Tim McConnaughy: 0:14

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Cables to Clouds podcast. I'm your host this week, tim, and with me, as always, is my co-host, chris. I'm at Carpe DMVPN on Blue Sky and Chris is at BGP Main on Blue Sky, if I could speak correctly. And with us is a returning guest, a good friend of the podcast. We're lucky to have him. Nico Weber, would you like to? Actually, I don't remember, nico, are you on? I don't remember. Are you on Blue Sky yet, nico? Are you? You to actually?

Nicolas Vibert: 0:44

I don't remember. Nico, are you on Blue Sky yet? Nico are you? You don't do the social media. No Well, I used to be on Twitter and pretty active, but I left that, yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 0:52

That was a good move.

Nicolas Vibert: 0:55

Pretty active on LinkedIn with videos and silly blog posts, but that's where you'll find me.

Tim McConnaughy: 1:01

Yep, yep, yep, excellent. And just in case, so we've had you on the podcast before. It was an excellent episode talking about Kubernetes and Cilium, but for the people who may not have heard or seen that episode, go ahead and quickly reintroduce yourself.

Nicolas Vibert: 1:17

Sure. So I'm a senior staff technical marketing engineer at iSurveillance slash Cisco and my background is network engineering. I've been in network for about 20 years now. I did my CCNA, ccnp, ccie back in the days. I was CCIE for about 10 years until I let it go and worked for Cisco for a while and then I was a boomerang back in through the acquisition of iSurveillance by Cisco last year. So yeah, just happy to be back on this podcast.

Tim McConnaughy: 1:52

Yeah, we're definitely happy to have you back and actually you came up with a really cool topic and that's why we brought you back. And let me see if I can read this correctly, just make sure I'm getting it right. So we were talking on LinkedIn a little bit and you were like you know, what I really love to tackle was this idea of the identity crisis of cloud networking, specifically, what's cloud networking and what it is, what it isn't. And I just realized that, like you know, there's so many opinions on this that, like it's a great topic and I'm sure if you talk to 10, five engineers, you'll get 10 different opinions, right, so I love it. So let's just kick it off there, like what made you think of this topic? And like because I mean, so this comes from somewhere. You've got opinions on this, yeah.

Nicolas Vibert: 2:41

Well, I guess, as a marketing, technical, marketing engineer, one of my responsibilities is to work with analysts, you know, like the likes of Gardner and Forrester, that kind of people, and answer questionnaires about our product and where we fit, and obviously let them, you know, rank stackers against other companies, you know, in the quadrant right. And I was recently answering one such query about cloud networking. I looked at all the different vendors and I was like, hang on, are these guys cloud networking? And you just look at the list of people we were being compared with, it was like apples and oranges, lemons, I don't know. It was just a bunch of different companies and I just kept thinking what is even cloud networking? And you guys, you've had like cloud networking and you guys, like you know, you've had a cloud networking podcast for a couple of years now a couple years, yep yeah, um, you probably, even between yourself, have a different definition of what cloud networking might be, so no, it's.

Tim McConnaughy: 3:38

It's funny to hear you say this because since I became a TME, one of the things I probably hate most are those 40-page report questionnaires about hey, here's, fill out 40 pages of why you fit into this quadrant and how you're better, and you know, usually they're like, oh, don't talk about your competitors in here. But then you get to see, like you said, like you go look at the magic, the quote, unquote magic quadrant or whatever. They've all got their own version of stack ranking vendors and you're looking at them like huh, Like why am I? These guys are like SSE or something. They got nothing to do with what I do. Right, so absolutely All right.

Nicolas Vibert: 4:16

So I'll ask a question then who do you think was on this cloud networking, you know? Who else we have ISOVANON, which, as I said, is now part of Cisco. There might be some that you think, oh yeah, of course that's a cloud networking company, and there might be some that was like, hang on, so give me your, give me your, give me your guesses.

Chris Miles: 4:37

Like versus like versus, who is versus who isn't.

Nicolas Vibert: 4:39

Well, who do you think is on it?

Tim McConnaughy: 4:41

There's a list.

Nicolas Vibert: 4:45

Who would be on the list? Yeah, I've got the list. I'll tell you if you're.

Chris Miles: 4:47

If you're correct, or not nice uh yeah, well, I mean, I would hope. I would hope our current employer is on there as well.

Tim McConnaughy: 4:53

Uh, I'm sure a matrix has got to be on there somewhere. Yes, uh, I mean so obviously, alkira would I. I mean I say obviously, but I I believe that alkira would would qualify and I feel like we're like passing judgment on that. I feel like an asshole, we're just passing judgment on these companies. But no, I mean I think from a focused cloud networking perspective. Yeah, I mean I think Alkira would fit the bill for that. Prosimo probably did before it went under right.

Tim McConnaughy: 5:19

I mean obviously Isovalent. Did Calico's own? Is it Tigera's the company that actually does Calico? Is that right?

Nicolas Vibert: 5:30

Yeah, they're actually not on it, but I suppose they could be, because they offer a similar product to what we do.

