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  • Human Infrastructure 405: A Day in the Life of BGP, Introvert Publishing, and More

Human Infrastructure 405: A Day in the Life of BGP, Introvert Publishing, and More

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
June 12, 2025

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

This is a great post full of wise and encouraging advice from Ivan Pepelnjak. Ivan’s responding to a reader who wonders if it’s a good idea to post and share the labs he’s using for certification study and practice. Ivan says yes, and lays out several reasons why it’s beneficial. Ivan notes that this person shouldn’t measure the value of what they’re sharing by page views, and not to fret about being a beginner. He writes “Keep in mind you’re not competing for attention. You’re building a portfolio of your work, and it should reflect your progress. All the talented people needed decades to get the experience that allowed them to create and post advanced stuff.” Such a good post. Do yourself a favor and read it. - Drew

Like a physician tracing the day in the life of a blood cell as it moves through the circulatory system, Geoff Huston does the same for a BGP session. He writes “Here I want to look at just one day of the operation of the Internet’s BGP network by looking at the behaviour of a single BGP session. The day we’ll use for this study is 8 May 2025, and the BGP vantage point used here is an unremarkable network at the edge of the network, AS131072.” This being a Geoff Huston joint, it’s a long post, but don’t be afraid to dive on in. - Drew 

Ben wanted to find a private IPv4 subnet range (RFC1918) for a personal Out of Band network that wouldn’t run into conflicts with the same address range being used elsewhere. He happened to have a large dataset of IP addresses from a previous project, so he dug in and discovered that “10.0.0.0/8 is huge, and outside of many subnets, is also deserted.” The result? “I now have a /24 for my new Out Of Band LAN that is very unlikely to collide with someone else’s network.” - Drew 

MORE BLOGS

Where Multi-Cloud IPAM Breaks Down – LightMesh   

IP conflicts across AWS, Azure, and GCP aren’t just annoying — they can halt deployments cold. This blog from LightMesh walks through where native tools fall short (no cross-cloud view, limited automation) and what modern IPAM platforms must deliver to keep up.

It includes practical examples for securely integrating AWS and Azure using read-only IAM roles and service principals — plus tips for forecasting subnet exhaustion before it bites you.

TECH NEWS 📣

My guess is that Hollywood studios have complex feelings about AI. As copyright holders and owners of valuable IP, they don’t want randos using AI to make images and shows that infringe on that IP.

At the same time, they recogize that AI is a technology that could allow them to, one day possibly soon, replace actors, directors, writers, and other pesky humans with machines. These machines can spew endless incarnations of set in IP-related universes and never demand a director’s cut, residuals, a paycheck, on-set catering, or bathroom breaks. So Hollywood isn’t against AI. They just want to make sure the right people (themselves) are the ones benefitting from it. - Drew

This is a crazy story, and it’s ridiculous that the US military even got into this situation. - Drew 

TL;DR. Cisco’s not bringing back the ACE. They’re leaning into the Isovalent acquisition to “sell the Isovalent Load Balancer as a standalone product for now. Future releases will integrate with Cisco’s Cloud Operations control plane and Nexus dashboard.” eBPF magic! - Ethan

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared on the Packet Pushers Community Slack by Matthew

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

From the README. “Provides seamless integration with Terraform Registry APIs, enabling advanced automation and interaction capabilities for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) development.

Use Cases:

  • Automating Terraform provider and module discovery

  • Extracting and analyzing data from Terraform Registry

  • Getting detailed information about provider resources and data sources

  • Exploring and understanding Terraform modules.” - Ethan

Somo (netstat alternative) - theopfr via GitHub
https://github.com/theopfr/somo?tab=readme-ov-file

From the README. “A human-friendly alternative to netstat for socket and port monitoring on Linux.

Features:

  • pleasing to the eye thanks to a nice table-view

  • filterable (see filter-options below)

  • interactive killing of processes

  • from netstat -tulpn to somo -l (almost half the characters, can you believe it?)”

I tried to install Somo mostly for that delicious table view, but had a dependency problem not easily remedied and gave up. I’m a wimp, I know, I know. 😭 - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

Aviatrix, which provides multi-cloud networking and security, has announced an integration with CNAPP provider Wiz. (CNAPP, or Cloud Native Application Protection Platform, as a category provides security controls around cloud code, configurations, and other application elements across the application lifecycle.) Via this integration, Aviatrix can take risks signals from Wiz and enforce network policies to help manage those risks, both in single-cloud and multi-cloud environments. - Drew

Josh VanDeraa describes the need for a source of truth for AI-driven network automation (and network automation in general), and describes how Nautobot provides a SOT that can be leveraged for AI-driven automation jobs. - Drew

EnGenius Technologies has rolled out two new multi-gigabit switches for SMBs. From the press release: “EnGenius Technologies today announced the launch of its new Cloud-Lite Switch Series, introducing the ECS205L and ECS208L models. Available now, the 5-port ECS205L is priced at $119.99, and the 8-port ECS208L is priced at $169.99.” - Drew

From the release, “As AI and HPC workloads continue to evolve at unprecedented speed, UEC’s purpose-built Ethernet innovation delivers:

  • Modern RDMA for Ethernet and IP – Supporting intelligent, low-latency transport for high-throughput environments.

  • Open Standards and Interoperability – Avoids vendor lock-in while accelerating ecosystem-wide innovation.

  • End-to-End Scalability – From routing and provisioning to operations and testing, UEC scales to millions of endpoints.”

We recorded a Heavy Networking episode with UEC Chair J Metz and Rip Sohan if you’d like more technical information about what Ultra Ethernet is all about. - Ethan

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆

Thanks to Danilo Neto for sharing in the Packet Pushers community Slack. 😂