Episode 55: SD-WAN Deep Dive
In this episode, we take a deep dive into SD-WAN technology, specifically what it is, where it came from, and where it's going.
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Pat: 0:30
everybody, welcome back to this week's edition of Breaking Down the Bites. As usual, I'm your host Pat. You can find me on Twitter at layer eight packet. That is the number eight. You can find Kyle on Twitter at Dan 2 56. You can find the show on Twitter Breaking Bites pod. Alex, you're not on social, so if anybody wants to get a Alex, just hit the shows Twitter and we will certainly get it to him. So we are pretty active on Twitter, so come say hello. The more friends, the better the time is. So, also if you like the show, don't forget to subscribe on your streaming platform of choice. As usual. We always like those numbers and people coming to say hi. So, Pick it out, subscribe, like, share all that kind of good stuff. And more ears and eyes on us. It's always good. So the three amigos are back again. We had a rough few weeks schedules. Alex, you're on vacation, enjoying Disney World down there in sunny Florida. And so Kyle and I had to fend for ourselves and do the show you know, do the show as a duo rather than a trio. But that's okay. All back and rocking and rolling, right? So, back from vacation. Mr. Alex. What's up man? How
Alex: 1:43
Oh, doing pretty well, obviously back from extended vacation to the cruise too. So it was Disney World followed by a cruise, so it was 11 days and I'm back. I'm ready.
Pat: 1:57
man? Some people got all the luck, let me tell you, man. Oh man. Kyle, what's up man? What are you doing? What are you up to? Any Eddie Cruises for you?
Kyle: 2:05
No. I mean, if it keeps raining like this though, maybe I could. Float down the road in like a little dinghy or something.
Pat: 2:12
We'll just build ourselves a boat and get rolling. Yeah. It was raining the last like three days. There's been nothing but rain
Kyle: 2:19
Mm-hmm.
Pat: 2:20
in the front yard and everything. It's brutal out there.
Kyle: 2:23
And that's that's your weekly weather report from Kyle, so
Pat: 2:26
That's right. That's right. I expect it every week now. What's the weather like?
Alex: 2:32
It's beautiful where I'm at.
Pat: 2:33
That's
Alex: 2:34
you're wondering,
Pat: 2:35
that's as expected.
Kyle: 2:37
you're right.
Pat: 2:38
expected. No. All good. All good. So everybody's back this week. A few tidbit or notes Alex. Well first of all, what was your favorite ride at Disney? I have to know.
Alex: 2:49
well, I went to Animal Kingdom and Epcot and there was two that stood above the rest, I mean, pretty easy, pretty far ahead of third place probably. And that was Pandora's flight at Animal Kingdom and Cosmic Rewind at Epcot. Both of those are worth the wait and worth the trip to the parks just for those rides,
Pat: 3:10
Damn. Look at that. That's awesome. I have done Pandora's flight, which was awesome. And then so when I was there in 17 on the honeymoon, they did not have the the one in Epcot yet, so I'm sure it was being built or at least planned upon. So I'm, so we're going in December, so I'm curious to see what that that looks like in December again, so, we'll see. But like when we were there the first time, like toy story land, none of that was there. It was all being built. So I'm interested to see what's up there. So, oh, did you do test track at Epcot?
Alex: 3:43
Oh yeah, test. Yeah, I did test track. Yep. Yeah, that was fun. That was cute. Cuz my kids were there. So, you know, obviously it's a competition then, so you can build the best car and yeah, my oldest ended up having the best. So, yeah. Yeah, that was a good time and RTU was really good. I mean, that might even be one that I should have mentioned too. I really enjoyed rtu. It might be because I love the movie. It's probably, I'm not even ashamed to say it's probably my top five favorite movies.
Pat: 4:11
All right.
Alex: 4:12
And I really did enjoy the ride ba.
Pat: 4:15
Well, awesome. That's a good deal. So everybody's got a little low down on Alex's Disney trip, so it's all good. All good. One thing I will mention I don't know, Alex, you wanna mention this too, but this my, for my first time at Cisco live, so I'm excited. We got the sessions all scheduled, the hotel's good. The the flight's all scheduled. So first time out there in Vegas. So I'm ready to rock and roll. So, Alex, are you going? Did you say you were going
Alex: 4:44
Yeah, I think the last time we talked about it, I may have been 50 50, but yeah, I'm booked, I'm registered, I'll be out there, so we'll be able to catch up in a
Pat: 4:54
Yeah. Yeah, I'm in. I always
Alex: 4:56
and Nate's gonna be there.
Pat: 4:58
What's that?
Alex: 4:59
Nate
Pat: 5:00
Oh yeah.
