After traveling between conferences these past couple of weeks, I wanted to share some reflections. I recently had the opportunity to speak at PeeringDaysEU in Croatia and attend KubeCon London, both of which offered a ton of great conversations and interesting perspectives on where our industry is heading.
PeeringDaysEU: My First Croatian Adventure
Last week brought me to Split, Croatia for PeeringDaysEU—my first visit to Croatia. I presented “New and Upcoming NetBox features for IXP/ISPs” to a packed room, discussing how NetBox continues to evolve to better serve the needs of internet exchanges and service providers.
One thing that made PeeringDays particularly interesting was its novel format. The mornings featured presentations, while the afternoons transformed into a fast-paced speed-dating style networking event. While most attendees were there to negotiate peering agreements, I was pleased to be invited to 10+ 20-minute conversations about NetBox. These ranged from discussions with NetBox-curious organizations to conversations with seasoned experts who’ve integrated it deeply into their operations.
These conversations were incredibly valuable, providing insights into the depth and breadth of NetBox adoption in service provider networks. I came away with a lot of interesting signals that will influence my thinking about future development.
Jac Kloots from NetBox Labs partner Kentik also gave a great talk about “Using Source of Truth to Enrich and Understand Network Telemetry” in which he laid out the importance of a source truth for adding meaning and context to signals from the network. He also argued that there is no Single Source of Truth, and we wholeheartedly agree.
Jac Kloots from Kentik answers the question “What are the building blocks of network observability?”
A big thanks to Marian Rychtecky from NIX.cz and the PeeringDays team for their warm welcome into the “peering family.” It’s certainly a community I’ll be happy to revisit.
KubeCon London: Where Cloud Native Meets Network Automation
This week I attended KubeCon in London—my first Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) event since stepping down as Marketing Chairperson in 2020. It was great to bump into so many old friends and meet a lot of new faces while seeing the Kubernetes ecosystem continue to go from strength to strength. While my focus has gradually shifted toward network automation rather than the Kubernetes ecosystem, it’s become clear that these worlds are starting to collide in ways that actually matter.
Open Networking and Edge Summit: AI Meets Telco
The first day brought me to the Open Networking and Edge Summit, where AI’s implications for telecommunications dominated the conversation. The agenda featured talks with titles such as “AI Networking – What’s behind the hype”, “Edge AI: The $100 billion+ Opportunity” and it’s clear that the excitement around the possibilities of AI is as prevalent in the telco space as it is everywhere else.
We also heard some results from the Open Networking and Edge Foundations latest survey which revealed that “92% of surveyed organizations now find that OSS is very important in networking”. An amazing statistic and something that I think many of us won’t find surprising at all.
Arpit Joshipura & Hilary Carter of the Linux Foundation sharing updates from their latest survey
By chance I sat next to Andy Reid, previously of British Telecom and now at the University of Bristol, who I learned was heavily involved in the birth of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs), and who helped me to correct some of my previous misunderstandings of the interrelation between VNFs and Cloud-Native Network Functions (CNFs). TL;DR, they are more similar than you think. Andy is now working on important problems around networking modelling including how to achieve an application centric approach to IP addressing and that’s a conversation I’m looking forward to following up on.
Cloud Native Telco Day: Hope for the Future
If the Open Networking and Edge Summit was for the “suits”, Tuesday’s Cloud Native Telco Day was certainly for the “hoodies”. A principle that served the CNCF well was the unwritten rule of “working code over standards” and based on what I saw at Cloud Native Telco Day, this philosophy appears to be finding its way into the telco world, fast.
This event had a noticeably different atmosphere: more practical, more hands on. Wim Henderickx from Nokia and Ashan Senevirathne from Swisscom delivered a solid session on Kubenet. Wim often talks about network automation as being about data flows and reconciliation logic under the hood— an opinion that we share—which makes Kubernetes an ideal substrate.
Wim Henderickx from Nokia and Ashan Senevirathne from Swisscom – “Kubenet: Harnessing k8s for Network Automation”
Later in the program, Lea BrĂĽhwiler and Joel Studler from Swisscom showed off their work on the NetBox Kubernetes Operator. They ran through three use cases showing how they use NetBox as a centralized IPAM for their Kubernetes deployments. I noticed pretty much everyone who was sitting near me saving links for later, which is always a good sign!
Left to Right: Lea BrĂĽhwiler, Wim Henderickx, Ashan Senevirathne, Joel Studler, Me – the “cloudnative networking crowd” according to Wim 🙂
Philippe Ensarguet, former CTO, now VP Software Engineering at Orange Business and one of the Cloud Native Telco Day organizers, mentioned they received over 60 talk submissions for this half-day event. Hopefully this means that the Cloud Native Telco Day could be a full day event next time round 🤞
Looking Ahead
It’s been invigorating to see NetBox providing value across such different ecosystems. These conferences have reinforced my observation that network automation, cloud native methodologies, and the service provider world are increasingly converging. That seems like good news for those who are driven by collaborative and open approaches to innovation.
I now have a brief break from travel, which comes at a good time as we start to prepare for our workshop at AutoCon 3 in Prague at the end of May which will be all about NetBox Discovery and Assurance. Grab a spot soon because our AutoCon2 workshop sold out fast. If you’re going to Prague, we’re also organizing another “NetBox and Friends” social—the previous one at AutoCon 2 was hugely popular —but this time it’s on a boat! Register now because places are limited.
