00:00
Welcome to the Cables to Clouds podcast.

00:15
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.

00:32
Hello and welcome everyone to the Cables to Clouds podcast. My name is Chris Miles and joining me today are my two lovely, beautiful co-hosts, Tim McConaughey and Alex Perkins. Yeah, so Alex, how are you doing today? How's your weekend going so far? Doing good. I had a late night maintenance last night. You know, I had to do some firewall upgrades, all the fun old school style stuff, maintenance window.

00:59
So I'm on a bridge by myself until 1 a.m. It was great. Well, wait, wait, you were on a bridge until 1 a.m.? Like, really, were you on a bridge? By yourself. What's the point of the bridge? If you're by yourself. I was on a bridge by myself, yes. I was taking change management to a whole new level. Yes. He's the jury judge and executioner. I'm supposed to do all the work. So, yep. Yeah. So, and then I just hung out, had a pretty lazy day today, hung out with the kids.

01:27
You know, get a couple things outside and that's about it. Tomorrow's Sunday, so finish out the weekend and get back to work on Monday. What about you, Tim? I would like to say I was doing something really exciting, but I wasn't. I was working on data management applications for WGU this weekend, which is a fancy way of saying, yeah, riveting. It's a fancy way of saying MySQL. I was doing one of those assessments where you have to write databases. It was...

01:56
It sucked. It was really bad. You probably had more fun on your alone time bridge. It was therapeutic, right? You know? There's going to be a database admin and no time. Yeah, in the cloud. In the cloud. I'm going to be a cloud database admin. Absolutely. There we go. Yeah. All right, Chris. So what are we doing here? Yeah, so I guess we should probably talk about that, why we're doing a podcast. Why are three more white dudes doing a podcast?

02:26
Yeah, let's get into that. So, you know, with beards, absolutely with beards. So yeah, I think, you know, me, Alex, Tim, we've been colleagues for a long time. We've known each other a long time. And we kind of all followed a similar path, right? We've kind of realized that, that, you know, businesses, enterprises are moving to the cloud. That's been happening for years now, but now it's kind of come to the point where...

02:53
People are begrudgingly or very happily moving to cloud, but nonetheless, it's here. It's here to stay for a while. And we're network infrastructure professionals. We live and breathe networking and we've kind of had to make this transition to cloud networking, which is a very different world. So as individuals that made that transition, we really wanted to just give back and kind of...

03:21
you know, learn new things and also help people that don't know how to make the transition to do so because it was, you know, it wasn't the easiest thing for us. We're still in the process. We're still learning new things every day. It's like drinking from a literal fire hose. So we really just want to do the same with public cloud. So yeah, that's why we're here. Cool. Yeah. I mean, Chris, what's your background? How did you, how did you get into this? Yeah.

03:51
Yeah, so I've been in networking about 10 years. Got my start at a tech support job doing support for high speed internet and cable TV. So started doing, helping people program the remote controls for their houses and things like that. And got the itch for networking when I got a little bit exposure to it. Worked my way up within that company, eventually got my CCNA. And then...

04:19
You know, kind of just kept going. It was all, it was all very monetary focus for a long time. I really just wanted the next job to get the next pay raise, things like that. I found MPLS and that's where I found my, my absolute love for networking. That was, that was the thing that really locked me in. I was like, man, I love this. I was like, this is the coolest shit I've ever seen. It was, it was, uh, uh, I guess that's where I really found my nerdiness for it. You know,

04:45
Yeah, so I eventually worked my way up after I found my passion for it, got my CCIE back in 2019 after probably many, many, many, too many attempts at the CCI lab. But $1,600 lunch. Yeah, the $1,600 lunch. That's what we like to call it. But yeah. I remember entertaining you a few more, a few more than a few times in RTP when you were coming in for the lab. That was a good times.

05:15
Yeah, eventually went to Richardson, went there too many times too. But yeah, so I got my CCIE 2019 and was working at the time for WWT, very large IT integrator consulting company in the US, large Cisco partner. So doing a lot of SD-WAN and really just, you know, a couple of years ago, I was like, what's next? What's next for me? Where do I want to go? What do I want to learn?

05:42
not to shit on Cisco or anything, but the big thing buzzing at the time was SDA and I wasn't too sure about it, wasn't sure if that was where I wanted to go. And really I was listening to, shout out to Jordan Martin from the Network Collective. I was listening to a podcast they were doing about where things are going in networking, what's next. And he had a great insight and he was like, public cloud is this thing that's just really taking off and it's not going anywhere.

