Cisco Podcast Network

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. I’m joined by two guests today to cover a couple of recent service degradation incidents involving DNS providers. In part one of the show, Kemal Sanjta, ThousandEyes’ resident BGP expert, joins us to discuss the May 6th disruption to Neustar’s UltraDNS service, which lasted nearly four hours. We discuss the BGP routing changes we observed during the incident and what they can tell us about the cause of the disruption. We also cover a separate incident involving Quad 9, a public recursive resolver service, which the company says was caused by a DDoS attack on May 3rd. In part two of the show, I’m joined by Michael Batchelder (AKA Binky) to discuss the two “Ds” of the Internet — DDoS attacks and the DNS. Watch this episode to hear about what we saw from ThousandEyes’ perspective.

What are the industry’s technical experts in pluggable optics thinking about today? What boundaries are the smartest minds are pushing to make the next generation of high-speed optics? In Episode 5, we start a new conversation with my esteemed colleague, Mark Nowell, Cisco Fellow. We begin with his own background, and then explore a brief history of standards in pluggable optics. – Pat Chou, Cisco Optics Product Manager Dr. Mark Nowell is a Cisco Fellow in Cisco’s “Optics and Optical Systems Group.” His focus is on next generation interconnect technology innovation to meet Cisco's needs. Mark is also active within the industry standards and forums and has chaired multiple IEEE 802.3 Ethernet projects. He represents Cisco on various industry alliances and Consortium. Mark also chairs a number of industry MSA (Multi-source Agreement) groups focusing on next generation optical module form factors (QSFP-DD, QSFP-DD800) and optical interface signaling technology (100G Lambda MSA). QSFP-DD Whitepaper, “Optimizing QSFP-DD Systems to Achieve at Least 25 Watt Thermal Port Performance” http://www.qsfp-dd.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/2021-QSFP-DD-MSA-Thermal-Whitepaper-Final.pdf Additional resources Cisco Optics blogs: https://blogs.cisco.com/tag/ciscoopticsblog (subscribe at https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=CiscoOpticsBlog ) Cisco Optics YouTube playlist: http://cs.co/9008BlQen Cisco Optics landing page: cisco.com/go/optics Timestamps 2:40 Mark’s early education and career background 4:41 Joining Cisco 8:07 Ethernet standards bodies 10:57 IEEE standards process 13:13 The rise of consortiums and multisource agreements (MSAs) 15:14 Pluggable MSAs 16:18 100G optical MSAs Music credits Sunny Morning by FSM Team | https://www.free-stock-music.com/artist.fsm-team.html Upbeat by Mixaund | https://mixaund.bandcamp.com

Wonder what your life would be like without Internet access? For many people, that is the reality of their day-to-day lives. Cisco experts express the importance of bridging the digital divide.

Offices are opening, so what does this mean for employees? This past year has taught us that work is something you do, not somewhere you go. Cisco experts chime in on the future of work.

Every great idea since the dawn of time started from someone spotting an opportunity and innovating.” In this episode of Cisco CX EMEAR: Unplugged, Phil Wolfenden is joined by Carlos Pignataro as they discuss the importance of innovation and its significance to our people, our teams and our business. Join the conversation and leave a comment under this podcast. We look forward to your thoughts on this topic!

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. Today, we focused on an interesting outage that impacted Cloudflare Magic Transit, a relatively new offering from the CDN provider which aims to efficiently route and protect the network traffic of its customers. On May 3rd at approximately 3:00 PM PDT (10:00 PM UTC), ThousandEyes vantage points connecting to sites using Magic Transit began to detect significant packet loss at Cloudflare’s network edge—with the loss continuing at varying levels, for approximately 2 hours. While the outage impacted some Magic Transit customers more significantly than others, we also observed mitigation actions by at least one customer to avoid the outage and restore the availability of their service to their users. This outage reminds us that no provider is immune to outages, even cloud and global CDN providers. However, with proactive visibility, you can respond quickly to reduce outage impact on your users.

ThousandEyes Co-founder Mohit Lad never intended to be an entrepreneur, but when his Plan A and Plan B didn’t pan out, he took a calculated risk to start a company that he describes as the Google maps of the internet. Hear how ThousandEyes, which Cisco recently acquired, gives companies more visibility than ever.

Jeneen and Mark discuss their experience with the LIFT, Learning Intentionally for Transformation, reverse mentoring program. Through the Connected Black Professionals Inclusive Community at Cisco, the program pairs Executives (mentees) with Senior African-American/Black professionals (mentors), bridging the gap across ethnic and racial divides through conscious conversations promoting understanding and increasing proximity to power an inclusive future for all. Mark and Jeneen share their real experience and what made their partnership so successful in tackling hard authentic conversations. Be sure to listen along as they share their wisdom and advice on how we all can better learn from each other. Sound like a place you’d like to work? Apply today: http://cs.co/teamcisco