Tim McConnaughy: 5:35

Yeah, well, okay. Now, this is, of course, because I only just started getting into the Kubernetes stuff within the last few weeks and I went straight to Cilium because I already knew you and I was very familiar with the labs and everything that you pointed me towards. But then I was reading something else and I was like, oh, I should take a look at Calico and it's not the same, and I don't want to compare the two products. But I was like, just from a, you know, it's a CNI plugin, right, like it fits at least the Kubernetes CN, kubernetes, cni, I that's. And again, this gets into the whole cloud networking thing. Well, which you know, it's kubernetes, kubernetes networking, which could be running in the cloud. So, yeah, you can see how it automatically.

Nicolas Vibert: 6:10

Already we're starting to draw lines, right, right yeah, and you know, like I think if I, if I had to guess, I would have said aviatrix and prosimo, now kira, because they're kind of for me like obvious networking companies, um, but then and then I saw, okay, I saw cisco and arista, juniper. Fair enough makes sense.

Tim McConnaughy: 6:33

So f5 yeah, that's yeah, are we? That's like a fair point, right? They route packets but their, their actual value, prop and application is in the load balancing, right. So that's a fair point. Uh, oh no, didn't f5 bought somebody though? Uh, a few years ago, um, what was the name of that company? They bought a they bought a cloud.

Chris Miles: 6:53

Yeah, was it engine x.

Nicolas Vibert: 6:54

Sorry, it's a bit of gen x yeah yeah, I'll have to look it up.

Tim McConnaughy: 6:58

They bought an actual company that they were like, but then they kind of buried it. They never came out with the product, the the. They actually had a quote-unquote multi-cloud product and they never came out with it.

Nicolas Vibert: 7:07

Now. I have to go find it Well.

Tim McConnaughy: 7:08

Cloudflare actually just today had a press release about a new MCNS product. Did you see it? Oh, did I? Okay.

Chris Miles: 7:16

Yeah, they acquired a company called Nefeli I think it was about a year ago, right and now it's being called ago, right, um, and now it's being called like of course they've dubbed their, their branded magic, uh, moniker onto the front of it now, but it just like that seems like an orchestration thing. So but like I think, as we open this up, that kind of speaks to your point, nico, like what is cloud networking? Like? We have like companies just doing maybe like kubernetes networking and then maybe multi-cloud networking, and then you know something as simple as just orchestrating the native constructs, like is that a cloud networking company? Like it's uh, yeah, the, the money.

Nicolas Vibert: 7:53

the waters are very muddy at this point yeah, you know, I see, like the likes of you know broadcom vmware is that. You know, do they include vmware and I make vmware and yeah, you know, like an sx or something. Yeah, I'm assuming that's an sx right I would think so yeah, but like would you?

Nicolas Vibert: 8:13

would you describe an sx as cloud networking? And you know, and again, I worked on an sx and which is I? I mean an sx couldn't be more different than you know, like what, what, what I don't know, f5 or prosimo, or if hvc says right. So this is what I mean about, like this, cloud networking products and companies that actually do very different things.

Chris Miles: 8:35

Yeah, yeah, I feel like. I feel like this is almost somewhat adjacent to like the kind of the evolution of where sd went. Oh yeah, we had a few companies start out that were obviously pure SD-WAN companies, like you know, kind of in that kind of founding sector, so to say.

Tim McConnaughy: 8:52

Like Viptala Of the product.

Chris Miles: 8:54

Versa, versa, yeah, and there's one other one Avello Cloud.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:00

Yeah, Avello.

Chris Miles: 9:01

And then, but you know, then we started to see the likes of the major networking vendors. Uh, just start like maybe or maybe, like I saw, mainly networking vendors, and like way in optimization they were just yeah the way in ops too, yeah, firewall vendors, firewall vendors, they would add like one feature and now it's like okay, well, now this is sd-wan it's like I don't know I don't know if you can really you, you know put your merit on that Like that's just like.

Nicolas Vibert: 9:26

Yeah, and it was like it went from like being SD1 to being SASE to being ZTNA.

Tim McConnaughy: 9:33

you know it's so quickly.

Nicolas Vibert: 9:36

But we were like yeah, like sorry, it was like even SD1, like, is that cloud networking? Because you know, you used to think about SD-WAN and you had, like, you are your branch device and you would say, oh, let's go and take all that traffic to Office 365. And instead of backhauling back to my data center and then through my internet pipe, I send it straight to my, you know, over my local internet link. That's some form of kind of cloud networking as well.

Tim McConnaughy: 10:01

Not, you know, not the yeah, well, this is interesting too, because the uh this is where we get into some other things where there's kind of a long-standing curiosity about like is saz cloud the same like? You know, like when, uh, we talk about this all the time, where, like customers are like, or microsoft is like, we have, uh, you know, so many million cloud customers and it's like, well, I mean they're, they're office 365 customers. I don't know if I would call them cloud customers.

Nicolas Vibert: 10:24

And it's like well, I mean they're Office 365 customers. I don't know if I would call them cloud customers.

Tim McConnaughy: 10:27

Sure, it runs on Azure, but I don't know if that makes them Azure customers. You know what I mean.