06:11
I think I realized that it wouldn't be a bad move to put on, you know, not all my eggs, but a good portion of my eggs in that basket and see where it was going to go. And yeah, here I am. So now I'm a solutions architect at Aviatrix. We do cloud networking and security. And yeah, it's a wild ride. Yeah. So it's been really fun. How about you, Alex? Why did you move? Nice. Yeah.

06:38
Yeah, you know, I spent about 10 years, active duty army, doing just basic help test stuff. There was a little bit of networking, but it wasn't my MPLS moment, right? It never really clicked for me. Eventually got out and I moved to the DC area because with a security clearance and a security plus, right? It's like almost a guaranteed job ticket in that area. I have to come on. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's everywhere.

07:08
So, contract, I was real interested in networking. This is like, I was trying to dip my feet in and see like where I wanted to be, you know, networking or cybersecurity or, it was basically like deciding between these two and I just happened to get a networking position. I was working on the NMCI contract, so giant Navy and Marine Corps network. Oh yeah? Yep. You were at the NMCI as well, huh? Yes, yes, that's right. Yeah, I was just at one of the sites, you know.

07:37
I was a site lead for the DC area. There's 60 plus sites in that area. Lots of copy paste. I must have missed you by a couple of years then. Cause I worked in the Norfolk Nock there for a few years actually on the MCI as well. Lots of calls to the Norfolk Nock. A lot. I probably was gone by the time you were there. Maybe I'm not sure. Yeah, I think I was, this was 2018 probably. Oh yeah, long gone.

08:07
Long gone. That's cool though. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, after that, this was when I got like my CCNA. I moved to another contract, just kind of being the main network guy for just like a two campus kind of setup. And they had like an MPLS link between these two campuses. And this is when I really started getting into networking. Got my CCNP, started actually being able to understand how things work. And

08:36
really mess with route maps and BGP and all the fun stuff. This was your baby. This is what you're saying, right? Engineering stuff. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The start of it, at least. It was your baby. Yeah. Yep. And then- That's where you had your MPLS moment. We're gonna term that now that you said that. I'm gonna ask people what's their MPLS moment. Yeah, but I'm about to have a data center moment. Oh. Yeah, that's a good way. Yeah. This contract ended after like, I was only there for like a year. So this contract ended,

09:06
federal organization and they were transitioning from Nexus gear to ACI, which was pretty new at the time. Not a lot of people are super experts at ACI at the time and magically got this job knowing literally nothing. Didn't even know what a spine leaf fabric was. So, you know, I started diving in. I found out that I absolutely love data center networking, understanding really how...

09:33
applications work, right? Front ends and back ends and load balancers and WAFs and all that fun stuff, and then combining it with networking. And ACI is a decent entry point into learning all this stuff. So this brought me to learning some automation because a lot of the point of all these GUI-based controller fabrics are, they're supposed to be easy to automate. And of course automation was the big thing around this year, right? 2019, this...

10:01
I started announcing all the DevNet tracks. All the APIs for the whole universe. Python or cloud? Yeah, Python or cloud, man. Every day someone was asking the question. Oh man, that was a rough time. I'm not a good programmer. Every YouTube video was just like, do I need my CCNA? Do I need to learn Python? That's right. Get your DevNet associate. Do I need to go to the cloud? Do I need to... Oh man, everybody was...

10:30
existential like crisis there. I remember the existential crisis. Automate or go to the cloud. Yeah, do I need to learn networking or do I need to learn Python? It's right there was like, oh man, yeah, crazy times. So like Chris said, at the time, there was also this little thing in the background going on. Like a lot of enterprises were starting to expand out to the cloud and move their data centers to the cloud. And you know, I hadn't done real well in trying to push into the automation space. And I was determined not to miss out.

11:00
other big paradigm shift like cloud. So that's really what got me interested in it. And it turns out that cloud networking is a lot of fun. You can just do a lot more things with it. Right, yeah, exactly. And we'll have plenty of conversations about that, but it's just a lot of fun. I enjoy it a lot and you can learn a lot of cool things and engineer a lot of cool new solutions. Yep, that's where I'm at now. What about you, Tim? Yeah, I'll round this out.

11:28
Let's see. I got my start on the NMCI as well. Although mine was, I was there back in 2010, actually. I was back there. So it was quite a bit of a long time now. I'm the old guy of the group. So if there's an Andy in this one, I guess I have to, I guess I'm required to beat that per budget and be angry about things and shake my head at clouds. I can't shake my face at clouds. Yeah, you're supposed to be yelling at the clouds. I can't be the old man yelling at you. Yeah.

