Rosalind Whitley (Dir. Product @Kentikinc) and Ethan Smith (Staff SRE @ An Enterprise Security Company) talk about network observability, the evolution of SRE for networking, flow analysis, and the complexity and tradeoffs or network design and operations at scale.

SHOW: 872

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #872 Transcript

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SHOW NOTES:

• Kentik - The Network Observability Platform (homepage)

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show. Tell us about your background and the areas you focus on today.

Topic 2 - I want to begin with the complexity of networking, and not just in the sense of routing, etc. Can you walk us through some of the things you have to consider, and potentially tradeoff, as you’re thinking about network design and operations (e.g. performance, security, costs, logging, troubleshooting, etc.)

Topic 3 - Usually there are many teams involved in making a large organization work. How do you collaborate across teams, and what types of technical hurdles get in the way of delivering the service? (maybe discuss logging challenges)

Topic 3a - How has the role of SRE and Network Engineer evolved as we’re now dealing with this new complexity? You have all the normal performance, high availability, observability stuff, but also things like egress costs, etc.

Topic 4 - We talked earlier about the challenge of cost management when running a large SaaS service. What are some of the ways that you explore or model costing behaviors and look to improve them?

Topic 5 - As you’re working in a single cloud (e.g. AWS), there’s often a belief that working only in that ecosystem is the best approach, as everything is integrated or billing is simpler. How did you go about exploring alternatives that worked in your cloud, but gave you more flexibility for your services?

Topic 6 - How do you tend to think about lines of demarcation between your team, the SaaS tooling provider and the cloud provider?

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