Alex: 5:01
be there
Pat: 5:02
it's awesome. Yeah. Looking forward to
Alex: 5:04
and I are actually staying in the same hotel.
Pat: 5:07
Where are you staying?
Alex: 5:08
staying at Tropicana?
Pat: 5:10
I'm at the Luxer.
Alex: 5:11
know where. Yeah, that's kind of like the, don't wanna call it the budget one, but it's like if your part that's the cheapest hotel that's Cisco Live has some type of, Affiliation with so you can get some discount. Yeah. So yeah, if I didn't make he, but he managed to find a place at Tropicana a while back, probably through some crazy credit card deal thing that he likes spending half his day trying to
Pat: 5:41
Yeah.
Alex: 5:41
But yeah, so I got in for like 75 bucks a night. And that's after taxes and stuff?
Kyle: 5:46
Wow.
Pat: 5:47
Yeah. Hell yeah. That's killer.
Alex: 5:50
Yeah.
Pat: 5:50
Yeah, so I'm going I know a bunch of the Cisco champs, the program that we're a part of, there's a bunch of people going there, so it'd be nice to put names with faces and, you know, they'll be friends for a couple of days in real life instead of just cyber life. So that's always kind of cool. So always a
Alex: 6:08
Yeah. And then we get to play the vendor dinner game because this is the first time that I've gone where work hasn't been paying for my travel.
Pat: 6:16
Okay.
Alex: 6:17
So, They're paying for me to get into the conference, well, using the learning credits that Disney has, but since they're still technically a travel freeze, the anything related to travel is on my time. So the 300 bucks on the hotel I spent I'm only a few hour drive away, so it's like a $70 flight if I wanted to do a flight, which I probably will, but yeah. But food, this will be the first time I've gone to Cisco live and since the company's not paying for my food, I'm gonna have to try real hard to get vendors to pay for it. So that's my
Pat: 6:50
Heck yeah.
Alex: 6:50
4, 4, 4 dinners paid for. I got one so far. My Cisco rep guaranteed me a
Pat: 6:57
Nice.
Alex: 6:57
so I gotta get three more and then the C C I E dinner. But I don't know if I'll go to it, but that's usually a decent meal, but I can only bring one person. So if I'm there with you and Nate, then I kind of feel like a, an ass
Pat: 7:09
Well, now that we're part of the champs, that there's a bunch of c Cs in the Champs program. So if they're there, then they can be my date for the night. That's cool. I, there's no shame in my game. So any of my fellow champs that are C C I e, that plan on going to the the dinner you I'm your plus one. I have your dibs. I'm making it public. Nah, it's gonna be cool. So we're looking forward to that. And I think there is a, there's a champs thing, I think I wanna say like Monday night. It's either Monday night or Tuesday night. They do like a thing with the actual champs. So like we have our own dedicated space and stuff. So I'm curious to check that out and kind of hang and see what all that brings to the table. So that's kind of cool. I'm looking forward to it.
Alex: 7:47
it's gonna be exciting. And if you're not already familiar with that, there's always some big event. You know, once a week, wherever everyone that goes to Cisco Alive can go to, they, they actually rented out Allegiant Stadium, a Raider Stadium. And I'm not big Gwen Stefani's playing.
Pat: 8:03
Okay.
Alex: 8:04
So if you're into Gwen Savani,
Pat: 8:07
See, I was into her
Alex: 8:08
at Legian Stadium. And we're there.
Pat: 8:10
I'll tell you that much right now. That was like my first crush. I was like, oh man, she's awesome. Heck yeah. Actually have a no doubt on, on vinyl. So I love I
Alex: 8:19
Well, there you
Pat: 8:20
from Gwen
Alex: 8:20
Well, maybe, so I guess you're gonna head to over and watch that
Pat: 8:24
See where the wind takes me. I feel like it's a big task. Being your first time in Cisco Live, there's just so much going on. You're just like, I don't know what to do next. So I'm sure I'll have a little bit of that as well.
Alex: 8:36
Yeah, there's the thing that I wanted to do but didn't get to do it to its full extent, last time I was at Cisco Live was they started doing escape rooms. But these escape rooms are it focused. So you, so to get outta it, you have to do things like like maybe log into an unencrypted S S I D and like mess around with that and find some stuff to get out of an escape room.
Pat: 9:00
Oh man. I hope they don't make me like, like code like Java file or JS O or write a Python script from scratch. Cuz I'll be there until like the following week they'll be like, oh, nope. Can't go anywhere.
Alex: 9:13
well, you'll just have to take a breakout session on programming before you do that or
Pat: 9:17
Yeah, I got a bunch
Alex: 9:18
Alright. There's so much fun. Yep. For sure. Lots of fun. And then I always like playing there's like trivia games that you can win prizes and I've won some pretty neat prizes over the years. Like a, an Amazon Echo. Before they were really cheap.