Nicolas Vibert: 10:32

Like it's not quite the same, Let me ask you guys, like where do you think cloud networking was invented?

Tim McConnaughy: 10:41

I mean like the CSPs.

Chris Miles: 10:43

Yeah, I mean mean ultimately, I think the. If we look at the evolution of cloud, you know kind of start in the early days with, you know, launch of S3, and then you know, eventually more things started or like using cloud and needed the natural progression and eventually things needed to be, you know, able to talk to each other, right, I don't remember what was it. When did VPC launch? Was like 2010. Wow, literally. So that's to be you know, able to talk to each other, right and um, I don't remember what was it. When did vpc launch? Was like 2010, 2000. Well, literally.

Nicolas Vibert: 11:08

So that's to 25th of august 2009. I found jeff biles uh, announced some blog posts. Oh, nice, nice, um, and it's just, you know, you. You read it and it's like, wow, you know. That's like close to 16 years ago and all still relevant, well-written, clear. The blog post was about, you know, being able to create a virtual isolated network connecting back to on-prem with a VPN, so that for me that feels like the origins and I'm sure some people will disagree, but it feels like the origins of, like, cloud networking.

Tim McConnaughy: 11:45

Well, here's the question, though Hold on real quick, because we got to. Some people will disagree, but it feels like the origins of like cloud networking. Well, here's the question, though Hold on real quick, cause we gotta.

Nicolas Vibert: 11:53

I'm waiting for the data center people to start screaming that like private cloud. What about private cloud? Yeah, and you think okay.

Tim McConnaughy: 12:03

I think the response to this wasn't, you know, things like OpenStack. Yeah, that's a very good point. Actually, I like OpenStack right. Yeah, that's a very good point. Actually, I think OpenStack would probably be, because, I mean, we're really talking about a model, we're not just talking about private cloud as a data center. That's not you know its own kind of abstracted workflow. Because to get to that on private, yeah, I think the first thing you would have been able to work with to do that would have been, yeah, openstack, to try to abstract away the compute and stuff.

Nicolas Vibert: 12:27

And they had the Neutron or Quantum plugin which was their way of creating virtual network and again I think that's my recollection where it was in response to the cloud providers and taking off and they wanted to cloudify the way networking was being consumed, on-prem right To offer a similar kind of experience. Yeah, it's again. We still haven't really got to the definition of cloud networking, right?

Tim McConnaughy: 12:54

No, no, no, no, we'll get there. We'll get there around 55 minutes or 60.

Chris Miles: 13:01

Well, it's funny because I think cloud has always been used pretty much as an abstraction. Right At the end of the day, there's still kind of, you know, hardware and components running under the hood that we all are familiar with. But I feel like, yeah, the cloud initially was supposed to be this term. That was like somewhat agnostic and you know, we had private cloud, we have public cloud, but, like, private cloud is a very, very different experience than than public cloud and I feel, like the terminology has kind of just shifted cloud I mean.

Chris Miles: 13:32

In my mind cloud means public cloud, um, and what that ultimately translates to is, you know, basically using, uh, vendor or service provider specific APIs to interact with their environment to get it to do what you want to do. So it's like I mean, that's what it sounds like to me. I mean, ultimately, you're always going to be able to do what they give you access to right.

Chris Miles: 13:55

Yeah, just like MSP, right, there's no super level of customization that you could do with a private cloud Right. So I mean, that's the way it translates to me.

Nicolas Vibert: 14:05

And I think that for me, cloud networking, it does involve some form of public cloud, because otherwise the definition just becomes too broad. Yeah, it's too generic.

Chris Miles: 14:18

Yeah, Otherwise it's just networking. Really, yeah, networking.

Nicolas Vibert: 14:25

But I think what you said around consuming the MSPs APIs, I feel like the first kind of real form of kind of cloud networking companies, like the likes of Aviatrix, was really about like building a gap that the cloud networking, the MSPs where the networking constructs had some limitations. So the startup was like, oh, let's go and create a product that fits this gap. That's fair.

Tim McConnaughy: 14:54

Yeah, no, I couldn't agree more, 100%, 100% yeah, it's. In fact, if you look at the history of our company, if you look at the features we rolled out, first stopgap, fill in the blank. Like these don't exist in the hyperscaler and I think there will always be a limitation to what the hyperscalers can offer to customers. Just by the fact that they're hyperscalers, right, they can't give you the same granular level of control that you can give to if you're going to, if they give it to you, they got to get to everybody, right.

Chris Miles: 15:20

So that's yeah, because it's a service, right, like, like hardware, like hardware vendor can give you something off the shelf that does everything under the hood, because you control all of that and you know it's probably in your isolated environment, right. But if you're providing a service, there's only so much you can do, um, for, uh, you know, like with r&d development, things like that, it just takes so much more work to get to that, get to that level I think every uh, even every msb, has a different stance and culture towards networking.

Nicolas Vibert: 15:49

I mean, I feel like AWS was, like you know, so developer-centric and I don't know, google is, like, so proud of its networking, so proud of its backbone and, you know, happy to share. Oh look, we've got cables, you know, under the Pacific Ocean, the pacific oceans. Look at that, it's amazing. And like they're just very, very proud of someone's networking and their pipes and their innovation around this.

