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.

One of the positive things that came out of events in 2020 was that many of us started working from home. At first, it was kind of weird. But once we realized that what we needed was available online, it became easier. All we had to do was figure out a few new apps, like Slack, Asana and Google Docs. Then, after a couple of weeks of working from home, many of us started having thoughts like, “I wonder if I could wear shorts and my favorite slippers?

Today on the episode 4 of the Network AF podcast, host Avi Freedman welcomes his longtime friend Elliot Noss. For 25 years, Elliot has been the CEO of Tucows, the internet services company with the second-largest domain registrar in the world. Elliot is considered an outlier in the ISP industry, largely due to his transparency and for the stellar customer experiences he encourages through Tucows.

In part 1 of this series, I talked a bit about how encryption is shaping network performance monitoring (NPM). Let’s dive in deeper now… Most NetOps and DevOps professionals today hear complaints about network performance when employees work from home. Unless the complaint is coming from all remote users of an application, individuals suffering from slowness are on their own to figure out how to optimize connection speeds.

If you’ve ever thought networking is bewildering as a newcomer, you’re not alone. In episode 3 of Network AF, meet Janine Malcolm, the director of network engineering at Salesforce. She joins podcast host Avi Freedman to chat about some of the experiences she’s had throughout her career and how to make network engineering a more accessible profession. At Salesforce, Janine is currently focused on uniting groups of people as one overall network engineering team.

It’s interesting to observe how encryption and network performance monitoring (NPM) have evolved over time. When I first entered the networking industry right out of college, many applications sent passwords over the network in clear text, unencrypted. Since just about everyone’s PC was wired back to a repeater (i.e., not a switch), we could observe each other’s traffic with free packet analyzers and laugh.