It Sounds Like Cisco May Need Some Ritalin - NC2C012

Nick was an absolute legend , such a big contributor to the networking community , one of the most gifted and kind people that we all knew . So if you want to make a donation in his name , we will put some links into the show notes where you can have a look and do that . So without that , we will get into the episode .

There's been a couple of conferences recently , so let's dive right in . Tim , you want to kick us off with some .

At that time they just added a new capability to it , which is what they're calling their service insertion feature .

So this is very much like the TGW service insertion basically , where you can , you know , redirect traffic as it moves across the TGW into some kind of security stack for for inspection , whether it be AWS firewall or Palo or some third party or Aviatrix and the so . So this is a new capability .

It's different in CloudWin than it is , say , for example , with the TGW service inspection BBC because of , of course , cloudwin is a managed service .

So you know , since you don't directly control , like , say , the TGWs under the hood , for CloudWin , they've introduced this new feature where you can use a policy essentially to tell CloudWin to redirect traffic to your security stack , whatever it is , and then , you know , based on how that security stack inspects it , it can go north , south and go internet egress

or east west . But pretty cool naked capability . A lot of third party vendors , ourselves included , have included some blog posts and whatnot to show people how to build that in and include security inspection .

So , um , I'm sure this is probably huge for a lot of customers moving to adopt CloudWin from TGW . They're probably like , oh , I'm not moving to CloudWin until you have this , this capability . So this is probably um , um , uh , really big for those wanting to make that migration . Um , have you had any conversations around that tim ?

Uh , has that been something that you guys were um privy to ?

So CloudWan is still pretty much in its infancy right , like it provides kind of the east-west connectivity across regions and all of that , you know , with the policy and the segmentation , but it's still very , I don't know , I would , I hesitate to say , clunky . That's that sounds negative , but it's just . There's just not a lot there .

It's like an abstraction of an abstraction right now . So this is getting closer to kind of what I would consider to be a , a fully functional kind of network , uh capability yeah , I've .

So yeah , I'd be curious to see this in the wild . I'd like to see some people using it yeah .

It's a policy and you make these actions that basically do like policy-based routing , essentially that tell it , hey , when you go across this CloudWinds segment , if this says send via , or send to north , south , east , west , go to this security inspection thing , that target that we've made for you . So it's pretty cool . Again , it's , it's .

It's an abstraction of an abstraction , so it still feels a little Fisher price , but it's a pretty cool , pretty cool thing . That's that I hope a lot of people are going to try out . Okay , next story from about amazoncom is some stuff that came out of reinforce . I believe . Some stuff that came out of reinforce . I believe . I think this came from reinforce .

Aws is debuting some new AI certifications surprise , surprise , and it's a quest to become the low , the leader in in AI . We now have the AWS certified AI practitioner . I think it is Hang on , yep , that's right , aws certified AI practitioner . So think of , like you know , certified cloud practitioner . I guess that's the level that they're aiming for .

This one Just to give you a really basic generative AI , I assume completely in the realm of how AWS does it with Bedrock and whatnot , right . And then AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer Associate . That was a lot to say and that's meant more at the solutions architect level , where you're supposed to already have some experience .

Now it's interesting they call it the machine learning engineer associate and not , like AI , engineer associate . So curious to see , from a blueprint perspective , what the difference is there , like why they specifically called it that instead of AI , or is you know what ? What are the services really ultimately that they're going to target for that ?

But yeah , so two , two new starts for me from AWS AI focus . What do you guys think about that ?

I couple of different vendors and it is interesting to see I don't know if this is just a play to kind of save themselves from overusing the word AI too much or , you know , to not call something AI when it's just machine learning . So it's interesting to see AWS doing this as well .

And then also , this is the associate certification , so it makes you think that probably down the line there's going to be a professional one as well . It's not surprising they're coming out with certs .

They have some we've talked about this before but I think they have some catch up to do in the AI race , so this is definitely a step in that direction for them .

It says together with the AWS certified data engineer , associate and machine learning specialty certifications , aws now offers multiple options for individuals to showcase some of today's most in demanddemand skills . Obviously , that's just you know kind of marketing speak , but I don't .

It seems like there's so much overlap with this , so I don't know if that means that the machine learning specialty is , you know , potentially going to get the ax or something .

They've seemed to have been shuffling things around a bit and and not I wouldn't say pissing people off , but making people a little weary about , uh , leaning too hard into a specific , uh , a specific certification on this , on this track . So , um , I wonder if that's going to happen here , Don't know .

