On Saturday, the pacific island nation of Tonga was decimated by a massive volcanic eruption that was visible from space. At 5:27pm local time, the underwater volcano Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai unexpectedly erupted, sending ash and debris for hundreds of miles. As of this writing, all internet and telephone communications between Tonga and the rest of the world are still down.
In the first podcast episode of 2022, Avi welcomes Ron Winward to Network AF! Ron is the vice president of network services at INAP, global provider of secure, performance-oriented, hybrid infrastructure. Like Avi, Ron also grew up in Pennsylvania and is a member of the East Coast Access of Infrastructure.
If you’re a person who works from home, you almost certainly have to deal with occasional internet connection issues. More often than complete outages, you’re likely dealing with occasional slowness. And you know from experience that any one of dozens of devices and services along the path can cause latency.
It’s an exciting time here at Kentik. We’re expanding into new markets, working closely with amazing customers, and continuing to hire talented people to grow our team. We announced a new round of funding in the fall. We’re continuously building on our product. And we have our sights set on scaling our systems to large numbers. As Kentik’s backend engineering manager, I know this has kept our team very busy.
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.
