How Cisco Live! Changed My Career…

With Cisco Live US happening this week, Justin Cohen is thinking back to how the event changed his career. He’s been attending since 2012, and got to know the community after meeting Tom Hollingsworth there. Things changed after 2016, when he got invited to Networking Field Day. Today, Justin is working as an Innovation Architect at Cisco, his dream job. It’s been a long journey centered around the event.

micro-segmentation at scale

Illumio made their return to Networking Field Day earlier this month, and Marina Ferreira was there to take in the presentation. The company took the event to launch their PCE Supercluster enhancement to their Adaptive Security Platform (ASP) solution, which will allow for a federated multi-region micro-segmentation architecture with centralized policy management and global visibility at scale. Marina was fascinated at some of the development potential their platform could enable for advanced analytics.

Brain dump: network visibility

In this post, Brandon Mangold puts his thoughts to paper on the state of network monitoring and visibility. For Brandon, this helps frame the overall point of network management, emphasizing user experience at the end of the day. To this point, monitoring applications need to look at network performance from the perspective of the endpoint and the application. Brandon looks at solutions from ThousandEyes and Cisco’s App Dynamics as examples of this focus.

DPDK Project Moves To The Linux Foundation

Drew Conry-Murray the Data Plane Development Kit being brought into the Linux Foundation as an official project. DPDK was originally developed by Intel before being open sourced as a way to accelerate packet processing in CPUs. Drew highlights that DPDK supports not just x86, but a variety of CPU architectures, as well as being able to run on NICs from Broadcom, Cisco, and Mellanox.

Vault7 Lessons – Zero Trust

Whenever you begin a piece about network trust with a quote from a Nicholas Cage film, you’re doing something right. Justin Cohen uses a quote from Con-Air as a springboard to the benefits of a zero trust network policy. He looks at how increased use of encrypted traffic requires a new methodology to secure networks, as it effectively kills deep packet inspections. Justin looks at solutions from Cisco and Illumio, which can be used as solutions in this new zero trust world.

ThousandEyes – Mean Time to Innocence in minutes

Justin Cohen saw ThousandEyes present at Networking Field Day in August, but wanted to test out their solution before passing judgement. So after mulling on it for a while, what was his verdict? Essentially, it has to be seen to be believed. ThousandEyes differentiates in network monitoring by combining agents within your network with their SaaS model of sensors from all over the Internet. This allows engineers to not just trace a path forward to an endpoint, but also work backwards. Combined with great visualization, they’re able to pinpoint causes outside of an enterprise network, allowing users to save time chasing their tail. Add in flexible licensing, and Justin thinks it’s a great tool to let you drill down to root network slow down problems!