So that's my , my guess is that that's their thinking on it as well maybe this means we'll get an advanced networking associate and a professional winner on ? Yeah , very unlikely . But okay , first they'd have to actually appreciate networking to that degree and I don't think anybody but us does .

So I was not at Reinforce , so I don't know how , if this is just what this particular person was paying attention to or if this really was the central wording , if you will at Reinforce to , or if this really was the central wording , if you will at Reinforce . But there was a lot of jabs at Microsoft .

Is what this article was saying about kind of the Microsoft culture of dealing with All over , yeah , really just all over it . Right , the Microsoft culture , if you will , of escalations and kind of not being clear and concise about their culture , like security culture and stuff .

Another part of the article mentions that AWS added a bunch of new security features to the identity access management . There's a lot in here again about AI , but it's all very generic , to be honest . Again , amazon really wants or AWS should I say really wants to be seen as a leader in the AI race . So pretty much any opportunity they have to talk about AI .

It seems like they're talking about AI and for what that's worth . But yeah , I mean , the article is pretty good . I'm Definitely take a look at it . But yeah , besides this idea of security culture and AI , I really didn't hear anything else really coming out of Reinforce . Actually , reinforce was pretty quiet .

I just feel like in the past , a lot of people have talked about how you have that shared security and responsibility model , and that hasn't really been the message from them in the past . They mentioned these things called security guardians , which it sounds like are people that are embedded into each service team . Have you guys ever heard of this ?

I've never heard that term before this article .

So to me's like it's a the season of saying exactly what he should be saying yeah , I mean this , the concept of this , these security guardians is what it's just .

So , um , you know , you know , I think they they aligned it to the whole shift left mentality type thing , right , um , so it makes sense . But , yeah , I'm , I'm kind of with you , tim .

It was like I think we we were looking through the uh , the announcements from reinforce to try to put something into the news and a lot of it really wasn't , wasn't even enough to cover really . So , oh , that's the most interesting thing you got out of Reinforce but yeah , kind of on the same page with you guys .

This actually brings to mind something we've talked about once or twice , which was the CSPs want to be leaders in the AI race and to some degree I'm sure they will be , but the biggest blocker for them has got to be the idea that customers are afraid to give their data to essentially what could be considered , in the worst case , the competition and in the best

case , a third party that they have to trust with all the , because I mean the data . The model's only as good as the data in it . Right ? Who was it ? Was it you , chris ? Sorry , we were talking about somebody putting their whole code base into Copilot or something like this . Right , it's nuts . Right , it's absolutely insane .

So I think this wording about AI and data security is not random , right ? There's nothing random about it .

You know , if people are going to have a hard time trusting Adobe with these things , just imagine someone like AWS or GCP or Azure , like it's going to be . We've got a long road ahead .

So AWS introduced a new functionality for AWS , GuardDuty , and GuardDuty is kind of like their threat detection product I think it's actually Proofpoint under the covers . Actually it's Proofpoint that they've branded as AWS GuardDog Proofpoint under the covers . Actually it's Proofpoint that they've branded as AWS GuardDog .

So GuardDog has been there for a while on the Elastic Block Store , so EBS volumes . So if it's attached to an EC2 instance , you have malware protection . Guardduty now is available Not available , I think it's actually on by default . Now for S3 , for the simple storage service .

So when people are uploading files to the S3 buckets , guardduty is going to look at those files and try to figure out if they're malware . So if you host a website or host some kind of thing where you want people to upload files to you , for example , this is now a service that AWS is providing , where GuardDuty will scan those files for you for malware .

So , like I said , a lot of us are probably scratching our heads like , well , that didn't already exist ? But no , this is a new feature , so I don't know what you guys have to say . Probably not a lot to say about that one .

There , unfortunately , was not a whole lot of anything around cloud announcements , so we're kind of trying to find stuff that we can cover , kind of related to our show here , and one that pops out is , of course , this really should have just been Cisco Live AI right , because it was a lot of AI announcements .

But after doing some research , it's like an elective . I think they call it right . I don't know much about the CCDE but , it's more of like a focus , like a major , like a minor . You can pick as you go through the CCDE if you will . So I don't know . Pete Lumbis had a lot of good points on this that I saw Like , basically , is this really necessary ?

Like our AI infrastructure is so custom that you need a whole dedicated section of the CCDE just to talk about it , and I don't know . I think a lot of people agreed with him . I didn't really see many opposing points of how it's so different that you do need something . So I don't know what I think about this . What do you guys ?

