Software Gone Wild by ipSpace.net

I always wanted to find someone who is more positive about AI than I am, while having solid “can deliver working stuff at scale” credentials. Andrew Yourtchenko definitely fits the bill. I first met him (online) when he was still an engineer in Cisco TAC, and when we finally met in person, he was busy automating the deployment of Cisco Live networking infrastructure . He was also instr...

I stopped tracking the (lack of) progress in network automation years ago, when I realized I had nothing new to say. As an eternal optimist, I hoped I was just missing something, but Urs Baumann (the guest of Software Gone Wild Episode 206 ) destroyed my hopes when he said, “ I can still use the same slides I created 10 years ago ”. On a more positive note, he recently completed his Ma...

Whenever I’m ranting about vendors changing their data models or APIs with every other release, there is inevitably a vendor engineer chiming in, saying , “Life would be so much better if the customers wouldn’t insist on doing screen scraping for the last 50 years.” While some of that screen scraping is pure inertia, we sometimes have good reasons to do it rather than use p...

Why do we need Infrahub , another network automation tool? What does it bring to the table, who should be using it, and why is it using a graph database internally? I discussed these questions with Damien Garros , the driving force behind Infrahub, the founder of OpsMill (the company developing it), and a speaker in the ipSpace.net Network Automation course . Listen to the podcast

The first IPv6 specs were published in 1995, and yet 30 years later, we still have a pretty active IETF working group focused on “ developing guidelines for the deployment and operation of new and existing IPv6 networks. ” (taken from the old charter ; they updated it in late October 2025). Why is it taking so long, and what problems are they trying to solve? Nick Buraglio, one of the...

In March 2024, I received my first PR from an airplane: Sander Steffann was flying to South Africa to deliver an Ansible training and fixed a minor annoyance in the then-new multilab feature. Of course, I wanted to know more about his setup, but it took us over a year and a half till we managed to sit down (virtually) and chat about it, the state of IPv6, the impact of CG-NAT on fraud prevention,...

When I first met David Gee, he worked for a large system integrator. A few years later, he moved to a networking vendor, worked for a few of them, then for a software vendor, and finally decided to start his own system integration business. Obviously, I wanted to know what drove him to make those changes, what lessons he learned working in various parts of the networking industry, and what (lookin...

It’s been over four years since I published the last Software Gone Wild episode . In the meantime, I spent most of my time developing an open-source labbing tool , so it should be no surprise that the first post-hiatus episode focused on a netlab use case: how Ethan Banks (of the PacketPushers fame) is using the tool to quickly check the technology details for his N is for Networking podcast...

As I started Software Gone Wild podcast in June 2014, I wanted to help networking engineers grow beyond the traditional networking technologies. It’s only fitting to conclude this project almost seven years and 116 episodes later with a similar theme Avi Freedman proposed when we started discussing podcast topics in late 2020: how do we make networking attractive to young engineers. Elisa Ja...

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio , the host of today’s podcast. In today’s evolving landscape of whitebox, brightbox, and software routing, a small but incredibly comprehensive routing platform called  FreeRTR  has quietly been  evolving  out of a research and education service provider network in Hungary.  Kevin Myers  of  IPArchitechs  brought this to my attenti...

Remember my rant how “ fail fast, fail often sounds great in a VC pitch deck, and sucks when you have to deal with its results ”? Streaming telemetry is no exception to this rule, and Avi Freedman (CEO of Kentik) has been on the receiving end of this gizmo long enough to have to deal with several generations of experiments… and formed a few strong opinions. Unfortunately Avi is...

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio , the host of today’s podcast. In the original days of this podcast, there were heavy, deep discussions about this new protocol called “OpenFlow”. Like many of our most creative innovations in the IT field, OpenFlow came from an academic research project that aimed to change the way that we as operators managed, configured, and even thou...

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio , the host of today’s podcast. As we all know, BGP runs the networked world. It is a protocol that has existed and operated in the vast expanse of the internet in one form or another since early 1990s, and despite the fact that it has been extended, enhanced, twisted, and warped into performing a myriad of tasks that one would never have...

