¶ Recent Cisco Acquisition and Cilium Integration
Welcome to the Cables to Clouds podcast . Cloud adoption is on the rise and many network infrastructure professionals are being asked to adopt a hybrid approach as individuals who have already started this journey . We would like to empower those professionals with the tools and the knowledge to bridge the gap . Hello and welcome back to the Cables to Clouds podcast .
My name is Chris Miles at BGP main on Twitter , not X still not calling it X On Twitter . Joining me , as always , is my beautiful co-host , alex Perkins at Bumps in the Wire and Tim McConaughey at OneGolbez .
So you may be if you didn't hear our last episode , you may be a little confused why you're getting another episode of the pod just a week later after the last one , where we typically release this on a fortnightly basis . So this is actually going to be our first standalone news episode .
So not to rehash it too much , we covered this on previous episodes but we're going to start doing a fortnightly news update that's standalone , separate from the podcast episodes , just so we kind of don't kind of time stamp our episodes with guests and things like that .
If someone wants to go back and listen to an episode of only guests we had , we don't want them to have to sit through last year's news or something like that eventually , when it gets to that point . So that's what . We're putting this on its own standalone thing .
It's probably going to be a little bit shorter episode , maybe around the 30 minute markers where we're going to try to keep it . We'll see how true to that we actually stay , but that's the idea . So , without further ado , let's get into the inaugural standalone news episode from Cables Cloud .
So yeah , like you said , alex , it's been I don't think we've done an actual news coverage for since mid December or something like that . So yeah , you would think during the holidays not much is going to transpire , but a whole bunch of shit happened .
So we've got some pretty news or pretty big news to cover Not just a bunch but like big , heavy hitting news . Yeah .
Even if these like just three major things happened , it would still be a huge news week nonetheless , so let's roll right into it . So , alex , you want to take it away , which ? We've talked a little bit about this one already , but let's kind of get into the weeds with it .
Yeah , and speaking of like interesting timing , I think this one came out like the week right after . During Christmas between Christmas and New Year's was Cisco's intent to buy Isovalent and this one just kicked off .
Right , this is the first of the really big announcements , but , man , personally , this came out of nowhere , like I was not expecting such a crazy acquisition . I thought Isovalent was prepping to be like that next big unicorn . For those that don't know , they make a product called Silium .
Well , they've basically created EBPF and one of the products that came from that is called Silium , and Silium is basically a CNI or a container networking interface , right . So it's like a networking plugin for Kubernetes and pretty much everyone that has a Kubernetes distribution , that being like AWS , azure , gcp , right , everyone that has one .
They've kind of all standardized on Silium . So that to me , I think , was probably one of the most surprising parts , is that Cisco got . This is amazing deal for Cisco , right ? This is super forward thinking on their part , so major congratulations there . I don't know what were your initial impressions of this .
Yeah , it was like you said , came out of left field , did not see it coming . I mean mainly because we don't see . Like I say this a little bit in just we usually don't see moves by Cisco like this that seem so smart in the cloud space . So this one was like damn okay .
I think Tim , you kind of touched on this on the last episode it's like okay , somebody's , somebody over there is listening and is tuned in and is making the right moves . Right now it's probably more than just one person , it's probably a well thought team and everything . But I'm very curious to see where this goes .
When you think Cilium , you think their integration with the CNIs container network interface and Cisco's products , that I don't see the direct mapping and like what fits in where ? Right , maybe a little bit in the security space with the network policies and things like that . But like I don't know exactly what this is gonna mean .
But , like you said , this has already been adopted as pretty much the gold standard for CNIs , right , everyone's using that as pretty much the industry standard . So they immediately are gonna have an inlet to a lot of the foreground there . So I'm curious to see where it's gonna go . I don't know how . About you , tim ?
Yeah , I mean I covered . We talked about this on the last episode and of course I'm seeing the shorts now come out from the last episode that where are we talking about this ? So it's kind of time-leaning funny . So Isevellin is a major contributor to the Cilium project , so I'm curious to see .
I think Cisco's always struggled a little bit with that balance between having to show value to shareholders and also being able to be kind of that contributor , if you will , to open source type of projects . I think everybody is holding their breath .
Wait and see how the hammer's gonna fall on this , and I don't actually think we're gonna get an answer in any short period of time , right ? So yeah , go ahead .
I think the acquisition doesn't close until the end of 2024 or two .