You guys have any thoughts here ?

Usually these things take a lot more care and feeding before they make it to the actual certification track . But if it's , if we're at this stage where it's kind of like pick your own specialization , you know , I can't , I can't be too perturbed with it because you people just don't fucking pick it . You know , pick the other shit .

That makes more sense , you know . Um , but at the same time it's like I I don't think I've ever seen anything get into the certification track this fast , especially for something like the ccde , which we actually thought was maybe getting sunset at some point .

Um , I think we've all , uh , tim I years ago , like contemplated going for it and then we were like , actually , I don't , it was , it was around cert apocalypse . Whenever that happened . What was that ? 2019 , 2019 . Yeah , we all were like , uh , actually they're probably going to kick the bucket on this thing . So we're just going to not do it .

Um , but um , yeah , it's interesting . Um , I'd be really keen to hear from somebody who takes it . I'm sure it's not going to be out for a little bit , but yeah , that's my two cents .

I forget what they are , I don't actually have the list in front of me , but but this is basically just a . I wouldn't know how this is different than just like high performance computing , just in general . Like how is this a different selection than that ? Exactly , but yeah so .

But to say that Cisco live was like entirely AI all the keynotes , all the all the so many breakouts , so many announcements , so many new things . From a cloud perspective , they had AWS and GCP there and that was it . They had booths in the world of solutions and they weren't really making any noise .

So it was cool that they were there , though , but , yeah , I was actually expected a lot more cloud there and they were like nope , get out of the way cloud . We got to make room for ai . So uh , yeah , so nothing else to say there yeah , okay .

It goes into a lot of detail about it but they announced something called nexusFabric HyperFabric right , not HyperShield like we've been talking about with the eBPF security solution , but HyperFabric this time .

There's new switches , cisco 6000 series switches they run on silicon one and there's like NVIDIA Bluefield DPUs . There's GPUs in this thing , like it's a whole . My understanding is these are like green field for greenfield deployments , right ? So you have think of how ACI kind of controls a data center fabric .

This is kind of similar , but it's controlling your AI , like on-prem AI data center , if you will . What's weird to me is this is controlled by Nexus dashboard and Nexus dashboard already controls you can have like VX land fabrics , you know spine fabrics within NXLS .

You can control ACI with it , and now they've added this third hyper fabric Someone in the A1 discord was mentioning , you know . Does this mean should we start watching out for ACI being sunset ?

And I think that's something to seriously think about , because you know as much as I used to love ACI , I really see more and more people migrating away from it , and if this is also controlled by Nexus dashboard , I just wonder how long something like ACI has has left left to live .

I think I've mentioned several times on the show , though , that I feel like the Cisco implementation of ACI was definitely geared towards network engineers and less towards the people running the applications , which is probably what it needed to be , because it was application-centric infrastructure and it never really made that leap , or anybody who turned on ACI mode , or

it's not network mode . I forget what the ACI mode is Application mode Is that what it's called ?

Do you think that's just a coincidence that the latest RevUp to Research program was all based around the Nexus dashboard ? I don't know , I'm sure it was not at all I'll tell you , as someone that's trying to get my CE credits and has not touched a Nexus switch in probably close to six years , it's a beast .

They have this very long course , so I don't know if it's going to lead me to Hyperfabric , but we'll see . Tim's going to lead me to hyper fabric , but we'll . We'll see . Um tim's going to be a hyper fabric expert and in the coming months .

I don't think he actually knew what was happening inside of Cisco with these products when he talked about it , but he brought up how there were like CVDs that were talking about on-prem AI networks and then , like two weeks later , all this stuff got announced and it was it's just funny like he was talking about it .

So it's just it's so fresh top of mind that it's funny to see this come out and know that there are CVDs out there for this exact thing . And it's not just CVDs , there's like the Cisco ones , but also NVIDIA has their own , whatever they call them , like their own equivalent of the CVDs for AI data centers as well .

But so I bring up John because he also brought up this thing called Cisco outshift and I had never , never heard of this before . So I went and looked it up and I know when I , when I sent you guys this link in Discord , tim , you were like I just saw this at Cisco Live . So it was funny Again

. Another weird coincidence , right , we have a link to this , to their site , but OutShift is essentially like an incubation what do they call it ?

This is just for like projects that Cisco kind of wants to try like something crazy out of the box and then like instead of like spin outs right , that's what they called them in the past I think they'd have spin outs that would build up a new company and then they'd acquire them and bring them right back in .

