My Experience at AutoCon3

My Experience at AutoCon3

This is my second time attending the AutoCon event. The first one I went to was last year in Amsterdam (AutoCon1), and it was absolutely amazing. I decided to attend again this year, and AutoCon3 took place from the 26th to the 30th of May. The first two days were dedicated to workshops, and the conference itself ran from the 28th to the 30th. I only attended the conference. I heard there were around 650 attendees at this event, which is great to see.

Network Automation Forum (NAF)

In case you’ve never heard of AutoCon, it’s a community-driven conference focused on network automation, organized by the Network Automation Forum (NAF). NAF brings together people from across the industry to share ideas, tools, and best practices around automation, orchestration, and observability in networking.

They typically hold two conferences each year, one in Europe and one in the USA, or at least that’s how it’s been so far. The European event is usually around the end of May, and the US one takes place around November. Tickets are released in tiers, with early bird pricing being cheaper. I grabbed the early bird ticket for 299 euros as soon as it was announced.

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The AI Datacenter Is Ravenous For 102.4 Tb/sec Ethernet Switch ASICs

While it has always been true that flatter networks and faster networks are possible with every speed bump on the Ethernet roadmap, the scale of networks has kept growing fast enough that the switch ASIC makers and the switch makers have been able to make it up in volume and keep the switch business growing. …

The AI Datacenter Is Ravenous For 102.4 Tb/sec Ethernet Switch ASICs was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

PP065: A Microsegmentation Overview

Microsegmentation divides a network into boundaries or segments to provide fine-grained access control to resources within those segments. On today’s Packet Protector we talk about network and security reasons for employing microsegmentation, different methods (agents, overlays, network controls, and so on), how microsegmentation fits into a zero trust strategy, and the product landscape. Episode Links:... Read more »

Bootstrapping Dual-Stack Kubernetes on Flatcar with Kubeadm

Recently I needed to be able to stand up a dual-stack (IPv4/IPv6) Kubernetes cluster on Flatcar Container Linux using kubeadm. At first glance, this seemed like it would be relatively straightforward, but as I dug deeper into it there were a few quirks that emerged. Given these quirks, it seemed like a worthwhile process to write up and publish here. In this post, you’ll see how to use Butane and kubeadm to bootstrap a dual-stack IPv4/IPv6 Kubernetes cluster on AWS.

For those who are unfamiliar, Flatcar Container Linux is a container-optimized Linux distribution considered to be the spiritual successor to CoreOS. For configuring OS instances during provisioning, Flatcar uses Ignition (see here or here for more information). Ignition is intended to be machine-friendly, but not human-friendly. Users can use Butane to write human-friendly YAML configurations that then get transpiled into Ignition. So, when bootstrapping Kubernetes on Flatcar, users will generally use a Butane configuration that leverages kubeadm, as described in the Flatcar documentation.

While the Butane configurations in the documentation are a good start for bootstrapping Kubernetes on Flatcar, they don’t address the dual-stack use case. As outlined in the Kubernetes documentation for dual-stack support with kubeadm, you Continue reading

Building an AI Agent that puts humans in the loop with Knock and Cloudflare’s Agents SDK

This is a guest post by Chris Bell, CTO of Knock

There’s a lot of talk right now about building AI agents, but not a lot out there about what it takes to make those agents truly useful.

An Agent is an autonomous system designed to make decisions and perform actions to achieve a specific goal or set of goals, without human input.

No matter how good your agent is at making decisions, you will need a person to provide guidance or input on the agent’s path towards its goal. After all, an agent that cannot interact or respond to the outside world and the systems that govern it will be limited in the problems it can solve.

That’s where the “human-in-the-loop” interaction pattern comes in. You're bringing a human into the agent's loop and requiring an input from that human before the agent can continue on its task.

In this blog post, we'll use Knock and the Cloudflare Agents SDK to build an AI Agent for a virtual card issuing workflow that requires human approval when a new card is requested.

You can find the complete code for this example in the repository.

What is Knock?

Knock is messaging Continue reading

Worth Reading 060325

Note to readers: I’m merging the worth reading and weekend reads into a “couple of times a week” worth reading. How often I post these depends on the number of articles I run across, but I’ll try to keep it to around five articles per post


I have been consistently skeptical of claims that LLMs are intelligent in any meaningful sense of the word. It is undeniably remarkable that LLMs can generate coherent conversations and articulate answers to almost any question.