Pat: 9:33
Yeah.
Alex: 9:33
and one of those s n e s emulators that were really hard to find one year that was like everyone's go-to Christmas present or something. I won one of those one year.
Pat: 9:43
Yep, for sure. Yeah, it's interesting. So if anybody's had Cisco Live, hit us up. We'll be there. It's gonna be cool. So I'm looking forward to that. So, Kyle, maybe next year you can come with us, man. Just be like, yo, cuts down. Put me on a plane, let's go. Oh, it's awesome. So anyway get a little of that out of the way. The the topic this week, I feel like the deep dives that we've done have done pretty well for us. So pe people have really found some value out of it. So I figured the deep dive this week, and it'll kind of be, it'll in, it'll be in my wheelhouse, if you will, since I've dealt a lot with it over the last couple of years. But I think we would do a deep dive on SDWAN. I feel like that's a big one. It's a major player in today's space. It, you know, maybe a couple years ago it wasn't really. Mainstay yet or, you know, center stage. But I think now people are moving away from the legacy WAN types and SD WAN is very very much so in the conversation. So I figure we would take this episode and do an SD wan deep dive. So I guess I'll kind of get this started off. And you know, like I said, the last couple of places I've been have run a flavor of SD wan and they're all three different flavors, if you will. So I've gotten a wide breadth of SD wan experience over the last couple years. And both from a, you know, maintenance perspective of, okay, it's already here, just, you know, kind of scale it and maintain it and from a, you know, grassroots, completely greenfield, deploy it and then manage it, you know, perspective. So, yeah, I figured that this would be the good one to do that with. So, So, yeah, I guess, I kind of give a little depth in depth of kind of how we got here and what, and I think the sdwan stuff will make a little more sense, but just kind of talking general scopes like back I don't know. I took my CCNA in 2013. I started in 2010 and then passed it in 13. And when I passed it in 13, there was still frame relay questions on my CC n a, which you talk about frame relay now people look at you like you have six heads, look what the hell's frame relay. So, so, so some legacy wan things, right? So you have frame relay at least from my perspective when I started kind of learn about this stuff, frame relay was the wan back then. And Delsey's and all that kind of stuff that made frame relay work underneath the hood. And then, so, That from Frame Relay, then PLS came into the picture and it was yeah, that was the darling of the industry for quite a while. And, you know, so that was, you know, end to end QS and, you know, private connectivity and all that kind of stuff. Pls, cloud, whatever you wanna call it. So a lot of voice systems ran over pls cuz it was dedicated Q os and the flexibility that came, that sort of thing. But then m you know, the drawback to M pls was cost, right? It was really expensive. Right? And depending on how many offices you had or how many sites you had and to drop an mpl l s circuit in there, in some instances I've been in places that have two MPLS and primary and a secondary to drop both of them in there were quite expensive. So, And a couple years ago I started with SD WAN around, I wanna say 2018, 2019, somewhere in there. And so they were moving away from the more expensive circuits of npl l s frame relay, you know, for those that still had it out there, things of that nature. And go into broadband, right? Or, you know, just changing over to just business broadband, right? But the question was how do you get the M P L S performance or the benefits of NPL s out of a broadband you know, business class circuit, right? So I think that's where SD WAN comes in and sort of blends the two together. And so the idea of SD wan it has multiple. I should say ideas wrapped around it. Right. But it's the idea is to basically from an SDWAN perspective, get a get, you know, I should say from a WAN perspective, I. Basically use just whatever transports you want to use, right? Whether that's, if you wanna stick with mpls, great. If you wanna, if you want to get a broadband circuit, a business class, i s p in there, great. If you wanna do cellular or great, you know, that kind of thing. SD WAN can terminate all of those connections and then basically be intelligent enough to to make its decisions on which. Which circuit or with which leg, which transport to actually use based off of its own intelligence of, okay, packet loss jitter latency, things of that nature. It's constantly measuring for those three types, or I should say those three things, it's measuring those on each one of the legs, and then based off of those measurements it intelligently chooses which connection to use. So you have that automatic failover, you have that intelligence to it. You have, you know, you can prefer, you know, in the settings or, you know, however you design it. You can prefer, you know, one leg over the other two, or however many you have. Say you have three legs, right? You can load balance across all three. You can prefer one over the other two. You can do two over the other one, you know, that sort of thing. So there's quite a bit of flexibility and it scales very well as, as well. So from the underbelly of that, The SD WAN takes the, you know, the intelligence out of it, right? So, and Alex and Kyle, you guys have been around long enough that, you know, if you had 50 sites, you had 50 routers, and you were managing all 50 at each place, right? So, you know, you