In the latest episode of Network AF, your host Avi Freedman chats with Zac Smith. Zac is a 20-year networking veteran, the managing director of Equinix Metal, and a double bass player. Throughout Zac’s career, he’s focused on using software to build automated infrastructure platforms. That includes growing Voxel, the Linux-based hosting platform that sold to Internap in 2011, into one of the early, leading cloud-hosting companies.

Many companies today rely on SaaS connections in order for the business to function. Some users simply can’t operate in their job when an application becomes unavailable. When hundreds of users are impacted, this can cost a company serious money. That’s why keeping a proverbial finger on the pulse of application performance is generally worth the effort. But, it isn’t easy. Many popular SaaS applications are delivered from hundreds of locations around the world.

In the latest episode of the Network AF podcast, your host Avi Freedman welcomes his friend and networking pro Cat Gurinski to the show. As a senior network engineer with loads of experience, Cat is most passionate about automation and troubleshooting, and especially loves to use Python and Arista’s pyeapi frameworks in her pursuits. She’s also the current chair of the NANOG Program Committee, and previously worked for companies like Best Buy, Switch and Data, and Equinix.

Every year the internet experiences numerous disruptions and outages, and 2021 was certainly no exception. This year we documented outages, including multiple government-directed shutdowns, as well as what might be the internet’s biggest outage in history. In this post, I run through 10 of the top outages that we covered in 2021. Needless to say, the world’s network engineers deserve a load of #HugOps in 2021.

Last month, the long-awaited film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic Dune was released in theaters and on HBO Max. Directed by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, the movie was a hit at the box office as well as via streaming, leading to another OTT traffic surge.

Network AF welcomes Doug Madory to the podcast. Doug is a veteran, a researcher, a writer and Kentik’s director of internet analysis. With his start in the U.S. Air Force within its Information War Center, Doug has now been working in the networking industry for 12 years. After the Air Force, Doug went on to work for Renesys, which was acquired by Dyn, which was later acquired by Oracle.