Yeah , I mean it's gonna be a very long time before we see anything . And right , and even after that they're gonna have to go through integration and incubation and just trying to figure out , like what the hell are we gonna do with this ?
Right , so they'll have a plan , I mean , especially since the acquisition is not gonna close until the end of 2024 , like you said , like when they did this with Viptella before the acquisition was even closed .
We had , you know there were Viptella people inside Cisco doing you know we were learning about Viptella and stuff inside Cisco ahead of time , so they're already working on that . I'm not worried about that . I think everybody's waiting with bated breath to understand what Cisco's plans for Cilium . You know , as a major contributor , that IceValan is and EBPF as well .
Right , that's a huge deal that impacts a lot of open source projects beyond just Cilium , you know , oh yeah .
And we should probably touch on like just because Cisco is acquiring IceValan and getting Cilium , it's more than just Cilium . Right , like they have the other , what are like Tetragon , is that another ?
one Tetragon's like the observability . Yeah , it's a big , or sorry , tetragon is a security piece , yeah right .
And then service mesh . They have their own service mesh , don't they ? Isn't that an yeah Cilium service mesh , yeah .
And real quick . Sorry to interrupt , but the thing about the Cilium service mesh is that it's agent . It's like a sidecar list , right .
Yeah , no sidecar . And .
I put that in quotations for those that aren't watching , because there's a huge debate in the service mesh community around what it actually means to not have a sidecar proxies next to all your containers , so that's gonna be another interesting thing to watch play out .
I haven't seen that discourse . Is it just like splitting hairs on technically whether or not you can call it a sidecar ?
Or is it like okay , yeah , we should call a service mesh , or yeah .
There's a lot we need to talk about .
yeah , Go ahead .
I'll be super quick , but basically MTLS is used a lot right ? Service mesh allows all these different containers to talk to each other using MTLS . The problem is that that basically requires some kind of agent . The argument is like how can you say that you're not using a sidecar but you have MTLS going because you need something there to broker that connection ?
Chicken and egg type .
Yeah , there are definitely some arguments on the back end around this , for sure .
Yeah , makes sense . I think we have it planned on the roadmap for this year . But to have these more and more of these CNI type of side , these kind of discussions it's becoming very obvious that most of our listener base might not be up to date on a lot of these stuff that we're talking about .
It's coming Well , especially as we see it more and more in the news , more and more in our networking data lives . We're going to put together something to us or talk about Kubernetes .
There's definitely a lot of people going on this journey , whether or not they want to or not , for real . We will do our best to try to help along the way . All right , so let's go to the next one . Probably was bigger than the first one , but I'll let you take it away , Tim .
Man , wow , again , this has just been the time for bombshells . Man , I don't know if everybody was just waiting for this time of the year , when it was going to be quiet , to just drop the biggest bombs possible . Heel of Packard Enterprise is acquiring Juniper Networks , which what no ?
had no clue .
I don't even know how to follow up that piece of data . You talk about Adelaide Field and not seeing that one coming . I think we all knew that Juniper had been .
Actually , what's funny is , I actually felt like Juniper was finally finding their own way in a way that not just being the the shadow , the Cisco shadow , or the foil to Cisco that had been for so many years , and actually coming into its own identity , especially with things like the MIST and Napstra and all of that . Yeah , this one's really , really surprising .
For those who haven't seen it yet again , heel of Packard Enterprise is buying Juniper Networks to just basically , hpe is huge , hpe is gigantic . It's one of those global conglomeration things where they just got everything . They're buying Juniper for approximately $14 billion . The valuation is also very interesting to me .
Yeah , it seems like nothing . That seems , Well , not nothing . $14 billion and something , nothing . You would think Juniper is worth more than that . I wonder if that plays into it .
Well , cisco bought Splunk . For what ? $28 or whatever right $28, .
yeah , it's a double , literally double the number . Yeah , yeah .
¶ HPE's Acquisition and Google Cloud Change
Yeah , so from a , of course , I've already started seeing and , if I'm being honest , contributed to all of the memes out there showing how your router is going to refuse to send packets because it's low on toner .
Yeah , the Juniper , the chassis one with the printer on top was the fucking DOS .
Oh , I know the killer killer .
Yeah , dude , it was so fucking fun .
Yeah , or the yeah , or like hey , I need you to send these packets . No , I'm low on cyan , but it is important to point out that Hewlett-Pekard Enterprises is a subsidiary .
Whatever , you call it . It's not HP . Yeah , it's not .