had the s SSH into each, you know, router or switch or whatever you're doing, and, you know, make those changes. And it was very time consuming and blah, blah, blah. So what Sdwan does is with software defined networking, right? It's a it's a central place to manage all. So however many sites you have. And then basically that config is then pushed down to each of the actual boxes on site. So you're taking the, you're taking the intelligence off the actual box, or I should say the control plane, really off the actual box and bringing it to a central, centralized location. And so that way, you know, you can have 50 sites today and you can have a hundred sites tomorrow. And basically you're just deploying the box at each site and the configuration gets pushed down and off you go. Right? So that it's very scalable in that fashion. So. But it's very centrally managed. Again, you know, the brain lives at a central location, and then everybody sort of, you know, all the, I should say spokes, right? Maybe it's a little better to say a hub and spoke. With that terminology everybody calls home, right? Each spoke calls home or you know, every now and then it checks in to make sure it's still there. And then if something needs to be pushed down, if the configuration needs to be pushed down, then it comes from the brain and goes downhill, right? Goes southbound, if you will, in today's technology. So those are some of the things that, you know, I've seen with SD WAN that make, you know, larger enterprises life's a little easier with scale, with you know, configurations all being the same, working from templates, right? So each one of those, or you can make as many templates as you want, but the idea is to templatize your configurations, right? Not just you know, Not just have 50 sites and 48 of them are all different, right? So the idea is then to push you know, templatize it, you get your standard config across the board. That way it's much easier to manage, et cetera, et cetera, you know, et cetera. So I said a lot there. Did you guys have any sort of questions as we kind of jump in here with either what it, what its purpose is, what it's trying to do, and kind of where it's, you know, where it's at the current state of today's networks?
Alex: 17:38
I think you, I guess you really kind of focused on two different things just now when you're trying to explain SD WANs. So, and like you said, it was quite a few minutes there of explaining it. So if you were trying to define SD WAN and weren't trying to use like the dictionary definition of it, what. What's the simplest way you could explain SD wan? So would you say, based on what you just said, that SD WAN is allowing you to use several different types of connectivities or such as mpl, l s, internet cellular, combining those and then kind of giving you a centralized management to intelligently do stuff with it? Or
Pat: 18:26
that's probably
Alex: 18:27
describe
Pat: 18:28
That's probably the best way. So I, you know, SD WAN basically uses software right? To control, you know, the big three connectivity management and the data, the services, right in between, you know, whatever you have data senators, remote offices, cloud, you know, the big three cloud, you know, that kind of thing. So it bridges all of those together from a WAN perspective, right? So, especially now with the, and I'll kind of touch on the cloud thing, especially now with the explosion of the cloud. Like if you were on a, on an PL l s. Network. Right? Or wan, how would you get an M P L S circuit in your cloud? That doesn't exist. That doesn't compute, right? So I think Estee Wan does a nice job of, you know, being able to bridge all of that, you know, together. And I think the old legacy wan stuff, right? For folks that have been around for a bit, the old way the wind used to work is everything was back hauled through a data center, right? So you had npl, l s, you know, connecting all your sites, but the security stack right was at a data center and then basically all the traffic had to come back to that data center, get scrubbed through the security stack, and then out the, out to the internet from the data center and not locally or like a local, you know, internet breakout at wherever the site may be. So SD WAN combats that as well. You can still do it that way with SD wan I've seen it done that way, but most of them, most of the. Modern designs they do a local internet breakout right at the site, and you're not back hauling traffic anymore. So, but at the end of the day, kind of defining what it is, we're trying to throw a couple words around it. It's basically you're using software to control connectivity, management and the data in between your, you know, in between your w insights in between your data centers, again, data centers, remote offices, cloud resources, right? So, it basically, and the other thing too it's the big one here, it's, it decouples, like I said, it decouples the control plane from the data plane. You're taking the brains off of the local box at your actual sites and bringing it to a central place where then it is centrally managed and then the configuration is pushed down to the actual boxes. So I hope that answers a little bit of your question.
Alex: 20:45
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, certainly I'm familiar with SD wan. I'm just trying to try to see how you would describe it. Cause I think SD WAN can be defined a few different ways by different vendors, but I think. Looking for a definition that is true amongst every vendor, and I think that's probably the case, especially the two things that you mentioned and focused on.
