Big AI Wave Will Lift Arista To $10 Billion Two Years Early
Jayshree Ullal, the chief executive officer of Arista Networks, has been pointing at the $10 billion revenue upper decks since the beginning of the AI boom, but is understandably hesitant about saying when the company would cross that threshold. …
Big AI Wave Will Lift Arista To $10 Billion Two Years Early was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
PP074: News Roundup – Microsoft Dumps Digital Escorts; Palo Alto Bundles Billions Aboard CyberArk
Packet Protector goes global for today’s security news roundup. Microsoft discontinues a program in which engineers in China supported the US Department of Defense’s cloud infrastructure (with the help of US ‘digital escorts’), Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC fires several employees over allegations of attempted theft of sensitive tech, an Arizona woman gets 8 years in prison... Read more »HW058: Wi-Co Wi-Fi Conferences with Peter Mackenzie
Technical conferences are an excellent avenue for building community. Guest Peter Mackenzie talks about his love for conferences and how they’ve helped him in his career. In fact, Conferences helped him so much started one in Europe called Wi-Co. It has grown to include North America so that more wireless practitioners can join in the... Read more »Fun Reading: AI: Great Expectations
Rodney Brooks republished an article on great AI expectations that he wrote 37 years ago. Not surprisingly, apart from a few technical details triggered by four decades of exponential growth in silicon capabilities, the article could have been written yesterday.
Side note: I’m a bit younger than Rodney, but I also went through at least three waves of AI hype cycles, starting with Prolog and 4GL, then expert systems, and finally neural networks. Around that time, I stopped caring and focused on networking, but I have enough battle scars to remain skeptical.
Aligning our prices and packaging with the problems we help customers solve
At Cloudflare, we have a simple but audacious goal: to help build a better Internet. That mission has driven us to build one of the world’s largest networks, to stand up for content providers, and to innovate relentlessly to make the Internet safer, faster, and more reliable for everyone, everywhere.
Building world-class products is only part of the battle, however. Fulfilling our mission means making these products accessible, including a pricing model that is fair, predictable, and aligned with the value we provide. If our packaging is confusing, or if our pricing penalizes you for using the service, then we’re not living up to our mission. And the best way to ensure that alignment?
Listen to our customers.
Over the years, your feedback has shaped our product roadmap, helping us evolve to offer nearly 100 products across four solution areas — Application Services, Network Services, Zero Trust Services, and our Developer Platform — on a single, unified platform and network infrastructure. Recently, we’ve heard a new theme emerge: the need for simplicity. You’ve asked us, “A hundred products is a lot. Can you please be more prescriptive?” and “Can you make your pricing more Continue reading
AMD Rides The HPC Tiger In The Datacenter
Being in the high performance computing business, as AMD most definitely is, has its ups and downs. …
AMD Rides The HPC Tiger In The Datacenter was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.
NB538: AI Copilot To Help Steer HPE SASE; SoftBank Will Test 5G Airships
Take a Network Break! We start with follow-up on post-quantum support in firewalls and DPDK, then highlight a command injection vulnerability in Ruckus SmartZone software. In tech news, Broadcom rolls out the Jericho4 ASIC to help scale AI across multiple data centers, InfoBlox beefs up DNS protection to spot malicious domains faster, and HPE announces... Read more »Tech Bytes: How Lightyear Makes ISP Management Painless (Sponsored)
Telecom and ISP lifecycle management can be tedious and opaque. On today’s Tech Bytes, we talk with sponsor Lightyear about its SaaS-based platform that handles telecom and ISP procurement, tracks installations and inventory, manages billing, and more. We talk about the pain points that Lightyear can solve, the components of the platform, and how Lightyear... Read more »BGP Community Propagation on Cisco IOS/XE: The 90’s Called
Just when I thought no vendor stupidity peculiarity could surprise me, Cisco IOS/XE proved me wrong.
I was improving a completely unrelated BGP functionality. I ran BGP integration tests on Cisco IOL (because it’s the fastest one to boot), and the BGP community propagation test failed. After verifying that I did not change the template and that the data structures had not changed, I checked the IOL release I was using.
Surprise 🎉🎉: the neighbor send-community configurations that worked since (at least) the IOS Classic release 15.x stopped working in Cisco IOS/XE release 17.16.01a.
Fast Following Fails
Fast following fails.
Whenever I hear a leader in a technology business say, “We’re going to fast follow because it’s the most profitable place to be,” I know I’m looking at a failed organization. I didn’t come to this conclusion by thinking about it. I came to this conclusion by observing it repeatedly.
After observing it, however, I wanted to understand why this particular strategy fails so consistently and spectacularly. Why? To understand my theory, we need to start in a somewhat different place than business—we need to start with the nature of goals and humans.