Have you ever wondered why pluggable optics exist? Have you ever wondered what acronyms like QSFP, LR4, FEC, and PAM4 actually mean? In this episode I continue my conversation with my colleague Ray Nering. He explains to me how a lot of these came to be, starting from the days of 1Gb GBIC all the way up to today's 400Gb QSFP-DD. This is the final part of a four-episode conversation with Ray. In this episode we get into complexity trends and coherent optics. Pat Chou, Cisco Optics Product Manager Ray Nering is a colleague of mine in the Cisco Optics product management group and over the years has held senior management positions at other companies in the optics space, such as AT&T Microelectronics, Lucent, JDSU, Agere, Optium, and Lightwire. Additional resources Cisco Optics blogs: https://blogs.cisco.com/tag/ciscoopticsblog (subscribe at https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=CiscoOpticsBlog ) Cisco Optics YouTube playlist: http://cs.co/9008BlQen Cisco Optics landing page: cisco.com/go/optics Timestamps 2:07 PAM4 09:37 100G lambda MSA defines optical interfaces 12:37 Complexity trend accelerates 14:36 Pluggable coherent modules for data center interconnects 20:25 CMIS is needed for managing complicated modules Music credits Sunny Morning by FSM Team | https://www.free-stock-music.com/artist.fsm-team.html Upbeat by Mixaund | https://mixaund.bandcamp.com

Dr. Oscar Rico, the Executive Director of Technology Services at Canutillo Independent School District in El Paso, Texas explains how Cisco technology helped bridge the digital divide in his community and power an inclusive recovery.

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. We’re joined this week by Hans Ashlock, Director of Technology & Innovation at ThousandEyes, to discuss Tuesday’s Microsoft Teams outage. On Tuesday, April 27th, ThousandEyes tests began to detect an outage affecting the Teams service starting around 3 AM (PT) and lasting approximately 1.5 hours. While the outage occurred in the overnight hours for much of the Americas, the global nature of the outage resulted in service disruption for users connecting from Asia and Europe. Transaction views within the ThousandEyes platform show that Microsoft’s authentication service appeared to be available, however, the Teams application was unable to initialize, resulting in error responses. Watch this week’s episode to hear more about what ThousandEyes revealed about the nature of this outage—and what we can all learn from the incident. Explore this outage for yourself using our interactive ShareLink: http://cs.co/ThousandEyesShareLink

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. On today’s episode, we’re thrilled to be joined by Kemal Sanjta, ThousandEyes’ resident expert on BGP. This week, we’re going under the hood on the April 16th BGP leak at Vodafone India, which leaked more than 30,000 prefixes, causing a major disruption of Internet traffic to some services. While some news outlets reported that the incident lasted approximately 10 minutes (starting around 1:50AM UTC or 9:50AM ET), we found that it lasted quite a bit longer—more than an hour in the case of some prefixes. Watch this week’s show to see how it impacted a major CDN provider.

Does your current click behavior put you at risk? Find out why "clicking with purpose" keeps you safer online and learn how to deceive the deceivers. Mike and Sean share key tactics in their latest podcast, Unhackable Principle: The Click

Have you ever wondered why pluggable optics exist? Have you ever wondered what acronyms like QSFP, LR4, FEC, and PAM4 actually mean? In this episode I continue my conversation with my colleague Ray Nering. He explains to me how a lot of these came to be, starting from the days of 1Gb GBIC all the way up to today's 400Gb QSFP-DD. This is the third part of a four-episode conversation with Ray. In this episode we get into 100Gb pluggables and then the QSFP-DD form factor. Pat Chou, Cisco Optics Product Manager Ray Nering is a colleague of mine in the Cisco Optics product management group and over the years has held senior management positions at other companies in the optics space, such as AT&T Microelectronics, Lucent, JDSU, Agere, Optium, and Lightwire. Additional resources Cisco Optics blogs: https://blogs.cisco.com/tag/ciscoopticsblog (subscribe at https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=CiscoOpticsBlog ) Cisco Optics YouTube playlist: http://cs.co/9008BlQen Cisco Optics landing page: cisco.com/go/optics Timestamps 02:06 4x bandwidth at 2.5x cost 06:25 Enter 100G modules 12:33 QSFP28 ramps in 2016 17:56 QSFP-DD form factor considerations Music credits Sunny Morning by FSM Team | https://www.free-stock-music.com/artist.fsm-team.html Upbeat by Mixaund | https://mixaund.bandcamp.com

This is The Internet Report, where we uncover what’s working and what’s breaking on the Internet—and why. We’re back from a short sabbatical to cover an interesting outage at Facebook in what appears to be an application outage compounded by a series of routing issues. On April 8th, for roughly 40 minutes, the Facebook application became unavailable for users around the globe who were attempting to connect to the service. Despite the short-lived nature of the outage, we observed prolonged performance degradation even after the application came back online for users. Suboptimal page load and response times, both of which can impact the user experience, were observed alongside a series of routing changes. This outage reminds us all of the importance of having visibility across network and application layers when troubleshooting and prioritizing issues that are impacting user experience. Catch this week’s episode to hear about the outage from ThousandEyes perspective.