For decades, Communist China’s spies, hackers and businessmen have feasted on the forced transfer of technology from vulnerable US corporate enterprises drawn to the vast Chinese market. Little has been accomplished to reduce this massive theft of intellectual property. US businesses seem to have resigned themselves to such unfair practices as the price of doing business in China.


His technical work and evangelism have improved the Internet, and I will give some examples of his contributions to the Internet community and users, but I am sad because he was a good person—idealistic, unselfish, open, and funny.


To build a data-driven story, we must use a basic narrative model. Various models exist in the literature, such as the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) Continue reading

Interesting: Bootstrapping HTTPS

Jan Schaumann published an interesting blog post describing the circuitous journey a browser might take to figure out that it can use QUIC with a web server.

Now, if only there were a record in a distributed database telling the browser what the web server supports. Oh, wait… Not surprisingly, browser vendors don’t trust that data and have implemented a happy eyeballs-like protocol to decide between HTTPS over TCP and QUIC.

Marvell Is Saved By The AI Boom, But Every Deal Is Tough

Marvell Technology made some big bets about delivering chip packaging and I/O technologies to the hyperscalers and cloud builders of the world who want to design their own ASICs but who do not have the expertise to get those designs across the finish line into products. …

Marvell Is Saved By The AI Boom, But Every Deal Is Tough was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Are Smart Glasses the Future of AI? My Hands-On Review of Meta AI Glasses

Honestly, I never believed smart glasses would become a mainstream AI form factor—until I bought the Meta Ray-Ban Smart Glasses two weeks ago! 😎 This gadget had been on my wishlist for a while, but it wasn’t available in India, and even if you managed to get one from abroad, the app didn’t work well … Continue reading Are Smart Glasses the Future of AI? My Hands-On Review of Meta AI Glasses →

Cloudflare named a Strong Performer in Email Security by Forrester

Today, we are excited to announce that Forrester has recognized Cloudflare Email Security as a Strong Performer and among the top three providers in the ‘current offering’ category in “The Forrester Wave™: Email, Messaging, And Collaboration Security Solutions, Q2 2025” report. Get a complimentary copy of the report here. According to Forrester:

“Cloudflare is a solid choice for organizations looking to augment current email, messaging, and collaboration security tooling with deep content analysis and processing and malware detection capabilities.”

Cloudflare’s top-ranked criteria

In this evaluation, Forrester analyzed 10 Email Security vendors across 27 different criteria. Cloudflare received the highest scores possible in nine key evaluation criteria, and also scored among the top three in the current offering category. We believe this recognition is due to our ability to deliver stronger security outcomes across email and collaboration tools. These highlights showcase the strength and maturity of our Email Security solution:

Antimalware & sandboxing

Cloudflare’s advanced sandboxing engine analyzes files, whether directly attached or linked via cloud storage, using both static and dynamic analysis. Our AI-powered detectors evaluate attachment structure and behavior in real time, enabling protection not only against known malware but also emerging threats.

Malicious URL detection & web Continue reading

TNO031: Attracting New Talent to Networking, Pairing Dev With NetOps, and More With Justin Ryburn

Total Networks Operations sits down with Justin Ryburn for a wide-ranging discussion on the state of the networking industry. Topics including how to attract new talent to network engineering and network operations; getting literate in DevOps/infrastructure tools such as GitHub, Terraform, and Python; pairing Dev and NetOps to maximize domain expertise; integrating tools and trying... Read more »

Multi-Layer Switching and Tunneling

When deep-diving into the confusing terminology of switching, routing, and bridging, I mentioned you could perform packet forwarding at different layers of a networking stack. In this blog post, we’ll explore what happens when we combine packet forwarding on multiple layers within a single network, resulting in multi-layer switching, where edge devices perform Layer n forwarding (usually Layer 3), and core devices perform Layer n-1 forwarding (typically Layer 2).

Each layer can use any forwarding paradigm you choose. However, since we generally use IP at Layer 3, edge devices typically perform hop-by-hop destination-based forwarding, while core devices can use alternative methods.

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