In early May 2020 I wrote a blog post introducing SuzieQ , a network observability platform Dinesh Dutt worked on for the last few years. If that blog post made you look for more details, you might like the Episode 111 of Software Gone Wild in which we went deeper and covered these topics: How does SuzieQ collect data What data is it collecting from network devices What can you do with that data H...

A while ago we discussed a software-focused view of Network Interface Cards (NICs) with Luke Gorrie, and a hardware-focused view of them with Or Gerlitz (Mellanox), Andy Gospodarek (Broadcom) and Jiri Pirko (Mellanox). Why would anyone want to implement features in hardware and not in software, and what would be the best hardware implementation? We discussed these dilemmas with Silvano Gai in Epis...

This podcast introduction was written by Nick Buraglio , the host of today’s podcast. As private overlays are becoming more and more prevalent and as SD-WAN systems and technologies advance, it remains critical that we continue to investigate how we think about internetworking. Even with platforms such as Slack Nebula , Zerotier , or the wireguard based TailScale becoming a mainstream staple...

The last Software Gone Wild podcast recorded in 2019 focused on advances in Linux networking - in particular on interesting stuff presented at NetDev 0x13 conference in Prague. The guests (in alphabetical first name order) Jamal Hadi Salim , Shrijeet Mukherjee , Sowmini Varadhan , and Tom Herbert shared their favorite topics, and commented on the future of Linux networking. Read more …

No, we were not talking about IP fabrics in general - IP Fabric is a network management software (oops, network assurance platform ) Gian Paolo discovered a while ago and thoroughly tested in the meantime. He was kind enough to share what he found in Episode 107 of Software Gone Wild , and as Chris Young succinctly summarized: “ it’s really sad what we still get excited about something...

Everyone is talking about FRRouting suite these days, while hidden somewhere in the background OpenBGPD has been making continuous progress for years. Interestingly, OpenBGPD project was started for the same reason FRR was forked - developers were unhappy with Zebra or Quagga routing suite and decided to fix it. We discussed the history of OpenBGPD, its current deployments and future plans with Cl...

Sick-and-tired of intent-based GUIs that are barely better than CiscoWorks on steroids? How about asking Siri-like assistant queries about network state in somewhat-limited English and getting replies back in full-blown sentences? Warning: you might be reentering the land of unicorns driving flying DeLoreans... but then keep in mind what Arthur Clarke had to say on this topic ;). Welcome to Net2Te...

Imagine you would have a system that would read network device configurations, figure out how those devices might be connected, reverse-engineer the network topology, and be able to answer questions like “ what would happen if this link fails ” or “ do I have fully-redundant network ” or even “ how will this configuration change impact my network ”. Welcome to B...

When I was still at university the fourth-generation programming languages were all the hype, prompting us to make jokes along the lines “fifth generation will implement do what I don’t know how ” The research team working in Networked Systems Group at ETH Zurich headed by prof. Laurent Vanbever got pretty close. The description of their tool says: Read more …

Every time a new simple programming language is invented, we go through the same predictable cycle: Tons of hype; Unbounded enthusiasm when people who never worked in target environment realize they could get something simple done in a short time; Ever-worsening headaches as the enthusiasts try to get a real job done with the shiny new tool; Disappointment; A more powerful language is invented to...

Remember how Nick Buraglio tried to use OpenDaylight to build a small part of SuperComputing conference network … and ended up with a programmable patch panel? This time he repeated the experiment using Faucet SDN Controller – an OpenFlow controller focused on getting the job done – and described his experience in Episode 101 of Software Gone Wild . We started with the usual “ what problem were yo...

I mentioned Multipath TCP (MP-TCP) numerous times in the past but I never managed to get beyond “ this is the thing that might solve some TCP multihoming challenges ” We fixed this omission in Episode 100 of Software Gone Wild with Christoph Paasch (software engineer @ Apple) and Mat Martineau from Open Source Technology Center @ Intel. Read more …