Human Infrastructure 408: The Fourth Cloud, Building a Teams Bot, and More

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Drew Conry-Murray & Ethan Banks
July 17, 2025

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

My coverage of, and interest in, HPE’s acquisition of Juniper has mostly been around the WLAN overlap. Keith Townsend digs into another interesting possibility: that HPE now has the pieces to bring together compute, storage, and Ethernet switching, and wrap it in orchestration software including Morpheus Data and Apstra, to deliver hyperconverged infrastructure, or what Keith calls “The Fourth Cloud.” 

He writes “It's about delivering a truly turnkey, rack-level cloud experience that operates entirely within the enterprise data center. Customers are actively seeking this solution … .” 

Keith notes that Broadcom is trying to unwind its strategic partnership with Dell’s VxRail, and Nutanix has to partner with hardware providers. But HPE, post-acquisition, has all the pieces it needs under one roof. The trick, of course, is getting all those pieces to fit. But Keith’s post opened up new thinking for me on the opportunities within this HPE/Juniper deal. - Drew  

Simon Willison highlights some interesting system prompts for Anthropic’s recently-released Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4. System prompts are written by the AI’s developers and serve as rules or policies for how the model behaves and responds to user prompts. Simon finds them interesting to look for two reasons. First, they can help you use the model more effectively.

Second, he writes “Reading these system prompts reminds me of the thing where any warning sign in the real world hints at somebody having done something extremely stupid in the past. A system prompt can often be interpreted as a detailed list of all of the things the model used to do before it was told not to do them.”

The system prompts shared here cover the model’s personality, safety instructions, the knowledge cutoff date, how to handle copyrighted content, search instructions, and more.  - Drew

Kyler Middleton is writing a series on how to build a private GenAI chatbot in Microsoft Teams. She’d already built one for her company’s Slack, so now on to Teams. A key idea here is that this GenAI tool is private, meaning no company data or documentation is getting uploaded into a public model. In this first post, Kyler lays out the steps that Teams requires for you to build out a bot, including registering the app, creating an Azure resource for the bot, and then registering a Teams app. There’s a lot of complex permissions work that has to go into this, and Kyler walks through it with clear directions and helpful screenshots. - Drew  

MORE BLOGS

The Internet Resilience Report 2025 is now here! Download your copy today

Now in its second year, this annual report delivers critical insights into the state of Internet health, stability, and performance. Learn how leading organizations navigate a digital landscape where resilience is no longer optional.

Key findings include:

  • 51% of organizations lost over $1 million in the past month due to internet outages and disruptions

  • 73% of respondents agreed that fast websites and apps are critical to success

  • 85% of organizations will increase their AI investments in the next 18 months

TECH NEWS 📣

Marko Elez apparently published an API key for xAI via a GitHub commit. According to this story by Brian Krebs, the key allows access to as many as 52 LLMs used by xAI. As Krebs notes, this does not inspire confidence given that this 25-year-old also has access, via his role as a DOGE employee, to some of the most sensitive databases in the US government. - Drew 

Cisco has issued another CVE for ISE and ISE PIC with a 10 severity rating. This bug follows two others in June that also affected ISE. All the vulnerabilities are tied to insufficient validation of user input. - Drew  

JuniHPEr is happening, finally. The ridiculous, postering objections (in my opinion) by the DOJ have been overcome. How? “HPE has agreed to divest certain assets related to campus switching products. This divestiture is a critical component of the settlement, as it aims to preserve competition in the market. Specifically, HPE will sell off Juniper’s campus switching business, which includes various products, personnel, and intellectual property associated with the EX series switches.”

There’s a bit more to it, but there ya go for now.

The real questions around what the networking product lines will look like haven’t yet been addressed in concrete terms. Where does Aruba land? What about Juniper Mist? What is the engineering implication of the EX switch line being sold off? One clue might be that Rami Rahim’s new title is President and General Manager of the new HPE Networking business. Suffice it to say that early noises indicate that all customers will be taken care of appropriately.

Much to keep our eyes on over the next year. Hold onto your butts. - Ethan

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Sniffnet is a simple network monitoring tool. FOSS. Written in Rust. Point it at an interface you’d like to capture on, and Sniffnet will generate a real-time summary of what it’s seeing go across the wire. Designed to be user friendly. Not a Wireshark competitor as such, but in that realm of tool type. Binaries available for Windows, macOS, and Linux.

