right. Like you hear much less about QoS in the days because just more because the pipes have gotten fatter. Right, there's, you know there's less concern about that. I mean, qos is still important, but you know you're not meticulously like trying to schedule voice traffic over a T1 anymore, right.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:15

That's true.

Chris Miles: 24:16

Yeah, I imagine it's kind of the same thing. But.

Alex Perkins: 24:20

I will say that EBPF is magic and takes away a lot of the complexity, and you guys know this already, obviously, but for the audience, there's definitely some episodes coming up in the next few months.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:32

that'll cover a lot of this stuff in some much bigger detail. I mean I'm going to ask these questions. When is time to ask these questions? That's because I know, all the engineers. All those engineers are asking this question, right? You know what we want to know.

Chris Miles: 24:45

Thankfully, we will have the people on who can answer the questions, so we're very excited. Stay tuned.

Alex Perkins: 24:50

All right. Well, that will wrap up our Fortnightly news episode and we will see you guys next week for a regular episode. Thanks for tuning in. 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 podcatcher, 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.