Nicolas Vibert: 16:12

Uh, they take now, that's interesting yeah, they have a different perspective, I think. I think that's a cultural aspect to uh, to to the importance of networking yeah the like.

Chris Miles: 16:23

it's always cool when they show those things, but in my mind, whenever I see you know, um, you know a service provider, specifically a cloud service provider, kind of toting about like what kind of connectivity they've built with you know undersea cables, all this kind of stuff, all that says to me at the end of the day is like, there's capacity, like the like. Capacity will probably never be my problem, which is good. It doesn't change how I build networks and I'll be honest with you in the long run, the least interesting thing well, not the least, but one of the most least interesting things to me in networking has been QoS, and if I don't need that anymore, then I'm very happy with that.

Nicolas Vibert: 17:01

So I think this is progression for sure.

Chris Miles: 17:05

But I don't know. Like yeah, networking to me like the undersea cables that's all cool, the CDNs that's cool as well, but like I'll be honest like that doesn't move the needle for me, like in terms of cool technology.

Tim McConnaughy: 17:18

So it's interesting, nico, you have the observation that Google cares a lot about its networking, because I think that's true. What you said about is building the undersea cables. I think all that is true, but, like, when I look at google's, the way that you as a customer have to consume google's networking, to me it seems like extremely developer centric. Like like don't even the concept of global vpc and specifically the idea that like we can just do it all for you. It seems like they really just want you to not care about networking, or just for me working with it. It seems, you know, like the auto building uh vpcs where they'll auto do all your subnets for you. It seemed to me like they they were focused on more. So it's interesting that the opinion that you have that is different yeah, it's.

Nicolas Vibert: 18:02

I mean to be fair, like I um, I was at cisco last week and I was showing a demo with a couple of colleagues that uh, which was like um meshing a couple of capabilities cluster one was on-prem, one was um in, uh, the cloud and we picked, we picked uh, gk, uh, because we thought actually from a networking perspective, that was the easiest.

Tim McConnaughy: 18:25

Oh, for sure, I think so. With the global VPC and everything and the way they do it. I think GKE is the easiest.

Nicolas Vibert: 18:32

And you know, doing some cool connecting machine clusters together, doing some low balancing across sites. That's a nice form of cloud networking.

Tim McConnaughy: 18:41

Yeah.

Nicolas Vibert: 18:42

It's interesting.

Tim McConnaughy: 18:42

I'm actually just getting into this myself because we're kind of doing some stuff with Kubernetes as well, so I've been so late, Like I know we had you on what like almost a year ago now or something like that. It's been a while and I was one of those things where I was like I'll get around to it. I didn't really get a chance until a few weeks ago, but the more I learned about it, the more interesting it is, especially the networking aspect of it about it, the more interesting it is, especially the networking aspect of it, even though it's like 90% of it is abstracted away, at least within the cluster, certainly within the cluster it is.

Nicolas Vibert: 19:11

Which is interesting from my perspective. It was my first time presenting at Cisco Live. I've been to Cisco Live many times but I've been presenting at KubeCon, for example yeah, and presenting our networking platform for Kubernetes. It's very different when you go to somewhere like Cisco Live. Compared to KubeCon, audience is very different. Yeah, exactly, very, exactly, very different audience and, like some of the KubeCon, they're more interested in like, what can you do with all this networking? Like you know more about the application stuff, can you do things like canary testing and load balancing and introducing new version of my app, do some redirection? Lots of different, more, more again application-centric, whereas I go to Cisco Live and what the first question I get is like, show me your packet work, show me the headers, and you know, show me BGP, you know, and it's just like oh boy, but so, yeah, it's kind of again a different culture. But what was? I guess?

Nicolas Vibert: 20:16

What I found fascinating is the platform and Kubernetes. Networking is about cloud-native applications, which is mainly containers and mainly managed and orchestrated by Kubernetes, and I think that's one of the reasons we were invited in this vendor's analyst report is because we do networking for cloud-n native applications. So does it qualify? As you know, is that a requirement to be cloud networking? Do you need to be able to support modern containerized applications, or is that just a kind of a side aspect of it? That's a great question.

Chris Miles: 20:53

Yeah, I mean, I think like we're at this point where we probably like I feel like we don't want to fall like in the same direction, like maybe security has where there's, you know, there's so many different categories for things, like there's, you know like so many acronyms, cnap, all this kind of stuff.

Chris Miles: 21:11

There's probably been two announced today as yeah, there's a lot um but like I don't know if we wanted like venture into that territory where we have like ultimate levels of classifications to every one of these things, like um, I mean, we're already there, we can generally talk about it, but there's just no, you know, like official, you know, once gartner does it, then then then it's real right um, but yeah, I don't know if I wanted to go that, that route, but I mean, ultimately there there is confusion.

Chris Miles: 21:36

So you know, the consumer at the end of the day, is going to be the one that's confused when they hear this term. Right, so, um, it might be necessary, I don't know.