HP , your printer company . Right , it's all the same global core , but it is a completely different and well-seasoned arm of the company , if you will . I mean HPE . Like I said , they've got a bunch of other technologies . They're heavy in compute , so there's a lot of speculation about this .
I personally , a lot of people are saying , hey , maybe it's going to be . They're doing this to get a strong networking seat at the table . I don't know that . I agree , unless it was just like a target opportunity where it was cheap enough that they were like , okay , well , we can go ahead and buy this and pull this , pick this up .
I think all the AI work that Juniper's done is very loud and out there and people know about it and might have worked into it too . I'm wondering how much we're going to see companies getting snapped up like this if they have AI , IP or something , as the race continues .
I mean that has to be it right , because I can't see HPE be like oh , we really want the service provider centralized market . That couldn't have been their target . It has to be . The AI missed all this stuff , right ? Daniel did make a great post about this . What does this mean ?
No-transcript Comments flying out left and right like it's more like I'm concerned to see what dies as a result of this . Yeah , you know what happens with what happens with Aruba , like what ? How does that factor into this ? And because Juniper missed is is miss the wireless thing there's has miss expanded it to more than just wireless . At this point , it's .
It's like there's just a rocky type thing .
It's like that , yeah but if I was it , if I , if I worked for Aruba at this point , I would be probably a little , a little nervous , right Like Aruba , unless they're gonna try to position it as like a upmarket sell right so that they don't impact Aruba at all . You know , let's say which I don't know , like maybe it's .
Yeah , I definitely know , definitely nobody thinks I I'm gonna say nobody , I'm sure somebody does that like , hey , aruba is like the same class of of technology and and Hardware as , say , you know , juniper , cisco , whatever you will right it's more definitely I don't , I don't get that feeling .
So , yeah , I guess we're gonna , we're gonna see , but that's anyway so not to believe at the point . But that is , that's a big bombshell . I'm not sure when this one's gonna close or I think everybody's just gonna have to wait and see what HP is gonna do . Hopefully they don't pull a broad calm . Well , well , we'll get to that one later .
Roke , yeah , real quick , because Chris just made me think of something that I hadn't really thought of until now . But you know , as far as like getting the service provider industry , I I could see an argument you know about .
Maybe they are targeting that in some way , because a lot of the Press release was about AI and maybe this is like 40 chests and they're thinking ahead of , like you know , as AI expands to the edge more they'll already be there entrenched into some of like the service provider Telco kind of space that's already on the edge building those edge networks , right .
That's like a service offering type thing .
Yeah , kind of like they'll just already be there and they already have like the data center portion of the AI stuff figured out . I don't know there's something there that I'd have to really flesh out a little bit more , but your , your comments , just made me kind of think about that a little bit more .
Yeah , you might be honest something . Maybe we'll see apsha at the edge . Maybe that's what they're gonna do .
Yeah .
Just gone bro , it's like yeah , I can't .
This is I can't see it . I truly cannot see that apsha surviving this acquisition . But you know who knows ?
Yeah , that's this one Like I can't like express how out of left field , this thing was like . I was like it was like that'd be like somebody like oh yeah , blockbusters acquiring Cisco or Netflix or something like .
What like is like , this thing that you kind of think of is old and archaic and not necessarily old and archaic In their entire product offering , but in their network offering . You know , you don't think , you don't really consider HPE a Top player at all . Right , yeah , they come out .
They've just been around .
Forever is all right , they just better .
That's their claim to fame . It's just , it's like it's if IBM , you know , bought I don't know , like if IBM bought a Rista or something .
Hey , you never know , now we got , we got everything else .
We got a couple weeks left in this month , bro . We could . It might be the trend , okay . So , yeah , let's onto the next one . So this one yet Well , I , I , I will say this one made me think immediately that it was kind of a doomsday thing for GCP , which is probably not the case now that we've looked at this a little bit further .
But so Google has announced that they will stop charging egress fees to transfer data out of Google Cloud , and I think this , like the , I believe the target point in the article was that you know they'll help you migrate to another or they won't charge you to migrate your data to another cloud . But I think that didn't .
They have a like a clause in there that you actually have to close your Google account once once that happens . So you got to like , you got to get the hell out Like you can't . It's like you know you don't have to stay here , but you got to leave .
Don't let the door hit you on your own .
Yeah .
Yeah .
