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  • Human Infrastructure 386: Will Bots Take Your Job?, AI Freakouts, Rating Cloud Firewalls, and More

Human Infrastructure 386: Will Bots Take Your Job?, AI Freakouts, Rating Cloud Firewalls, and More

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Ethan Banks & Drew Conry-Murray
January 30, 2025

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Cisco’s Jeff McLaughlin asks a question many of us have pondered about AI in the last year. Are the bots going to take my job? “Smart” finance people seem to think so. Jeff doesn’t.

Why? In his view, networking would need to become truly simple for AI to be able to take it on…and networking isn’t simple, nor can it be made simpler (like a Tesla is actually a simpler automobile when compared to a ICE-based car). We can have a simpler experience as network engineers via abstraction, but that doesn’t make the complexity hidden by the abstraction any less complex.

Jeff posits, “Even if AI reaches the point of being able to configure and operate network devices, it will still be an abstraction layer. I cannot fathom AI somehow doing away with networking. At most, it would be like the automation systems on the plane, not like a Tesla.”

I think he’s right. - Ethan

Rowell walks you through the fundamentals of free, open source monitoring tool Zabbix. While Rowell focuses on the network monitoring use case, he points out that you can monitor your entire infrastructure with the platform. He also touches on alerting, integrations with tools such as Slack, event correlation, and how to get started. - Ethan

Nick Buraglio (who just joined the IPv6 Buzz team as a regular co-host) reviews the commonly found scenarios in which IPv6 operates as defined by RFC8925. With IPv6 adoption continuing to grow, these definitions matter more and more. Good to get your head around. - Ethan

This post compares the release of DeepSeek to TikTok, another Chinese app that successfully challenged US dominance of a tech realm. It also calls out the hollowness of the AI and investor classes in the US who have been clamoring for ever larger amounts of money and infrastructure to be immolated on the altar of “staying ahead of China!” The post notes “like TikTok, it’s doubtful that American tech oligarchs are actually capable of accepting how screwed they are because AI is not just a massive pyramid scheme to them. It has ballooned out into a psuedo-religion.” Amen. - Drew

MORE BLOGS

Nokia Event-Driven Automation

Tired of Fragile Data Center Networks? Nokia Event-Driven Automation Delivers Reliability

Data center networks are the backbone of your business—but too often, they’re brittle, unpredictable, and prone to outages. Legacy systems, complex architectures, and human error make every change a risk, leaving you in reactive firefighting mode instead of building for the future.

Nokia Event-Driven Automation (EDA) transforms this chaos into clarity. By monitoring real-time events and automating intelligent responses, EDA keeps your network resilient, and your team focused on innovation. No more sleepless nights, desperate rollbacks, or endless root-cause analysis. With EDA, every change becomes safe, predictable, and automated.

EDA integrates seamlessly with your existing infrastructure, making proactive reliability accessible—even for teams new to automation. Join the enterprises moving fast with confidence by automating your data center operations effectively.

Ready to build a network that won’t break under pressure? Discover how:

TECH NEWS 📣

Spend more money than the gross domestic product of many nations on data centers for AI. Power is a problem. GPU availability is a problem. Whether or not we can get to AGI is a problem. Even the actual money is a problem, as some don’t believe the $500B is available. Is any of this real? We’ll see. If it is, even at just a fraction of the hard-to-comprehend $500B, lots of data center equipment suppliers stand to win. I’ve seen an analyst report speculating that Ciena and Arista could be big beneficiaries of Stargate. - Ethan

10 platters. 3.6GB per platter. Seagate claims they’re going to get to 10GB per platter for an eventual 100GB per drive. If you’re thinking, “But…SSDs?” Right. SSDs are better than spinning rust in many ways, but HDDs are cheaper and perform well enough for AI workloads. Plus, HAMR technology will help keep HDD costs down.

Per the article, “Heat-assisted magnetic recording, Seagate says, enables a 25% cost reduction per TB and a 60% decrease in power consumption per TB. This relentless drive towards cheaper storage is what will keep HDD relevant despite SSDs supremacy on performance, storage density and power consumption.” - Ethan

Russia is believed to be responsible for yet another cable cut in the Baltic Sea. This one connected Latvia and Sweden. A Latvian warship was deployed to intercept the suspect vessel headed for Russia.

What’s intriguing about this story is less the specific cable cut and more the thought provoking nature of the attack. Imagine the submarine cables of the world becoming targets in a global conflict. Every cable cut would weaken the connectivity of the global Internet and create congestion points impacting public cloud operators as well. Repair would be increasingly hard to achieve assuming resources are spread thin or the few specialized ships used to repair undersea cables become military targets.