This is just like a new incubation engine for Cisco . You guys have anything to add here . I don't know if you've looked into this too much .

The innovator's dilemma is , of course , is a book that you can find on a printer audio book , but it basically says you know , for all these giant companies that are so slow moving , that have all their revenue tied up in products they already sell , who have to take care of their customers and can't spend a dime , it doesn't make any financial sense for them to

spend a dime on innovation anymore . Like , how do they do it ?

And the answer in the book was pretty much the same as what we've got Cisco doing and Google doing , which is you got to spin this out , take it out from underneath the uh , the skirts of the of the big corporation , out from underneath the uh , the financial sense stuff that you know the all of that , and then try it you know to be agile and and just get

it out from under the company and see how how it works .

And for those of you that out there that have worked in a startup , it's very chaotic . It is very fast moving . You know you're doing a lot of pivoting . There's not a lot of , you know there's not a lot of like hard lines drawn in the sand on anything , like everyone's kind of doing everything type thing .

But that makes me wonder if , if you know , obviously the , the , the behavior of spinning things out , letting them run on their own and then just kind of bringing back the , you know buying them out , basically bringing them back under the Cisco umbrella . I wonder how this affects that .

Does it affect the agility of these incubation units to run Like , if it's , if it's technically still part of Cisco , like , are they going to be restricted to a lot of the compliance and kind of day-to-day operations of how Cisco does things ? I don't know Restricted to a lot of the compliance and kind of day-to-day operations , of how Cisco does things .

I don't know . I'd be curious to learn more about that . But yeah , I mean it's probably a way to speed up this process rather than letting people kind of leave and come back under the terms of acquisition . I would think .

The move fast and break things kind of mentality yeah .

And that's the part I think that still Cisco is struggling with .

So they're working on integrating capabilities from Laceworks CNAP and for those of you like myself that don't know what a CNAP is much like I don't that is a cloud native application protection platform , kind of contributing to Fortinet's unified SASE offering across the board .

So the quote from Fortinet was like you know , this is one of the most comprehensive full stack AI driven cloud security platforms available from a single vendor being Lacework . So they've obviously brought them in under their umbrella .

I'll be honest , I don't know a ton about Lacework . I know they've been causing waves in certain aspects and I've heard about them here and there . So this is you know . I mean it's about as exciting as an AI driven acquisition can can be in the security , uh , security space . Um , I think they said they .

It's still unclear whether or not the Laceworks CEO is actually going to move over to Fortinet . Um , so , um , we'll see if that comes to light . But , um , yeah , cool , a good move for uh , for Fortinet , I'm sure . Um , it's uh .

Fortinet is not one of these companies that I've kept in the forefront of my mind thinking about integrated AI security in that regard , so I'm sure this is going to kind of be a bit of a springboard to get them in that . In that , in that category , how do you guys feel ?

I didn't even realize Fortinet had the ability to spend that much on something like this so quickly . So it's just another domino and all these insane acquisitions we keep seeing over the last year .

Was this a fire sale ? Or did fortinet actually have like a had been , you know , shopping for a while for something like this and and wanting to add their portfolio ? You know , sometimes there are companies that acquire other companies just because it's too cheap , not to . It's just like this is the lunch money , leaving it on the ground .

And then there's ones where they actually think , hey , we've got a huge hole in our portfolio , let's go find the right company to pull in . And I kind of wonder , based on how this article is written , which one this is , and maybe we'll never find out .

I don't know who's technically the customer in this scenario . Is it Microsoft or is it OpenAI ? Either one , not bad to have them in your back pocket . So you know , I'm sure OCI is out there like number one , updating all their customer slides to include OpenAI and Microsoft as one of their primary customers . That would be the first thing I did .

So , yeah , capacity . We're reaching the time where capacity is becoming a big problem for even some of these CSPs , and they're the ones that get pretty much first access to all the GPUs from NVIDIA . So it's , you know , kind of concerning , but we'll see where

it goes .

So I wonder if part of the deal to get the capacity involved , this like this press , you know , like this public press release saying , hey , you know , oci's got capacity for ai workloads , like come on over , right . So you know , it seems it's a weird .

It's a weird press release because you , I don't , I can't remember the last time you essentially have one csp or or one company as huge as microsoft , uh , you know , open ai , I know , but let's just say it's microsoft really , uh , putting this money out , um , you know , to a , to a competitor , essentially saying we need your , we need your shit yeah , and kind

of to both your points .