What was also interesting is that you do it as like they . It doesn't quote , unquote cost anything , but it's on a rebate model , right . So it costs you , but they'll rebate you essentially at the end , right .
But yeah , I mean initially you think like , oh , like is this ? Is this ? Is this the first like piece of the sunset the sunset dominoes for for GCP . Is this then being like yeah , go ahead , go ahead , we'll see you later .
But no , I mean , Tim , you , you actually found some some documentation out there that this might be related to actually like regulations , so maybe you want to speak on it a little bit more .
Yeah just real quick . So actually I didn't . So you know I work at ABA tricks . We have a . We have a , you know , presence in Europe . One of the legal team in Europe was said actually , you know that there's a new data law I forget what the I think it's actually called data law or something like that .
It's actually got like a super generic name it's coming out and some part of it had something to do with with killing egress fees , at least in in Europe . I'm not . I have to go read through it . I haven't had a chance to read through it yet because I just found out about it .
And then actually I subscribed to Forest Brazil's Brazil , brazil , brazil , brazil , Brazil , brazil , his newsletter , since you know years so you know two years ago or three years ago now , that he did the cloud resume challenge and all that and he actually had it in his newsletter that he just put out and he had a different take on it .
He had really good takes on it actually , you know , and he just actually just left Google . He'd worked there for a while and , yeah , so he had mentioned it . He said I didn't really think it was . That was the case . I'll I'll .
It's a newsletter , but like , I'll get it , get his , we'll make sure we have his intro in the article notes somewhere or you can take a look at it and whatnot , but he didn't necessarily think it was . It was that , you know . But I was originally . I was just like you , chris , where I thought it was going to be where I thought it was going to be .
Oh crap , like actually , I took the other track and I thought , oh well , maybe Google's doing this , so people will use Google more that are already in other clouds . But yeah , this whole the way this article is written , it's like it's just like a , like an exit strategy , like which is really , really weird to me .
I think it's hilarious that right , chris , you were saying how a lot of people immediately thought oh God , is this ? It Is this one ? Google kills GCP . And and then Tim , in that that newsletter you sent us he had . The part of the article is about how everybody thinks that immediately , anytime , google makes any announcement , you can't blame us .
You can't blame us . No , it's all the time , like , like you know it's , it's if it looks one of , it looks like a whatever like a duck . Yeah , but , yeah , I mean . But I wonder if that's it like , if they do stop charging egress fees in the EU , I wonder how many people are going to start just backhauling internet traffic through the EU .
If it's not a sensitive latency , sensitive workload , maybe they'll start backhauling the .
EU . Well , you don't want to do that , though , because then you fall into GDPR and a whole other can of worms comes into play .
That's true , but maybe just Netflix , I don't know .
I'm just like I have a question mark here . Originally I thought , hey , this might be a smart move for them to use , because I think we'd all be clear that they're not the leader , obviously , in the CSPs right .
No , their offers , generally the service offers , aren't one-to-one with AWS and Azure , just the services that are available as a one-stop shop for a cloud , if you will , are not one-to-one . I thought when I first read this oh crap , it's actually really smart for Google .
They're going to lean into the fact that they know compute , the fact that they are K8s , the fact that they are AI . They'll make it easier for customers to get in and actually move data out of the cloud to the clouds where they are and just harvest the compute cost . Yeah , now I'm still scratching my head .
I was hoping to read that somewhere , but yeah , I didn't see anyone even saying that . I agree , it would have been a good play to frame it that way .
Yeah , so interesting . We'll see how that one boils out . Pretty much these three things . It's just the tip of the iceberg thing , right it's all going to grow into something much bigger .
I saw a quote recently or not a quote , but just like somebody said something online recently that I thought was really interesting , that it was a prediction that years are going to increasingly look different going forward . It's so true . I'm just thinking of the last couple of years since COVID and how everything has changed so much every year .
Tech , especially , is just . I'd like this . In two weeks we had all these crazy announcements . Things just move so fast these days and so unexpectedly . It's going to be a crazy year .
I don't know how you plan your career path at this point anymore .
Yeah , I don't either .
Yeah , dude , I'm glad we're not in our early 20s anymore .
Yeah , I feel for the people who are just starting to get into tech . I wouldn't know how could you spend more than two weeks on anything without it changing underneath you ?
Yeah , no kidding , yeah , so I guess we'll round up this last one . I know we're coming close to time on this
¶ Impact of VMware Partner Program Changes
. Alex , you want to touch on this last one about VMware ?