You can place goals into two buckets: first things and second things.
First things are foundational. If you are a technology company, the first thing is building a stable, resilient, and flexible platform (or foundation). The products you sell will only be as stable as your platform. The innovation you achieve will only be as consistent as your platform is.
Second things are goals you can only achieve once you’ve built the first things.
Here’s the hard truth no one wants to hear: Generating revenue is a second thing.
Humans become what they do.
We all want to believe we can become what we Continue reading
HN791: Should You Build or Buy Your Automation Platform?
Perhaps the biggest question around adopting network automation is whether you should build a solution using open source tools and a lot of coding glue, or buy a network automation platform from a vendor and construct your automation solution on top of that. Either way has tradeoffs. Network engineer Lee Harper joins Heavy Networking to... Read more »UCI-Express Cranks Up Chiplet Interconnect Speeds
With cloud computing, HPC, and now AI driving enterprise computing and the technical challenges and cost connected to semiconductor design and manufacturing increasing, demand for chiplet architectures continues to increase. …
UCI-Express Cranks Up Chiplet Interconnect Speeds was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Oracle Cloud Launches Database Service for Agentic AI, Analytics Workloads
A decade and a half of enterprise cloud adoption has spread vast amounts of data and processing around the globe, and the onslaught of generative AI – and now agentic AI – is only accelerating it. …
Oracle Cloud Launches Database Service for Agentic AI, Analytics Workloads was written by Jeffrey Burt at The Next Platform.
Redesigning Workers KV for increased availability and faster performance
On June 12, 2025, Cloudflare suffered a significant service outage that affected a large set of our critical services. As explained in our blog post about the incident, the cause was a failure in the underlying storage infrastructure used by our Workers KV service. Workers KV is not only relied upon by many customers, but serves as critical infrastructure for many other Cloudflare products, handling configuration, authentication and asset delivery across the affected services. Part of this infrastructure was backed by a third-party cloud provider, which experienced an outage on June 12 and directly impacted availability of our KV service.
Today we're providing an update on the improvements that have been made to Workers KV to ensure that a similar outage cannot happen again. We are now storing all data on our own infrastructure. We are also serving all requests from our own infrastructure in addition to any third-party cloud providers used for redundancy, ensuring high availability and eliminating single points of failure. Finally, the work has meaningfully improved performance and set a clear path for the removal of any reliance on third-party providers as redundant back-ups.
Workers KV is a global key-value store that Continue reading
Technology Short Take 187
Welcome to Technology Short Take #187! In this Technology Short Take, I have a curated collection of links on topics ranging from BGP to blade server hardware to writing notes using a “zettelkasten”-style approach, along with a few other topics thrown in here and there for fun. I hope you find something useful!
Networking
- Jason Gintert justifies the value behind using IRRs and RPSL to keep your public BGP routing working well.
- IPv6 has a new documentation prefix, as outlined by Ivan Pepelnjak in his blog post as well as by Nick Buraglio in his blog post.
Servers/Hardware
- Kevin Houston takes a look at the latest blade server offerings from Cisco and HPE.
Security
- This is an older article dating back to the start of 2025, but it outlines a potential security flaw that allowed hackers to hijack Subaru cars in the US and Canada.
- Rory McCune tackles PKI in this post of his series on Kubernetes security fundamentals.
- Daniel Stenberg (of
curlfame) explains why thecurlproject doesn’t use CVSS scores and describes some of the problems that result from this decision.
Cloud Computing/Cloud Management
- I’ve spoken about Cedar before here on this site. The first mention of Continue reading
Hedge 276: Common Mistakes in RFPs
Requests for proposals (RFPs) are a little understood part of running a network–or any other IT system. What are some common mistakes, and some things engineers should think about, when building and executing RFPs? Andreas Taudte joins Tom and Russ to discuss RFPs.
AWS Direct Connect Technical Deep Dive (IX)
In the previous posts, we looked at how to use a site‑to‑site VPN to connect your on‑premises network to AWS, and as we saw, it is very easy to set up. So what’s the fuss about Direct Connect (DX), and why would we need one?
To give you a one‑word answer, a VPN connects through the Internet. As you would expect, that comes with some limitations. Latency can be high, and the throughput is capped at around 1.25 Gb/s (per tunnel). So what if we need something more resilient and with much higher throughput?
Suresh Vina
That is where AWS Direct Connect comes in. As the name suggests, it is a Dedicated Direct Connection (DX Connection) to AWS, giving you a dedicated network link with better performance and reliability compared to a traditional VPN over the Internet.
As always, if you find this post helpful, press the ‘clap’ button. It means a lot to me and helps Continue reading