Pat: 21:08
Yep. We kind of touched on it before, but I think one of the SD wan's sort of key features, right, is the ability to manage multiple connection types, right? Whether it be mpls, whether it be broadband, whether it be like cellular or wireless, things of that nature. And then basically you can segment traffic within. Those within multiple segments, right? You can chop that up and, you know, basically send it along the wan, right? So, you know, you can think of it as for those of you that are familiar, think of it as multiple vfs, right? You can split that traffic. However, you know, if you need to keep separate traffic within your wan, you can do that with SD wan. Send them within multiple segments or vfs and, you know, they use the same pipes, they use the same technologies, but they don't know, you know, tho those two vfs don't know each other exists, right? That sort of thing. So there's multiple ways to kind of, you know, skin that cat, if you will. So, I feel like that's a big one. I also think the big one there is the, again, the traditional WAN model is, you know, back hauling all that traffic. So then at your data center you have to have these, you know, massive scales of, you know, firewalls and circuits and all that kind of stuff to handle all of that traffic. Now you don't, you know, with s D A, you don't have to, cuz all the internet traffic is still, you know, with the security stuff that the SD WAN boxes now have it the, it can be done right there at the edge and, you know, broken out and sent to the internet right from the actual site instead of back hauling, you know, it all. So I think that that definitely helps as well.
Alex: 22:45
I was just gonna mention cause I think another question that may come up is like, how is SD WAN getting better or how's it evolving? And I think it's probably best for people to realize that, oh, I think when SD WAN was first really catching on, it was really, people just thought of it as a way to connect back to that data center, a simple way to connect back to it. They didn't wanna have to throw in a router that they had to configure some complicated VPN tunnel that they didn't know about it, how to do that. And if you have 200 sites, that can get complicated. So I think Estee Wan's first purpose was, Hey. Remote office, get back to, you know, get back to this my own little internal cloud, I guess you can say. And now it's evolving too. They can do quite a bit more, like you said now they have security functions on them and just now the, you know, several different types of connectivity you can plug into them and now they're more intelligent and they can pick, okay, this voice traffic should go over this connection that you're running because this says lower jitter. And yeah, it's just, cuz like I said I think it's interesting to know where it's going in the future and I think it's a good idea for people to understand where it's gone through so far. So just wanted to chime in there.
Pat: 24:03
Yeah, no, I think that's a good point. I think that it has come quite a bit and I actually forgot that when Alex, when you and I worked at Evolve, they sort of got their own. They put out their own version of SD wan. It really, it wasn't called that at the time. But I, you know, speaking of Nate we, we you know, he was kind of working a lot with that. It was like evolves a little, I don't wanna say homegrown, I guess you wanna call it, it's probably the best word for it, but it was ba you know, I think they called it what the bonder or something. It was some terminology but it wasn't SD a at the time, but it basically served the same fun, the function, right. So, you know, we had customers that wanted to try it, and it basically just put two, two raw ISPs into this bonder, into a, you know, a glorified Linux box. Right. And it, you know, it made connections with the head end, which was, you know, evolve's data center at the time and then, you know, left from there. So Evolve was doing that, like, that was probably what, 2015, Alex? Something like that. So that was a little even before. Some of the, you know, the Estee WAN verbiage was out there and it was a buzzword. So, but yeah, so that was, you know, a cool little taste of, you know, how some of that worked and whatnot. And then, you know, in the last couple years, it's certainly, you know, Estee Wan has exploded to everybody. Everybody's got, it seems like everybody's got a flavor of Estie Wan now know.
Alex: 25:18
Right. Yep. For sure.
Pat: 25:21
So I guess some of the, I don't wanna get too into the details, but at a high level, right? So, yeah, most of the, you know, we talked about okay, so you're abstracting the brains from the actual boxes, right? The intelligence of the routers, switches, whatever it is. So where does that go? Right? So most of your SD WAN providers now are cloud-based, like the brain is in a cloud, right? I mean, you can host it yourself. I don't necessarily recommend it but you know, you can do that. But most of them, you know, like for example, Ciscos they host it in aws, right? And, you know, VeloCloud right? Does the same thing. Basically it's all cloud hosted. So, you know, Palo Alto, same deal. It's all cloud hosted. I think they do have versions. I think Cisco has a version of the Cisco Vitello is what they call it. You can do you can download like an ova, a VM machine to, to be the Marines. But is Cisco already hosted? Why, like, why, what's the point of that? So, so yeah, most of 'em are gonna be cloud hosted, and then basically it's just all web based, right? You get in there through a gooey and start pointing and clicking and building, building your stuff. The main gist of it is you're basically taking I guess trying to formulate this better. So the you know, like I said if you have configurations that you're doing, you're basically then pushing it down to the actual devices via templates or whatever. And then also but that's, that communication is actually done over IP sec tunnels. So it's all encrypted. So you don't have any sort of real data hanging out there. It's all in ip sec tunnels. And then basically, if one site wanted to talk to another site, the head end or the brains isn't involved at all. They build automatic tunnels to each other. Right. So again, so that takes that back haul piece out of it, cuz you don't necessarily need it. It's intelligent enough to sort of know its own. Wan or its own neighbors, and then basically, Hey, I need to get to here. I'm gonna form automatic tunnel with you and, you know, off you go, sort of thing. So, some other terminology you'll sort of hear on, on, on as they're building or as the SD wan functions build their tunnels you'll hear an overlay and an underlay. So basically the underlay is the ISPs, right? The physical part of that. Right. And then the overlay is the actual tunnels that SD wan builds on top of the underlay. So they split it out into that particular, you know, terminology. So again, not to get too crazy into the weeds, but some of the g generic terms you'll hear when dealing with SD wan overlay and underlay are a big one controller, obviously the brains that, that's another big one. So just trying to. Piece, you know, some of this together. So, but yeah everything from a communication standpoint, whether you're going to the controller or to another actual S two RamBox it, it is all ip sec VPN tunnels. So, that's also you know, a big one there as well. So, Kyle, any questions with that or Alex any other questions?