In version 1.4, Sniffnet added several new features, including the ability to speedily analyze a PCAP. - Ethan

FossFLOW Diagramming Tool - stan-smith via GitHub
https://github.com/stan-smith/FossFLOW

From the README. “FossFLOW is a powerful, open-source Progressive Web App (PWA) for creating beautiful isometric diagrams. Built with React and the Isoflow (Now forked and published to NPM as fossflow) library, it runs entirely in your browser with offline support.” - Ethan

Beeno macOS Screen Mirroring
https://www.beeno.app

From the website. “A tiny macOS utility that mirrors an external monitor in a resizable window. Beeno is a simple, lightweight macOS utility that mirrors your first external display in a resizable preview window on your main screen. Ideal for quickly checking presentations, demos, or sharing content without rearranging your desktop setup.” - Ethan

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

The AutoCon conference is adding another day of workshops. Starting at AutoCon4 this November in Austin, TX, you can now attend workshops on Thursday in addition to Monday and Tuesday. The Thursday track will be split into two half-day themes. The first is Leadership and Management, which is meant to help automaters communicate to the business, build ROI cases, and so on. The second will cover advanced automation topics.  

By the way, the call for speakers is open now for all workshops and sessions, so if you’ve got an idea, now’s your chance to make your pitch. - Drew

We all know that Nvidia is reaping a huge fortune from the AI infrastructure buildout. The AI tide is also lifting other boats, including vendors selling compute and networking, if not quite as high as the GPU king. This same AI wave is also helping companies that manage power and cooling for all those AI data centers being built. Dell’Oro says infrastructure providers such as Schneider Electric and Vertiv are enjoying revenue growth of 17% year over year. Direct liquid cooling revenues are also hot, jumping more than 50% in the first quarter of 2025. - Drew  

NSS Labs, which provided independent lab testing of security products, went out of business in 2020. Now the brand is being relaunched with a new business model: to provide testing services to enterprises, security vendors, and service providers. It’s an interesting idea; lots of enterprises and service providers don’t have the time or expertise to test products, so there may be an appetite for a lab that can be hired out to do it for them. As for security vendors, I’d want to know more about what’s involved in regard to any testing or validation.   

NSS Labs says it will also serve as the testing partner for CyberRatings, a non-profit that conducts independent testing and offers its reports for sale. Jennifer Minella and I recorded a Packet Protector episode with CyberRatings CEO Vik Phatak, who is also leading the revamped NSS Labs.

I’m not surprised to see NSS Labs move away from independent testing. That’s a tough business model. I used to work for Network Computing magazine, which had multiple testing facilities and made bona fide efforts to run fair, useful comparison tests of network and security products. (I was a writer and editor, not a tester. Testing was for the mad scientists on our staff who loved to put gear through its paces.)

However, testing was expensive and time-consuming (particulary before public cloud), and vendors had to be willing to participate. Over time, vendors began to wonder why they should loan hardware and donate engineering time to a test lab if it meant possibly getting a lower rating than a competitor? (And as Greg Ferro always said, it’s easier just to ship gear to a customer who’ll test it for you in production.) Eventually, Network Computing’s test lab model proved impossible to sustain. 

But I always believed there was value in testing, and I do think there’s a role for third-party testing, whether paid or independent. We’ll see if the new version of NSS Labs has found a viable formula. - Drew

You know how these shiny new AI bot crawlers suck your website dry of all its content to train their large language models? And what you get in exchange for training someone else’s model is a significant reduction in visits to your site? Cloudflare is here to help.

Automating robots.txt is the first assistance Cloudflare is offering. “What if you don’t want your content to serve as training data for the next AI model, but don’t have the time to manually maintain an up-to-date robots.txt file? Enter Cloudflare’s new managed robots.txt offering. Once enabled, Cloudflare will automatically update your existing robots.txt or create a robots.txt file on your site that includes directives asking popular AI bot operators to not use your content for AI model training.”

The problem with robots.txt is that it works on the honor system. Most AI scraper bots laugh in the face of honor. In that context, Cloudflare further offers an AI bot blocking service, but a granular one, as you might not want to kick out the AI scraper bots everywhere.

“Some customers want AI bots to visit certain pages, like developer or support documentation. For customers who are hesitant to block everywhere, we have a brand-new option: let us detect when ads are shown on a hostname, and we will block AI bots ONLY on that hostname.”

Cloudflare goes into substantial detail on how they deliver these services in the post. - Ethan

Leostream makes remote desktop access software. The company recently announced new capabilities in its 2025.1 release, including native support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. From the press release “the updated Leostream Platform Connection Broker and Gateway can both now install and run on RHEL 9 and its derivatives, such as Rocky and Alma Linux. Customers no longer need to use Windows to run the management plane and can manage the underlying Linux operating system based on their standard corporate policies.” The 2025.1 release also includes expanded identity tracking and session recording. - Drew 

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

LAST LAUGH 😆