11:58
Can't be the old man yelling at the cloud, but, you know, I'll do my best to be suitably angry about new technologies to carry the banner. I'll let you yell at me, man. Just old man yells at Chris. How about that? Yeah, there you go. I mean, I do that anyway, so it's fine. Let's see. So, yeah, so I started with the NMCI. Worked there a few years in the Norfolk NOC. Went on to an enterprise with a global footprint, you know, so I got to.

12:28
And you know, you mentioned your NPLS moment, Chris, for me, mine was a DMVPN. Actually, DMVPN was my NPLS moment. That was like a very elegant technology that I loved. And I got to use it a lot. I mean, as far as it could be, right? Like comparatively, you know, to like frame relay or something like that, right? It was pretty, pretty damn elegant.

12:52
You know, now we're not going to talk about the Akira monster that it became Iowan, but like, you know, let's, let's, you know, it's cool. It's cooler than DMVPN when you do, what is it? 2547 over DMVPN when you put MPLS on top of DMVPN. It's MPLS over, you know, because you know, what's, you know, what's better for a fabric is another fabric on top of that fabric. So.

13:17
Basically, we just keep stretching fabrics on top of other fabrics. It's just like a bed. It's like a bed with like 30 blankets. Yeah. Right? Exactly. We're going to end up with a payload size of five bytes by the end of, by the time we have all the, you know. Yeah. Anyway, so that place is cool. I got to go all over the world, you know, mostly APJ to be honest. And then, you went to like Shanghai. I went to Cisco for a few years. I did.

13:46
Yeah, I did. I went to Shanghai, Taipei, Seoul. It was a cool gig. But anyway, so I moved on to Cisco from there. Spent years at Cisco learning to SDU. Well, I was the route switch guy and then I got my CCIE. Chris, you and I studied together in the same study group. That's how we met actually, right? In Router Gods. Router Gods. Yeah. So after...

14:15
Yup. Shout out to Radar gods. Then we got our, you know, then we both basically ended up working, you at WWT and me at Cisco for us with SD-WAN, right? SD-WAN was our, was our baby at that time. Yeah. So, and then you went to Aviatrix and I, you, you know, let me know that they were recruiting and I had a, I had like,

14:38
an interview that was kind of ridiculous actually, because I didn't know anything about the cloud at the time, but you're like, hey, just go ahead and try. So, you know, I tried and they were like, well, you're not quite ready yet. And I completely agreed. And then a few months later, you know, they decided to hire me and here I am now I'm a solutions architect at AVatrix. Welcome. And yeah, so anyway, so let's see.

15:04
Why don't we talk a little bit about this is actually a really good intro or not intro, but a good segue into kind of who's this podcast for. So let's talk a little bit about that if that's all right. Yeah. You know, and Chris, you kind of hit it a little bit, right? Network engineers transitioning to cloud. I think that's part of it. I think there, I think that the, I think the margins are a little wider, right? We're also looking for people who are in the cloud. Maybe cloud.

15:31
you know, adjacent and working on cloud and they want to know more about the networking options in the cloud. And that's so like on that side of the, the, the, the train, if you will. Uh, and then, you know, where we come from, right? Maybe there's engineers that aren't, they don't want to be cloud engineers. That's when I visualize this, our target audience, I see people that don't want to be cloud engineers, they're network engineers, but they need to know enough about the cloud, right? To, to really make.

15:58
to work with the cloud teams to own their piece of it and specifically to do hybrid networking, right? Like, you gotta connect your data centers, gotta connect your colos, you know, all that stuff. Everyone's gonna be hybrid. That's the future's hybrid, man. There's no question. In my opinion, the future's hybrid. So I just wanted to say, like, you know, hey, you know, for anyone who's listening, that's the audience I think that we're looking for. That's the, to me, that's the target where we've painted and that we're kind of aiming for.

16:27
So do you guys think that that's accurate? Yeah. So, I mean, before I even started learning about cloud networking, like I was, I'll be honest, I was not interested in it whatsoever because the, to me, it sounded like, you know, I was a networking professional that sat there for years, like learning, reading the RFCs, learning the standards, things like that, trying to, you know, I mean, I was definitely a big Cisco guy, so I was definitely learning vendor.

16:56
uh, you know, vendor integration techniques directly from the vendor, um, which is, you know, some people have their, you know, their, uh, their qualms with that or whatever, but, you know, I was learning through networking. And then when I thought about, you know, Azure or AWS or GCP, anything like that, I was like, I'm just going to learn networking on their terms and how they, they integrate it because, you know, they're, they're, they're these massive, you know, hyperscalers and right. And like they, they need to.