Tim McConnaughy: 21:44

So, so this, uh, you know you get me thinking, though, because, like Kubernetes, the whole thing with Kubernetes is that we, you know you can have this cloud native, Cloud native and Kubernetes like go together. Right, the CNCF owns the whole thing. Like there's so much it's joined at the hip. Right, we say cloud native, cloud native, cloud native. You kind of wondered, you know. Now we have to like, okay, what the hell does cloud native mean? In order to get to cloud native, what the hell is cloud native? We had a discussion on this as well we did, we did a while back.

Chris Miles: 22:13

Yeah, it's like I think it's strayed from what it what it used to mean or what it was intended to mean as you can force.

Tim McConnaughy: 22:19

You can run a kubernetes cluster on prem right or, you know, in a middle mile provider or something. I don't think I'm not, I don't know how many people do that. To be honest with you, I think a lot of people consume the, the managed kubernetes. Kubernetes is pretty complicated, but well, actually I mean the.

Nicolas Vibert: 22:33

I mean just again talking to customers at Cisco Live and KubeCon. So many are doing self-manage and you know, very often on the like, you know like OpenShift or Rancher, and that's why I had so many conversations around this last week at Cisco Live. Again, it's about like okay, I'm building my own Kubernetes cluster, managing my own on-prem, how do I connect to my Cisco ACI, for example? Yeah, of course, any other fabric.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:06

Just outside the cluster. How are we making connectivity right? Yeah, how do we expose our?

Nicolas Vibert: 23:10

applications applications. What's the best practices? Again around BGP and Ingress and make our cloud native applications accessible from the outside.

Tim McConnaughy: 23:25

Yeah, it's funny because with Kubernetes, specifically for Ingress specifically, you have to build, you need a load balancer service, something for the ingress to the service you've done. So now a load balancer now becomes part of cloud networking, Like all these services. These extra services end up being part of cloud networking. Right, it's not just networking anymore, there's all these services included.

Nicolas Vibert: 23:51

Yeah, so is service mesh a service mesh or an ingress controller? Is that cloud networking?

Tim McConnaughy: 23:59

I think it has to be with Kubernetes specifically? I think it has to be right, the service mesh especially. You've got your sidecar. You're building tunnels. You're just making a tunnel mesh between clusters with your sidecars.

Chris Miles: 24:12

That one almost ventures just into application networking.

Nicolas Vibert: 24:15

to me, yeah, maybe At the end of the day, I guess like what is that that's?

Chris Miles: 24:20

fair. I mean it's turtles all the way down right. Eventually it's the same thing, but like I don't know, we're probably splitting hairs.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:28

No, I mean, that's a fair point though Application, because it's the application. So yeah, I mean now that you're asking yourself, god, this is getting so crazy.

Nicolas Vibert: 24:36

So, philosophical.

Tim McConnaughy: 24:38

Yeah it's almost Socratic in the method, right? Because then you have to say well, is the Envoy like for Istio, is the Envoy an application or is it a networking?

Nicolas Vibert: 24:51

device or is it both? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it's proxy-wise. So yeah, it's kind of. You know, defining a category is just really hard when it just keeps things keep evolving. But I think for me, I guess, the characteristics of cloud networking. There are things that I think we can say, okay, the one thing that all have in common for me is that they're API-centric. That would be, I guess, my own personal take, and maybe you know I'm sure there are also cloud networking products that are maybe more consumed through a UI, but I think the aspiration should be that you consume your cloud networking. Your networks are API, built through an API.

Tim McConnaughy: 25:34

Okay, okay, yeah, I think that's Well. What about Terraform? Did you consider that the same thing? It's IOC, right?

Nicolas Vibert: 25:41

Yeah, with an API, some form of automation, a playbook, a Terraform module, okay, yeah, yeah, that should be part of the goal when you start leveraging a cloud networking. Part of the goal when you start leveraging a cloud networking is that you template, create a template or automate it. If you claim you have a cloud networking product and you don't have an API, then you're lying.

Tim McConnaughy: 26:12

Or, at the very least, if your product is not interacting with the cloud provider APIs to do the building, like that kind of stuff. Yeah, I think that's definitely true. Yeah, I think after I asked about the Terraform question, I realized that what you originally had meant when you said that so yeah, it is APIs all the way down, right, that's how you generally interact with, whether you're doing it on a CLI, whether you're doing it on a CLI, whether you're doing it with their SDK, whatever. That is right. Terraform, it's an API call at the end of the day. So you asked a question on the notes here that I really wanted to get to and I don't want to pick out a specific company, but, like you had said, essentially is Middle Mile a cloud networking company, somebody that provides connectivity to the cloud?

Tim McConnaughy: 27:01

Would we consider them a cloud networking company.

Nicolas Vibert: 27:03

You have an opinion, yeah, you could argue, and again you could say things like Equinix, megapod. They provide some direct links to the cloud from on-prem to the cloud. I think they also enable you to connect your clouds together, so some form of inter-cloud connectivity. Now, I think because it's more of a physical layer to and from the cloud. I don't think it necessarily qualifies as such. I guess in my head it's more. I guess cloud network, in my head, is more about creating networks within a cloud environment that isn't consumed by applications that live in the cloud and that can be virtual machines, that can be bandwidth or that can be containers.

