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  • Human Infrastructure 413: SD-WAN and SSE Integration, AWS Changes, and Letting AI Do Chores

Human Infrastructure 413: SD-WAN and SSE Integration, AWS Changes, and Letting AI Do Chores

AuthorAuthor

Ethan Banks & Drew Conry-Murray
August 21, 2025

THIS WEEK’S MUST-READ BLOGS 🤓

Pat has written a practical overview of what it’s like to integrate SD-WAN from one vendor with cloud-delivered security from a different vendor. (Pat is bucking a projected trend from Dell’Oro Group, which predicts that 90% of of the SASE market will be single-vendor.) If you’re considering such a project, this post would make a great roadmap. He documents the many phases of this months-long effort, describes challenges, and shares lessons learned. - Drew  

Matt Ouellette shares a demo of a tool he’s been building. His goal is to “create a working GUI for the snmpget command on Mac to allow quick testing of read and write functionality of a Cisco devices SNMP configuration.” Matt’s not a programmer, and the project is ongoing, but he’s sharing this post to remind us all that “if you understand the logic idea of programming and can piece an idea together, even without formal training you can get your idea to happen.” - Drew 

Natalie has put together an entire workshop around container security focused on different methods to escape from a container to move laterally, exfiltrate data, or combine the escape with other tactics to do nefarious things. The idea of the workshop is to help dev and security practitioners get a better understanding of potential exploits and how to prevent them. Great stuff, all for free! - Drew 

This is a handy list of changes to popular AWS services that have taken place over nearly twenty years of the public cloud service existing. Corey Quinn writes “If you’ve been using the platform for a while, it can be hard to notice the pace of change in the underlying “foundational” services. I’ve gathered some of these evolutions that may help you out if you find yourself confused.” The post covers EC2, S3, networking, and more.  - Drew 

I’ve seen a social media post that goes something like “I thought we’d have technology do more of the work so we’d have time to write and make art, not have machines write and make art while we do more work.” In this post, Angie has some practical examples of using AI to do tedious work chores to save you time for more interesting things. - Drew  

MORE BLOGS

  1. My process to debug DNS timeouts in a large EKS cluster - Jack’s Home On The Web

  2. GPU Networking Basics, Part 1 (and Part 2)- ChipStrat via Substack

  3. SaaS is Dead (TL;DR. Vibecoding = make an app on-demand then throw it away because apps are trivial now, so who cares?) - shayne.dev

MeterUp 2025 is coming — register today

Join us November 18 in San Francisco for Meter’s annual conference, where networking leaders come together to rethink how networks are designed, deployed, and managed.

This year’s highlights include:

  • Keynotes from industry leaders including Satya Nadella (Microsoft Chairman and CEO) and Sanjit Biswas (Samsara CEO and Meraki co-founder)

  • Technical deep dives, real-world best practices, and a look into the future of network engineering

  • A community of kind, ambitious people who challenge industry assumptions and build for the long-term

If you care about building faster, smarter, and more resilient networks, MeterUp 2025 is where you need to be.

TECH NEWS 📣

TL;DR. Plumbing GPUs in AI data centers takes a whole bunch of the fastest network ports gold-pressed latinum can buy, so networking hardware vendors are making huge piles of cash right now. - Ethan

Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg famously dropped out of Harvard. Now a new generation of Harvard dropouts are glibbly building yet another platform that runs roughshod over privacy. 

It’s distressing that the lesson these guys learned from Meta is that a startup is better positioned to scale up these stalker/creeper glasses because the startup won’t be held back by any reputational risks. Sometimes it feels like Silicon Valley is engaged in a cultural experiment to see if it can breed the purest form of capitalist sociopath. - Drew

I think it’s a bad idea for Intel to give the government an equity stake in exchange for CHIPS Act grants. The CHIPS Act was a strategic initiative to spur investment in US chip manufacturing to reduce our reliance on foreign manufacturers, not a profit-making endeavor for the US Treasury. If the government wants to increase revenue, it can raise taxes on corporations. And while the Trump administration says it won’t interfere in how Intel (and any other chipmaker that might have to sign onto this deal for CHIPS Act grants) runs its business, I find that hard to believe. Trump enjoys using whatever leverage he has over supposedly independent institutions and enterprises to bend them to his political will (see, for example, Columbia University and the law firms Paul Weiss and Kirkland & Ellis). If Intel takes this deal, it gives up any ability to operate its business and make strategic decisions without first considering the whims of a capricious, self-interested President.  - Drew

MORE NEWS

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

RESEARCH & RESOURCES 📒

Arkime Network Analysis & Packet Capture
https://arkime.com

From the home page. “Augment your current security infrastructure to store and index network traffic in standard PCAP format. Arkime offers full network visibility, facilitating the swift identification and resolution of security and network issues.