17:23
they need to take this infrastructure and build it to do these things at a scale that they can support what they want to do for their customers. Right. And so it was like, I didn't want to learn, you know, I don't want to have to learn the little quirks of each cloud and things like that. That didn't sound fun to me, but, um, you know, I kind of just dove in and, and I will say, boy, was I wrong. It actually is very fun. It's, it was like, it was like learning something brand new for the first time. Like I remember,

17:50
Like getting so far with my CCIE studies and I was like, you know, I was like, it was very rewarding, but switching to cloud, it was like I was learning a brand new technology. There wasn't all this, you know, luggage or, you know, baggage to come with it. You know, there wasn't, there's no rib, there's no, you know, there's no.

18:11
You're not carrying 30 years of technical debt. Exactly. Yeah. It was like, hey, like, hey, all that shit that was pointless, we ripped it out. Like we didn't bring that with us. So, yeah. So, but, you know, I kind of want to encourage people to look into it, to try it out because it actually turns out to be very fun. And, you know, you can like not to, you know, glorify it or anything, but you can stand up like a global enterprise network within an hour.

18:41
in the cloud and play around with it. And it's pretty powerful, man. So yeah, like Chris was saying, I think one of the greatest benefits of the cloud is that there's just more freedom, right? Like with traditional networking, even at the CCIE level, you kind of get trapped into a box. You got all the nerd knobs now, but you still have to kind of follow best practices. And yeah, exactly. I mean, in the cloud, it's all software-based. So really it's like,

19:09
I'm definitely not an artist or a poet, but there's more of an art to it, I feel like, in the cloud because it's like a blank canvas. You can just kind of design your own network. You have that ultimate freedom to... Less options honestly leads to more architecture. It's weird, right? I agree completely with you. I completely agree. I didn't know how to say it.

19:33
But that's right. It's so weird because it feels like Fisher Price networking to me, right? Because they give you so few options. And so you actually, and it's kind of the fun, it becomes fun like what Chris was saying, to my opinion, it becomes fun because it's like working within the constraints of what they expose to you to make something elegant. It's almost like a challenge. And the freedom thing, I love how you put the freedom thing then.

19:59
Because you're right, I thought you were going to say networking has to follow the cable, which is truthfully right? At the end of the day, a switch has to connect to a router, routers have to connect to... The cables are the cables and the cloud really kind of obviates that. So not to cut you off, but I thought that was good. It's funny in a way, sometimes I feel like this is kind of like what VMware tried to do with NSX. It was a network that you're supposed to be able to just spin up and throw away, but now it's everyone can do it.

20:29
you don't have to be using a certain product and you have all these big different CSPs that all do it a different way. And it really just opens up a real engineering side of networking that I think a lot of people are looking for. And that's the part I enjoy. Right. Actually, I love doing the actual engineering piece. Absolutely. And it's good because it kind of forces people because you're transitioning, right? You're...

20:55
you're adopting a new technology. It's kind of a new stepping stone where you should be able to implement these best practices. And some of them kind of force you into that box, which is very nice. It's like, you can't have your 2000 static routes anymore. Like you can't do that. Like they're not gonna let you. They're gonna like crap. Yeah, exactly. So it's like, you gotta learn how to summarize. You gotta learn how to condense and you gotta work within these hard limits. Sometimes there are pain in the ass. It's like...

21:23
Oh, I can only have a hundred dynamic routes or something, but it forces you to be more crafty and you can only have so many roles on a security group. So you don't have firewalls with endless amounts of security policies and things like that. So it's, I mean, it's, you have to re-engineer it and it's ultimately in a more simplistic way. And it's, yeah, I think it's really good. Yeah. Refractor. You don't have to know EIGRP and ISIS and OSPS and RIP.

21:51
Yeah, I said this the other day, but I was like, I think Cloud might be the... BGP you still have to know. BGP you still have to know, but I think... You don't need to know all of them. Yeah, I think eventually it'll probably come back, but Cloud to me has almost been the death of the nerd. You don't get all these... You don't get to twist every little thing that you want to turn on. You don't get BGP, ASPATH, multipath, relax, all this stuff. You don't get all these...

22:20
crazy commands that you have to like tweak things with, right? Yeah. Forced elegance. Well, it's like, you know, a lot of it is bringing, you don't have the IETF in the cloud, right? And that's a different time. I could rant about that another time. It's like, you know, you don't have these committees. It's whatever they're releasing as a product, you just consume it in a cool, creative way that nobody's going to tell you how to.