Alex: 28:20
Well, you mentioned underlay and overlay and that was, those were terms I wanted to use earlier on, but I feel like some people, if they're not in this space, struggle with that concept cuz that is, especially for someone in networking who understands that's the easiest way to describe it really. And you mentioned IP sec and again, if people are in this space, might see a lot of similarities between like classic DMV VPNs and how these SD WANs function, at least underneath
Pat: 28:51
Yep.
Alex: 28:52
So I feel like a lot of this stuff, the SD WANs do that technology has been around for quite some time, but They've now made it much more accessible for people that are simply in it. I mean, you don't have to be some seasoned network engineer to support it. Now they've put a, you know, a fancy gooey and centralized it in one place, and now it's much more feasible for just about any organization to run it.
Pat: 29:17
Yep. Yep.
Alex: 29:19
But,
Pat: 29:20
and I think that's, that, that's a good point I think it, it facilitates a lot of things. Like you said the technology's been around there, been around the block for quite a bit. SD WAN just kind of, I think, puts a pretty coat of paint on it, and it makes it a little more, you know, a little more usable from a scalable, you know, perspective. So, and I don't know, Alex, I guess I'll get your your kind of take on this and, you know, maybe Kyle too. Do you think your company has to have a certain number of sites or a certain size to actually take to benefit from SD wan?
Alex: 29:56
Well, I'm not familiar with the SD WAN price models yet, so I don't know if there's much cost to entry. I would like to think, especially with SaaS models and some really cheap boxes that maybe that it's, you could make an argument to do it as soon as you have two or three sites that really need connectivity to each other. So I'm thinking, no, not really. It's probably still simpler to get an SD WAN solution than set up full mesh VPN n tunnels between three
Pat: 30:25
Or DMV P editor. Yeah.
Alex: 30:28
Certainly when you start talking about D VPNs and like failover solutions with that. Cuz then the failover solutions is the other thing too. Which really, if you're doing it classically with VPNs it starts getting really complicated. Like you have two ISPs and you don't own your own block and you have two different public IP addresses. Now you're several different tunnels and failure over dynamically. It starts, it just starts getting much more complicated. And then at that case, SD WAN is probably a much simpler solution. And if there's not a obvious financial drawback to, you know, like if, again, like the initial cost of just setting it up, if that's not there, yeah. I can't see a reason why you wouldn't consider it early on. But again, I'm not familiar with it, the. The companies that I've been with have either done it themselves at Evolve IP, or have been PlayStation in Disney, which you know, we're talking about scale. That obviously becomes
Pat: 31:28
Right.
Alex: 31:29
simpler to handle with an S D N solution.
Pat: 31:32
Yeah, I was kind of thinking that myself, like, you know, originally I thought, well, if you're kind of small, like I don't really see the point of like two or three sites doing SD wan. But again, if the money. Is not, if there's a low cost entry. Yeah. I wouldn't see why you wouldn't. But I'd be curious to see if anybody has any thoughts on that as like, is SD N meant for the larger enterprise because of its scale? You know, scaling abilities, right? I think that's probably one of its biggest pros is the you know, is the way to scale, right? So, you know, you're not necessarily, you know, there's no, you know, buy-in something from a vendor, having it shipped to an office, somebody configuring it and then reshipping it to wherever it needs to go, and then having somebody plug it in and blah, blah blah and all that. You know, we've all been there. Now with SD N you can basically, Ship it to wherever it's gonna go. Have somebody rack and stack plug it in, it calls home and it knows where to go. Right? That, that zero touch provisioning is also a large pro. Right. For that for the SDWAN stuff, and again, you can scale in a matter of, you know, you can spin these things up in a matter of minutes if you had everything ready to go, you know, from a template perspective before it actually got to where it's going. You know, had that template ready to go. Serial number boom, it plugs in, you know how plug however many legs you have in at these offices and off you go and it calls home and, you know, in a couple of minutes you're, you know, you got traffic flowing. So it's this whole mind shift from traditional legacy, you know, networking that we've, you know, we've all grown up on and loved, but it's it's definitely a shift in mindset and, you know, again, talking about the overlays, the underlays and all this terminology, right? Northbound southbound APIs and how it communicates with the controllers and all kinds of crazy stuff. It's some really it's a new day here in the networking world and it just feels like, it's some cool stuff and I'm I don't think it's done sort of growing up yet. I think that's the land's got some growing to do yet. But I definitely think it's heading in the right direction.