Chris Miles: 27:59

Okay, so real quick then I was going to say an important thing in that classification is they also provide the connectivity like direct connectivity options for like SaaS providers as well. Right, so that's like services running on cloud, but maybe you're not getting into a private environment that you manage on top of cloud. So it's like running on cloud, but maybe you're not, you know, getting into a private environment that you manage on top of cloud. So it's like, yeah, like what does that translate to?

Tim McConnaughy: 28:23

Well, I also have to challenge a little bit the idea that if Megaport connects two clouds together but it's physical, that makes them not cloud. Because that then question is so if I connect AWS to Azure and I do it over the internet instead of using, because I mean, you know, there's no direct connect between AWS and Azure. That's obviously right. So is that cloud networking or it's going over the internet? Are we counting the internet as a medium? You know what I mean.

Chris Miles: 28:51

But if we're thinking about like this concept of at least the CSPs provided networking options, you're basically building networking across their backbones. Whatever services they've exposed, they allow you to build networking on their platform. What is different about that to Megaport or to Equinix? That's the exact same thing. They have an underlying set of hardware services, a backbone of something. But the way you interact with it is essentially the same. You make an API call and you say build this connectivity. So how is it not cloud networking at that point?

Tim McConnaughy: 29:26

We're not saying you're wrong. I'd like to justify a little bit.

Nicolas Vibert: 29:31

I suppose it's. You don't necessarily use their networks to run applications.

Tim McConnaughy: 29:39

Okay, so it's that you're not building apps on their network?

Nicolas Vibert: 29:42

Yeah, and maybe I don't know enough about what they do. I guess it almost feels like a subcategory of cloud networking. Maybe this is how we kind of break it down right yeah clam cloud networking as a kind of overall category, and then you've got the intercloud, and then you have the I mean it's just not easy, right like there's a reason why everybody struggles with it.

Tim McConnaughy: 30:08

This definition, these definitions, is not easy. I think it's very hard to to draw these lines and to figure out what lines to draw.

Nicolas Vibert: 30:15

And you know we talked. You were saying like Cloudflare or maybe like CDN I don't necessarily Akamai.

Tim McConnaughy: 30:22

Yeah, that's a really good question, man. That's a super good. That's even harder than the Megaport one, by far, I think, or Megaport Equinix Middle Mile generally by far, because, you know, the CDNs are technically usually attached to the cloud backbone, but like they're not, so they're, they're delivering content right. That is, over a network that is usually cloud based in some way, whether it be Cloudflare or directly connected like with the AWS offers. Man, I don't know what do you think? Chris? That's a tough one.

Chris Miles: 30:54

Yeah, it is tough, but I mean that one one, that's one that I feel like has been around in some shape or form for a long time as well, like even before cloud oh yeah, cdns, yeah yeah well, like I mean, yeah, like I remember, like back in the day we used to, I used to work at a big mpls provider and like we got a lot of circuits from level three and at level three, had a lot of these kind of front front door scrubbing services and things that are just very adjacent to what those providers do today and obviously they have a much bigger footprint and things like that. So it's like I don't know Then so does it? If that's the case, then the cloud networking start back then, like yeah yeah it is, it is, it is, it is, it is, it is.

Nicolas Vibert: 31:35

Yeah, yeah, it is, it is. It is very hard to say like, yeah, what, what was? What started it all? Um, yeah, okay, so what about security? Then? Like, do we is, let's say, consistent security across cloud? Is that a must? Is that like um, because we can't do talk, we can't talk about cloud networking without talking about cloud networking. Security Is encryption, is consistent networking across the multiple clouds? Yeah, some form of requirement to say, okay, we do cloud networking.

Tim McConnaughy: 32:12

So, yeah, obviously, we work for Aviatrix and we literally this is kind of the mission statement of the company. So, to put the company aside, I think, even putting the company aside, I think you know if you're gonna this whole shared responsibility model that all providers have, you know, customers are still in charge of their own data, right, the data that's runs across their cloud networks. Now it's encrypted in the rack, essentially, or across the backbone, or however you want to say it on the cloud provider side, but ultimately a customer, but that you know. Then you look at things like salt typhoon uh, the sulfide typhoon attacks, uh, you know owning telecom networks and being able to just do man in the middle, you know captures of open, of unencrypted traffic.

Tim McConnaughy: 32:58

So, yeah, I mean, I do think I think it's a requirement, in that a customer would be very foolish not to run some of their, you know, do it themselves. I wouldn't trust the provider to secure all of my traffic, but does it? Is it quote unquote required? Like from a technical RFC perspective, if you will? I mean, obviously not right. Like AWS supports GRE across you build a GRE tunnel from a TGW Connect, for example, and of course you can't do GRE in Azure, but that's because that's what they're using. On the underlay right.