So a little Australia representation on the pod here today , but just really talking about a lot of the AI integration and whether the enterprise networks are ready for this type of adoption of AI .

So the one , specifically from Fierce Network , talks about a study that was put together from a company called Xperio I believe is how you pronounce it found that 69% of businesses are preparing to take on AI or already using it at scale . So I feel like that's pretty obvious .

I think that anyone probably knows that they get into a lot of details about percentages , about who's ready for that , as far as , like , where network security sits , where multi-cloud networking and connectivity sits , and this kind of talk about the , the rise of this network platform that needs to exist to support the , the AI infrastructure along the way , and there's

a lot of details and there's a lot of numbers about , you know , percentages , percentages relating to economy and inflation and things like that . So I don't I don't think we want to get too deep into that , but , yeah , curious to hear your thoughts . How , how do you feel ?

I mean , I feel like we've been preaching this already , that we saw this coming , but I'm curious to hear if you guys have any other tidbits to offer .

Ai is just blowing up everywhere and , as we talk about often like for the people that don't want to hand over their data to CSPs or whoever else is like providing some kind of AI cloud , you know they have to start thinking about how to do it in-house and , whether they want to or not , a lot of these companies feel like they have to do something with AI

and maybe their only option is to do it on-prem . So it's good to have someone talking about it .

At least some of the things that people should worry about , like this network platform or data sovereignty or latency , or how to interconnect your clusters Right All these things are important , so I guess it's good to see it out getting into the mindshare of everyone .

And so now , here you know , here come along the people who are not networking , people saying , oh , actually , we really need a network for this AI data center that we're building , for these AI workloads , so high capacity , high performance computing . You know , high capacity , uh , high performance networking .

We knew a year , over a year ago , when we talked to peter jones about this , and I remember very well when we were asking him what do you ? I mean , what do you think any of these networks are going to look like ?

I forgot what exactly , what is the exact exact words were , but he was like , oh , we're just gonna like make some shit up then , cause , like at that time , nobody really even understood what the AI was going to .

You know what , in what form such a model might look , right , so now we're actually starting to see some solid solidifying of it , and I think a lot of companies are finding out that , first of all , they don't have the gear for it at all and , uh , you know , and like you said , they're , they're feeling the pressure , like you know , somebody above them , some

C-suite person heard , heard the word AI and decided that they have to do it too .

Like a lot of these companies don't have the money to buy such high performing or massive clusters that they actually need , and I think a lot of businesses don't realize just how much compute it takes to do some of the things that they're seeing these larger companies do , and that's just causing even more consternation , right Between oh gosh , do I go to the

cloud and then I lose data sovereignty or whatever else , and I think that just all of it just lends itself to the same conversation over , like cyclical conversation over and over again .

It's just a lot of data going through a network at a specific point in time , and now it's almost like it's it was kind of it's kind of just the same shit over and over again , right , like that . People don't want to pay to put , you know , maybe they don't want to pay to deploy this huge , you know VMware stack or something on-prem anymore .

So they're going to start doing it in the cloud . They're going to do Kubernetes to make it , you know , decoupled and things like that , mic , microservices it's all buzzwords coming to fruition .

I do like seeing callouts for things like latency and network congestion , specifically because I feel like that's something that's typically overlooked , because , especially a lot of this is going into the cloud . We're talking about a lot of AI integrations .

It seems like the simplest one out of the box is a chatbot for people to interact with on an application scale , right , and that's direct interaction with users on a regular basis , and latency matters a lot in those situations it can be critical to the user experience . So it's good to see that called out , I guess .

But I mean , like you said , guys , it's pretty much . I mean I don't know if anyone's going to know user experience , so it's it's um good to see that called out , I guess . But I mean , like you said , guys , it's pretty much .

I mean , I don't know if anyone's going to know the meme I'm referencing , but it's like the manifestation of that meme where the kids just like , does anyone know if we have to reap what we sow tomorrow ? I'll find , I'll find it and uh , I'll put it in the show notes or something . But that was the first thing I thought of .

But uh , yeah , that's all I got . So let's , uh , I guess I'll toss it back to you , alex , you can take us home .

So I am actually optimistic that maybe this will finally bring about the edge computing paradigm and , like iot right because of that latency piece that maybe that will finally be the push that while this cycle starts over again and then it never kind of made it to the edge , maybe this time it will actually , because there's actually a legitimate reason to push it

out there .

You can also visit our website for all of the show notes at CablesToCloudscom . Thanks again for listening and see you next time .