Alex: 33:42
Agreed.
Pat: 33:43
So, Kyle, anything for you? You're kind of out of the Estee Wan game, so,
Kyle: 33:47
Yeah. A little bit. So, I mean, I'm hearing a lot of things that sound really interesting. Pretty cool. I haven't had a lot of hands on. There any cons, pitfalls that you've kind of come across in the Estie WAN realm versus you know, I guess maybe the more traditional legacy style.
Pat: 34:06
yeah. At least for me, I think and some are better at this than others. A and again, I think that goes back to Alex with the pricing sort of nomenclature saying, okay, look like, you know, these vendors that, that have stuff out there, like they're expecting you to have X amount of sites, so it's cost. Beneficial then you can justify that cost. So that's probably one I would say, Hey, you know, it, you know, depending on your infrastructure you know, depending on where that price breakpoint is, it may or may not be a good fit for some folks. The other thing I found too is if you're pushing like templates, I think they're good and bad at the same time. Like I think templates are great for things that are standard across the board, right? Your NTP servers, your DNS servers, S N M P things of that, you know, banner messages, things of that nature. Stuff that doesn't change or shouldn't change, I should say, from site to site, no matter what site you're at, all that stuff should be the same a across the boards. The other part of the templates is if your environment isn't quite right, or I should say isn't quite. At a space where it can be templatized, you have to sort of do like a one-off for like you can't. The templates aren't aren't flexible enough if you have one or two sites that are just a little different than the other ones. Now the goal there is to get those two or three sites, whatever they are you know, those outliers into that template, right? Get them structured enough so they can fit in a template and everybody's cookie cutter, right? But if you do have that environment where those, that wonder two sites is quite different for whatever reason, it just has enough to just to be annoying, you know, it needs to do something that all the others don't. You have to create a whole new template for that and basically do the whole thing over and then change your template to fit that site. And then that can kind of get into where you get into like template sprawl, right? So you have like a bunch of templates and, but the whole idea is to get your environment, get it towards a spot where everyone can be fed from the same. Template. I think that's probably a con, but that's more of a management sort of, you know, con with that. I've worked with different SD WAN flavors that some are easier to kind of set up. Things like q o s things of that nature. Some are better to set up that than others. So if you're not in a if you're with a vendor that doesn't make that easy, that can kind of become a, you know, a little bit of a rabbit hole sort of thing. So, it just depends on, you know, various things. But, I think the, under the underlying SD WAN product itself or what it's, you know what it does at a nuts and bolts, no matter who slaps a vendor name on it. I think it's good. It just depends on these vendors that they have their quirks depending on, you know, how much they actually give you eyes under the covers. Right. Because I've had places like and I don't know if this is still the way or not, but like when I was doing the velo cloud Sdwan stuff, they gave you very little visual or I should say a very little peak under the covers as far as like what happens in the back end. So you basically had control of your front end sdwan boxes. It magically left that sdwan box and showed up at the SDWAN box in your data center. You had no visibility in between the actual SD WAN boxes. Like you didn't have any visibility in the actual fabric into the cloud, right into that SD WAN cloud. So that made it a little hard trying to figure out, you know, troubleshooting and things of that nature. Now, on the other hand, the Cisco stuff, the Vitello, they give you full visibility from underneath the covers. So that is fully customizable from front to back. So the other part of that is, yeah, you get the visibility, that's great, but if you're not like well-versed enough in it, it can be daunting to be like, okay, am I doing this right cuz I'm seeing now all the under the covers things right. That sort of thing. So it can be overwhelming to kind of learn that, you know, all that piece, all the way from A to Z.
Kyle: 38:13
Okay.
Alex: 38:15
Yeah, and I'll probably add. That vendor interoperability is probably quite a bit harder if you're talking about an Sdwan n solution. Cause you know, you can create an IP sec tunnel between a thousand different vendors. But trying to get a vitel to work with silver Peak or 40 Net or something like that,
Pat: 38:38
That's a good point.