Yeah , vmware , they already announced this a little while ago . I think people were just surprised when they actually did it . For some reason , they basically took all their accounts private . Is that the wording ? I think I'm messing up the wording , but they took all their partner accounts internal . They shut off the partner program and it's on hold .
They literally told partners don't even apply for reinstatement . We'll let you know when we can start redoing this pipeline . And you have to sell 500,000 a year or something of services to be even considered . It's crazy , man , how quickly they just are cutting things out . They already cut out all these external communities . They cut off the partner program now .
Things moved very quickly .
Yeah , I was joking with someone it might have been Will actually that I was like they have to pay this Apparently . Whatever they spent on acquiring VMware , they must have to pay it back really fast . Maybe it's a 3-1 arm or something like a mortgage or something , I don't know .
It's insanely how quickly they are absolutely gutting any kind or moving to capture every last penny .
Remember the day the acquisition happened . People were posting pictures of like look they've already changed the signs . It's everywhere . They already posted over .
That has an immediate impact on business for them and for all the partners . I will say I haven't been close enough to it to say but is this going to cause partners to die ? If ?
you're a VMware integrator ? Yeah , absolutely .
If you just lost your entire channel ? Yeah , how would that go ? If you were a VCP and you worked at a VAR and that VAR lost its ability to do channel partner with VMware ? Yeah , I mean , how does that work ? I have no idea how that would work .
Was it blanket , like everyone , or do you think there were some backdoor deals where , like look , we'll keep this open ?
I think there were one or two huge integrators that they kept but they were the ones that were like I don't know if it was really WWT , but like the WWTs of the VMware partner program , I think were probably the only ones left .
Yeah right , tim , you're making a good point too . What's going to happen to certification program ? There's a lot of downfall from this that could happen down the line .
Yeah , I mean if you cut out the , if you cut a large part of the career track out , where that people would have gone to integrators to help customers do VMware integrations or something like that . Yeah , dude , it's a house of cards that I'm kind of curious . If fraud can't even realize or cares , the answer is no to that one .
If they pulled that , you know the rug pull , they've done .
All right . Well , I think we're about time . There are some other articles that we'll put into the into the Fortnightly News document . So if you check the show notes , there will be a link to that . There will be a couple of the links . The first stuff that we found interesting , one about how to break into a cloud engineering career .
Yeah , ebpf predictions from Isovalent . That one's probably pretty , pretty topical , pretty good to read , so we'll throw that in the show notes . So definitely check that out for some additional news that happened over the last few weeks here . So with that we will wrap it up .
Like I said , this was the inaugural standalone news episode , so we're going to bring this to you on a fortnightly basis . Again , we have the listener survey out there . We've posted it on socials , we'll put it in the show notes and and all that . So please fill out the listener survey if you haven't .
That would greatly help us to make sure that we're bringing you something that you want to hear on on now a weekly basis . You will be hearing Keebl's Clouds once every every Wednesday .
Chris has been waiting to say that since we started Just so I do we get think if we could say every Wednesday , how good that will be .
But yeah , so we will be releasing this on a . You know , the podcast will have a release every every week . It'll be fortnightly , between news and and an episode with either guest or round table type thing . And you know , we're working on some stuff for this year , hopefully some more technical content focusing on , you know , solutions , things like that .
We got some good feedback that people want to hear that , so we'll be working on that . Lastly , any , any closing thoughts from either of you guys ?
Slow down . Please Stop buying companies . Just for just a week or two would be fine . Really , you got to catch up .
Yeah , no same thing . I just echo that . I mean it's crazy , Like there's supposed to be holidays and slow down time and instead we got just our , our our our talking on discord privately . Man , it's been like nonstop just talking about all this , all these bombshell announcements , one after another .
So yeah , please slow down . Well , if in case it doesn't slow down , we'll talk to you in two weeks with the next news update . But yeah , so this has been cables clouds . Thanks for checking it out . Hit the subscribe , hit the like button , all that , all that crap , right and we'll . We'll see you next week .
Hi everyone , it's Chris and this has been the cables to clouds podcast . Thanks for tuning in today . If you enjoyed our show , please subscribe to us in your favorite podcatcher , as well as subscribe and turn on notifications for our YouTube channel to be notified of all our new episodes . Follow us on socials at cables to clouds .
You can also visit our website for all of the show notes at cables to cloudscom . Thanks again for listening and see you next time .