This is an uncomfortable future I’d rather not contemplate any further just at the moment. - Ethan

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

If you’re interested in understanding why DeepSeek is a big deal, this lengthy piece is a good place to start. The Stratechery crew gets into the differences in the various DeepSeek models, hardware behind them (and related controversy), money spent, achievements made along the way, and quite a bit more. While some of what they say is speculative, Stratechery is know for their useful insights and perspectives. - Ethan

This is the official paper from the creators of DeepSeek on how they built DeepSeek V3, and includes serious technical detail. It describes techniques such as Mixture of Experts (MoE) and Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA), which the DeepSeek creators used to develop their model on the cheap. We’ll likely be hearing more about MoE and MLA as other AI developers use these techniques to roll out lower-cost models of their own. One tidbit that jumped out at me is that they used Infiniband rather than Ethernet for communication across GPU nodes. - Drew

Wireshark nerd Chris Greer aka Packet Pioneer exports text output from Wireshark and uploads it to Deepseek. Then he asks Deepseek questions about the capture. Does Deepseek have good answers? Not as good as you might hope, but better than you’d think. Intriguing for sure! BTW, we published a Heavy Networking episode on packet analysis with Chris recently. - Ethan

And a Packet Protector episode with Chris, too! - Drew

Netdata - Open Source Monitoring (With Commercial Upsell)
https://www.netdata.cloud

Netdata positions itself against Datadog and Prometheus/Grafana. Their website brags about ease of use & performance for high volume sites. Seems like a well-established project with lots of dev power behind it as well as community engagement. First I’ve run into it, so I poked at it a bit.

The Netdata elevator pitch? “Netdata is different. Our mission is to help you simplify and optimize your IT operations. Netdata provides high-fidelity data, real-time visualizations, reliable alerts, anomaly detection for every metric and a monitoring experience that is affordable and works out of the box. We take care of all the monitoring complexity, so you can focus on your infra!” Here’s a screenshot of their online demo site.

From what I can tell, Netdata isn’t especially good at monitoring network infrastructure (despite the name Netdata), although it handles SNMP. But still, another monitoring weapon is always a welcome addition to the arsenal. - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

  1. Open Source Networking Projects: A Current List - Packet Pushers (a list we maintain)

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

The Common Vulnerability Scoring System assigns a severity number to known vulnerabilities. The higher the number, the more serious the vulnerability is thought to be. A score of 9.8, let’s say, might indicate the world is ending, unplug all the things, and set fire to cabling.

Only…not everyone thinks the CVSS is returning appropriately actionable scores. Why? Context matters. I have spent a lot of time thinking through exactly this when I had daily secops responsibilities.

  • What is the vulnerability, exactly?

  • How might that vulnerability be exploited in our network, considering security mitigations already in place?

  • If the vulnerability were successfully exploited, what’s the worst case scenario?

  • From there, we’d make decisions on whether to patch right the heck now or wait for less disruptive, regularly scheduled maintenance window.

The argument from Daniel Stenberg (cURL creator) and the Go security team echo this idea, complaining that a high CVSS number assigned to a CVE can create a lot of work for project maintainers, when the fire really isn’t all that bad. Click through for a lot more nuance. - Ethan

AutoCon is a new conference dedicated to advancing the state of the art of network automation. AutoCon3 is happening in Prague, May 26 - 30th. If you’ve got a topic you’d like to present about, such as a network automation project, insights into automation tools, or other topic, the call for papers is open now. And if you’ve got an idea for a workshop you can teach, Network Automation Forum also wants to hear from you! The Packet Pushers are proud to be the media partner for AutoCon. It is, frankly, the best tech conference I’ve been to. Great topics, great people, with the vibe of a nerd jamboree.  - Drew

BackBox is in the resilience market, meaning that if something bad happens to your network infrastructure, they can get you back to before the bad thing happened. Their Cyber Resilience Platform does this with automated lifecycle management (backup/restore configs for network devices, plus manage/upgrade/patch), compliance & policy management (check configs both for drift and for non-compliance with industry standards and policies), and network infrastructure integrity (look for known vulnerabilities and mitigate them automatically if possible).

BackBox has been a Packet Pushers sponsor. If you want research them, listen to some of the pods we’ve recorded with them to get more details about what they do. - Ethan

Security researchers say they’ve found a set of techniques that could enable a malicious browser extension to escalate privileges sufficient to take over the browser, and eventually the device on which it runs. The press release highlights the three steps needed. From the release: “Critically, the malicious extension only requires read/write capabilities present in the majority of browser extensions on the Chrome Store, including common productivity tools like Grammarly, Calendly, and Loom, desensitizing users from granting these permissions. This revelation suggests that virtually any browser extension could potentially serve as an attack vector if created or taken over by an attacker.” - Drew 

CyberRatings is a nonprofit that tests vendor gear in a lab setting and publishes its results for free. Back in November 2024, they released a report on tests of cloud-native firewall offerings from Google, AWS, and Azure. None of the cloud firewalls did especially well, and Google’s did remarkably badly. Since then, Google reached out to CyberRatings and essentially asked them to re-run the tests using Google’s published best practices for its firewall settings. With those in place, the effectiveness of Google’s cloud-native firewall increased considerably. You can see both the original report and the updated report on the page linked above. - Drew

After contracting in 2024, Dell’Oro is forecasting growth in the enterprise campus switching market through 2029. One reason is that Wi-Fi 7 adoption will prompt upgrades in access switches that need to support higher PoE demands.  - Drew

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