Chris Miles: 33:32

It's funny how many directions this can go in, because that's the first thought you had, tim, about this. I call back to just when we're talking about the different architectures that we see within cloud and how it's a very strong fundamental shift with what we've been doing for 20, 30 years at this point.

Tim McConnaughy: 33:52

Oh yeah, the Volus coupling model.

Chris Miles: 33:53

Yeah, well, not even that. I'm just talking. If we think of the concept of a global VPC, like that's one big network that exists everywhere. Like the difficulty to implement something in there, like zero trust, which is a prominent thing you know from from a networking perspective. Like doing that in a global construct that is just all meshed together at one point, like that becomes a conversation. That's very difficult to get that in there, right?

Tim McConnaughy: 34:19

What's your opinion, Nico?

Nicolas Vibert: 34:22

I can't imagine doing like a global VPC back when I used to be like a network operator. I just imagine there's a difficulty of doing something that is so well crafted that you know like you you get, you know you deploy VPC in GK and you don't really care Like you, just you know your application receiver, it just works and you know. And that's just thinking again, thinking back to the days where I had to connect multiple, multiple sites together and having to worry about addressing.

Nicolas Vibert: 35:00

And I think that's the beauty of like a really well designed cloud networking like GKE, but again also, providers also do it very well, but it's all the intelligence and the automation under the hood to, you know, make it happen and being able to replicate it on-prem is just about impossible.

Tim McConnaughy: 35:20

We've said that for even when Alex was here, that we used to talk about all the time that the people that are going to win the game are going to be yeah, I know who is that? I don't know who that is either the people who can, whatever company or companies finally are able to build the product that can reproduce that level of the consumption model of cloud. But in an on-prem data center, man, they're just going to win the game. Like it's going to win the game because it's impossible, it's like so impossible but everybody would benefit from it. Like everybody would love that, because nobody's going to be able to fully evacuate. Unless you started in the cloud, you're probably never going to truly leave all of your data centers behind, right? You're going to need something on prem. So, yeah, man, I yeah.

Chris Miles: 36:04

Yeah, I think, I think it was very easy not easy, but it was easier, at least in um the pre-cloud days to kind of classify what type of networking, like products and things were out in the market, because there was always this kind of delineation of like physical location like like branch routing, data center routing or data center switching was. It was a very different thing, right, that's like, even if I just say that that implies certain things about the hardware campus and about it.

Nicolas Vibert: 36:33

What if its capabilities are?

Chris Miles: 36:35

know, right off the bat, right, whereas cloud has just become this extension of IT, right, it's not? It's like everything runs there, right. So it's like it's incorporating the branch the way in, the like. Everything is there, right. So it's just like so convoluted, yeah, yeah.

Nicolas Vibert: 36:52

So I think maybe we just need some new vocabulary, more acronyms, yeah, yeah, but I think maybe we just need some new vocabulary to describe it More. Acronyms yeah, probably. But yeah, we need to separate it because I think it just becomes very complicated and then I end up having to answer a questionnaire from vendors and the questions that maybe apply to me, to my products, don't apply at all to you know. I don't know like a restart Wi-Fi or whoever.

Chris Miles: 37:24

So it's Gartner's problem, basically.

Tim McConnaughy: 37:28

I think that's true, though I mean speaking of someone who's also had to fill out one of those 40-page reports like there are. Definitely sometimes they'll ask a question or be like explain your capability, and you're just sitting there like scratching your head, like tapping the pen on the desk, like huh, I got to put something here, but like our product really doesn't play in this particular space.

Nicolas Vibert: 37:48

Yeah, well, one we. We had a question recently which was all your your product doesn't support like drag and drop and your product?

Tim McConnaughy: 37:55

doesn't support drag and drop. You're like no, not exactly.

Nicolas Vibert: 37:59

What? Because maybe there will be some products where you can do some kind of Right like a policy creation in a UI or something.

Chris Miles: 38:09

Yeah, a map type thing, yeah.

Nicolas Vibert: 38:13

I'm not sure that, as a decision maker, we think, oh, I won't buy this product.

Chris Miles: 38:20

Gotta have that drag and drop man.

Tim McConnaughy: 38:23

Yeah, I can't build rules if I can't drag and drop things in my UI. That doesn't exist.

Nicolas Vibert: 38:29

Yeah.

Tim McConnaughy: 38:29

Now that's really interesting, I don't know. So I know we're running out of time, but I don't know if we got to an answer and I don't think the three of us are authoritative enough to make an answer for everyone, anyway, but even for ourselves.

Tim McConnaughy: 38:46

It's very convoluted, it's very ephemeral, it's changing all the fucking time. Yeah, it's almost like and this is the problem with a lot of things, right, not just networking, but also security, as we pointed out, it's very reductive, right? So, in order to get to the bare minimum the MVP definition, it becomes so reductive that you can almost sweep everything underneath it, which is what you're trying not to do, right, by defining it.

Nicolas Vibert: 39:13

Yeah, I won't even even try. I enjoy the, the, actually the diversity, uh of of cloud networking and the whole. Um, even a few years ago, the way I thought of the cloud networking is different from what I think of it now, and maybe you know, in the same five years time, like, I guess what, what do you think like cloud networking will look like? You know, and can you answer this without mentioning ai?