  • Visibility - Security teams gain access to the necessary network visibility data essential for responding to and investigating incidents to expose the full attack scope.

  • Scalability - Designed to be deployed across multiple clustered systems, providing the ability to scale to hundreds of gigabits per second.

  • Productivity - Allows security analysts to respond, reconstruct, investigate and confirm information about the threats within your network and take the appropriate response quickly and precisely.

  • Open Source - Provides users with the benefits of transparency, cost-effectiveness, flexibility, and community support.”

I’m not familiar with Arkime, but it came up as a recommendation in the Packet Pushers community Slack group. Looks interesting! - Ethan

Brian Kernighan co-wrote the second programming book I ever remember reading, the C Programming Language. (This was the first programming book I ever read, as long as you don’t count issues of Compute! magazine.) In this video Brian discusses the history of UNIX. Why him? In part, because he was there. Why watch the video? Brian’s a personable presenter with many interesting anecdotes about the operating system that has ended up running the planet. - Ethan

MORE RESOURCES

INDUSTRY BLOGS & VENDOR ANNOUNCEMENTS 💬 

NetBeez, which makes a nifty and affordable platform for network performance monitoring, has announced a new feature in its 15.0 release called Custom Command. One thing NetBeez lets you do is run synthetic tests from its library of network and application tests. Now with Custom Command, you can write scripts of your own and run them from any NetBeez monitoring agent (or agents). Custom Command supports scripts in Python and Bash. The blog post above includes links to five example scripts you can use as-is or customize to fit your environment and use cases. - Drew 

I met Wyebot last week. They do Wi-Fi optimization, making sensors that help you improve AP deployment, rightsize power profiles, uncover security problems, perform synthetic transactions, and more. This post is not technical, but at least helps you understand how Wyebot fits into the world of wireless, showcasing their involvement at this year’s CLUS. Useful knowledge to have in your brain if you need your company’s Wi-Fi to run flawlessly (retail, K-12, etc., you know who you are). - Ethan

AI LLMs are the new hotness, but they’re susceptible to the quotidian risks that plague pretty much any computer system, from issues around access control and authorization to data leaks to social engineering. HoundDog is a startup tackling the risks that LLMs might expose sensitive data. It offers a static code scanner that developers (or security teams cleaning up after developers) can use to identify the presence of data including PII, cardholder data, and even things like authentication tokens. The product can also discover AI integrations you might not have known about, track data flows, and let you create allow lists for which types of data can be used in prompts. - Drew 

This report summarizes a Python user survey with over 30K participants. The data reveals how folks use Python, what versions they run, and the most commonly used tools in the Python ecosystem. Lots of other interesting tidbits in the report as well, such the fact that if you upgrade from Python 3.10 or earlier to 3.11 or later, there are significant performance gains to be had. Plenty of good information as well as some possible action items to help you make the most of the report. - Ethan

Whenever I see a consumer product use lingo from enterprise IT vendors (this AI bed apparently uses ‘digital twins’ to model your sleep habits) I feel like some kind of containment field has failed and that marketing radiation is seeping into the groundwater. - Drew 

MORE INDUSTRY NOISES

DYSTOPIA IRL 🐙

TOO MANY LINKS WOULD NEVER BE ENOUGH 🐳

  1. Sound Tube: The Surprising History of Airline Headsets (2019) - APEX Experience Magazine

  2. Open Mike: No New iPhone? (perspective on not upgrading) - The Online Photographer

  3. The Six Semiconductor: Forging the Path for Memory Solutions - Tech Soda

LAST LAUGH 😆

Found on Reddit at r/ProgrammerHumor