22:46
how to set it up, you figure out how all these things interact together in a way that best makes sense. Absolutely. Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, I guess this is another good segue into, you know, what's our plan going forward? What are the episodes going to look like? What are the kinds of things we're going to talk about? And you know, I think we have a bunch of ideas ready. Chris and Tim, I know you guys want to chime in with some of the ideas we have. I know we have plans for guests. We got a bunch of things that we want to cover.

23:12
We're definitely going to be, I mean, we just talked about like some of the most fun things, which is, which is utilizing the, uh, the cloud native stuff to make things happen. Of course we can also use NVAs. I mean, Chris and I both work for Avatrix and we'll, we'll get to that at some point, right? But we're going to definitely going to have to deep dive on some of this network stuff that's exposed because we all just said it, right? The kind of forced elegance model means that.

23:36
people coming from networking backgrounds are going to have to learn to live within the kind of the Fisher-Price model and learn how to be elegant with it. So I can't wait to get right into that. What's missing? Yeah. But like you said, we've already lined up some really good guests, right? That we think can come on and really kind of expose not only the audience and the listeners, but also us because there's a lot of stuff that we don't know about. It's a very big...

24:02
big world like you know, there's there's you throw so many things in the mix like Kubernetes and You know decoupling applications and load balancers and things like that. So, you know, I think it's best that we bring in people that know these things are very tried and true and and can kind of speak to it and hopefully we can expose that to A larger audience that that hasn't even considered it. Yep

24:26
And help them and then maybe they can help us figure out where the net, you know, how to design the network, right. To, to take advantage of all the things that they're bringing, especially, dude, I want to know more. I mean, I know a little bit about container networking, but I would love to know. More, you know, so just as just throwing that one out there as an example, right. So I'm excited to get started. There's so many cool technologies. Like if you've ever just gone to look at like the CNCF landscape, man, it's so much. It's so interesting is how networking.

24:55
combines into all these technologies and it's not talked about a lot yet. So that's, that's a lot of what we're going to be doing. And the other thing is the, like we said, the future is hybrid men and hybrid design is going to be more, some of the most complex things that are going to be out there just because you got this legacy network with all of these, you know.

25:14
legacy problems, legacy things, thousands of routes flowing around and all of that. And how are we going to be engineering for the cloud to be a hybrid, you know, to work hybridly with those, those. So I'm really excited to get started. I can't wait to see some of the stuff we've got planned. Yeah. I mean, the network is still at the core of everything, right? It all comes down to the network. So that was true in the on-prem world. That's still very true in the cloud world. But

25:43
Unfortunately for us, there was a long period of time, probably five or six years where developers just had access to a default set of networking and they thought that was all they ever needed. And now you have some very- Default VPCs. It's, and then they've built some, you know, if you let them run rampant and they don't know what they're doing, they will build some functioning applications, but they're very ugly under the hood. So it's just as important in the cloud world to get the networking piece right.

26:13
So yeah, I'm hoping we can really dive into a lot of this and prove that it's a fun world to be in. Absolutely. All right. Yeah. So I think that's all we really wanted to cover for today. Just kind of, you know, give an introduction to who we are, why we're doing this, and welcome everyone to join us on this journey that we're going to go on. So we have some really good stuff planned. We're bringing in

26:43
So glad to be working under the Art of Network Engineering umbrella with AJ and all the folks over there. So big shout out to them. Really happy to be under that umbrella. Great discord community. So if you want to get involved with that, you can find it on the A1 website. We'll definitely plug that as well. We're going to be hosted under there as well. So that's where you'll find us. cables2clouds.com. Also, you can go to theartofnetworkengineering.com.

27:11
and find our page there with our RSS feed and all that. As for me, like I said, my name is Chris Miles. You can find me on Twitter at BGP main, a little nod to Gucci main. And I blog over at the controlplane.net. Yeah, Alex, how can we find you? Yeah, obviously the A1 Discord, pretty much always on there. I'm upping my presence on Twitter a lot more recently. So I'm at A Perkins.

27:41
828 and LinkedIn. I'm always on LinkedIn. If anyone messages me on LinkedIn, you're most likely going to get a response. How about you, Tim? Challenge accepted. I might take that back, right? Yeah, absolutely. You opened the floodgates. Oh yeah. So Tim McConaughey, you can find me on my blog.

28:07
CarpeDMVPN.com, on Twitter at one goal biz. Yeah, and of course, like Chris says, you can also reach us on the A1 website or cables to cloud. Thanks for joining us. Yeah. Thanks everyone for listening. Look forward to having some more content here on a regular basis soon. So that's it for now. And yeah, we'll talk soon. See ya.

28:32
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 cablestoclouds.com. Thanks again for listening, and see you next time.