Chris Miles: 39:38

no, no, that's as far. We got this far without saying ai, that's great yeah well.

Tim McConnaughy: 39:45

So I mean, but yeah, we're not gonna. I don't think, I I don't even know right, like it's almost like a uh, what's the word? What I'm looking for like the uh singularity, like the technical singularity, like lies five years in the future, now that AI is everybody's fricking, finding new and new, newer and newer things to do with AI and we're getting closer and closer to to Skynet or whatever.

Nicolas Vibert: 40:06

Like who can even say and that's something we have now seen in the past couple of years is in in vendor analysis asking does your product support some form of AI? And I always like to kind of distinguish between is it about AI for networking, do we leverage some form of AI to optimize network traffic, predict patterns, or is it about making the network more robust, quicker for AI workloads? And I think both of them apply. I think both are requirements we're going to see more and more from not just kind of cloud networking but broader networking products is can your network cater for AI workloads and does your network leverage AI to provide better performance?

Tim McConnaughy: 40:58

Right, yeah, so this is interesting because the CSPs are like whole hog on basically developing their own silicon, which they've been doing for a while, but specifically for AI. They don't want to be beholden to NVIDIA or anybody for GPUs a while, but specifically for AI, like they don't want to be beholden to NVIDIA or any of the you know any anybody for GPUs and GPU. So doesn't that also come with a requirement then to and maybe this is why all these we reported on the news a few weeks ago that you know Microsoft is planning to spend what? A hundred billion dollars on their, on their upgrading their infrastructure, and like AWS said 75 and Google said like 80 or something like that, do you think a lot of that is going to build the networking for AI, meaning networking to support AI workloads? Do you, you know cause people may not be building their own, or do you think we'll see a reduction, like with deep?

Tim McConnaughy: 41:49

You know this, the deep seek thing was like 50, 50, which is what I kind of expected, which like, yeah, there are things that are good, but also a lot of it was kind of snowed over. It was a snow job of burying the lead on a lot of the costs and stuff, but it still represents a movement forward towards making it more. What's the word I'm looking for? Affordable, essentially to do AI, so do you think they'll just kind of meet in the middle somewhere? What do you think we're going to see first?

Nicolas Vibert: 42:18

I am equally as excited and dubious about AI for networking. I guess for a couple of reasons. One is I wrote a blog post about machine learning for networks 15 years ago. I wrote a blog post about machine learning for networks 15 years ago.

Nicolas Vibert: 42:34

I remember being I got the chance to sit in a room with like a Cisco fellow which is like the highest engineering level at Cisco and he was presenting some machine learning capabilities that he was working on at the time. That was 2000. It was more like maybe 2015, but it was like it was maybe 10 years ago. But it was, like you know, way, way, way before we you know, we yeah.

Nicolas Vibert: 43:04

And I got very excited about the possibilities, but nothing from what I know kind of came out of it. Right, it was, maybe it was maybe it was too early, but clearly, you know, we've seen like some amazing advancements and I'm a more than daily user of ChatGPT, but I still have some I really want to see like really applicable use cases. Like show me okay, networking has been able to help us make a better decision for this packet, right? Yeah, it was supposed to go and follow the you know the rising table and I could not hang on.

Nicolas Vibert: 43:41

we'll just go and send it to elsewhere because of you know conditions, whatever that is, yeah, yeah, um, yeah yeah, just just I want to see some more evidence, but I'm, I'm, I'm excited and I think just it's going to really help us make, create better products, help us develop our software faster, for sure. But we still want to see a bit more before. Let's say, I trust AI to enforce some security policies for me, for example.

Tim McConnaughy: 44:20

That's the one.

Tim McConnaughy: 44:20

Who was it? It was John. We had John Capobianco on there. We were asking him the same thing about. You know, when is it going to be the point where somebody is going to trust this agent like an AI agent enough to to actually go do network-level changes that could just blow up the whole network? Like, where's that? Where do we get to that part where somebody's okay with pressing that button and walking away? You know, essentially so I think I'm with you. I think it's going to still be a long time before we get to that, no matter what, right.

Chris Miles: 44:51

We're too big of control freaks for that at this point.

Tim McConnaughy: 44:56

Well, network engineers have to be, because those five nines of uptime are on us. Alright. Well, we'll go ahead and wrap it there. Nico, as always, it's awesome having you on and I'm really glad we could do it. We'll have to do it again in the future, any time any final thoughts there, chris, before we roll up.

Chris Miles: 45:15

No, I was just going to say Nico. Where can people find you online?

Nicolas Vibert: 45:19

Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn Again. That's probably where I'm most active. So LinkedIncom slash Nicolas Viver.

Tim McConnaughy: 45:34

We'll get it in the show notes too. Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right.

Nicolas Vibert: 45:37

Good night people.

Tim McConnaughy: 45:39

All right, everybody. Well, I don't know if we got to the exact answer, but hopefully somebody found some useful information in all of this. As always, I'm Tim, this is Chris, our guest, nico, and thanks for listening or watching, and we'll see you next time.