Alex: 38:39
WAN solution is a whole different ballgame. So, I haven't run into it enough, so I'm sure there's solutions out there cuz I'm sure they've come across it. Like, if you acquire a new company and they have a thousand vitelli nodes and you're rocking and VMware Ello cloud, now there's gotta be some way you can integrate them. That would be my thought is vendor interoperability might be a bit more difficult and Probably a bit harder to move off a vendor, but it seems like most people tend to stick with one vendor anyway, so that's probably not a major deal breaker for a lot of people.
Pat: 39:12
Yeah, the only place I would think of where the vendor interoperability comes with is like a merger or an acquisition. Like you said, you know, if you're a, if you're a thousand, thousand shop Vitello and you Yeah, you buy a shop that has 48, like, you know, okay, what do you, yeah. How do you blend those two together? Right? So I think that's probably the, where they see the most, you know, hills, if you will, from a, from an interoperability, you know, perspective. But the other thing I was kind of talk thinking about too is, you know, like there are some security tools out there that they have that the Sdwan boxes are sort of, you know, now coming built in, if you will. You know, but like, what are the other security tools that you have to integrate with them? Like I think there's some shortfalls around that as far as trying to get it in the, you know, operate that sdwan box operating within your existing security stack, right? Or other sort of tools, right? So whether that's a scene tool or, you know, like a Splunk or, you know, things of that nature, like how does that all, you know, integrate as well? So there, there may be some, you know, maybe some pitfalls there. The visibility, right, that we talked about before, I mentioned a few minutes ago that that's a big one. As well, especially for the security side, right? You really don't have a whole lot of that, you know, visibility, you know, things of that nature. So, but yeah. Hey, who, yeah, who knows, maybe there's some they're developing some stuff and you know, that sort of gets gets better every day. So it's it's an interesting. You know, take on, it just depends on, you know, where we see it going in the next couple years. But I it's definitely here. It's a, it's an everyday thing. It's, you know, it's not just a fringe, Hey, larger corporations can't afford it cuz they're throwing money at it sort of thing. It's here for everybody, I think. And then I think it's got some really good some really good pros to it. Kyle, you got anything else?
Kyle: 40:59
That was that was what I had for
Pat: 41:00
Cool. Cool. So just some vendors I wanna throw out there for you know, we, we've been talking about like I said, VeloCloud Palo Alto has a, has their own sdwan now which Palo Altos are nice cuz they don't require a separate SD WAN box. It all works within their. Next Generation firewall. So if you have, if you're already on Palo Firewalls, it's just a, it's a plugin for their firewalls, which is kind of nice. Silver Peak is the I think Silver Peak was one of the first ones to the game. So they're always popular. And then Cisco Vitello you know, it's always a good one. So obviously Vitello was a standalone company and then Cisco came and bought them a few years ago, so now they just, they, you know, they basically called Cisco Vitello, so it's they slapped their name on it and off they go. I'm trying to think of what else. Like, some use cases,
Alex: 41:47
Val Cloud. Yeah.
Pat: 41:50
that'd be about it. Those are the big ones, at least.
Alex: 41:53
Yeah. And like you said, at this point it's kinda like streaming services. You got a few guys that kind of run the show, but everyone's doing it.
Pat: 42:03
Yep. Yep. So, just a couple of key takeaways from the SD WAN stuff. You know, that we kind of spewed out here in no, no particular order. But basically SD WAN is the, you know, it's a WAN technology with a virtualized, you know, again, here's that term overlay, right? It's basically abstracting the software, you know, from the hardware, right? So you're, again, taking the central, you're taking the brain off the actual individual box and putting it into a centralized location, right? Controller you know, that's the technical, you know, term for it. So, again network abstraction, right? Land virtualization, policy driven, centralized management, right? You can do all kinds of crazy policies with how you wanna do traffic, right? So, again, q o s is a big one. You know, with VoIP, obviously being around the last oh geez, seems like a billion years yeah, you gotta make sure that traffic is prioritized, things of that nature. You know, and it again, it scales, scales, scales very well from a, you know, both from a local perspective of, Hey, you wanna get a third leg in there, or if you can get a third I s p, great, you know, whatever. Or from a site perspective, right? You all of a sudden now you bought somebody and now they're, you know, they're, they got 50 sites across the states, you can get 'em on your wan tomorrow, right? You know, in a relatively, you know, short amount of time versus, you know, the old school way of, you know, configuring 50 different routers and sending 'em out and getting all that stuff you know, scheduled and all that kind of crazy stuff. So, You know, there, there's various ways to architect it, right? So it can be cloud-based. Most of them, most of the controllers, like I said, are cloud-based. Or you can do it on-prem you can technically do a cloud and an on-prem if you wanted to. But the way I've seen it done is amazing. Basically, the controller part, the brains part is all in the cloud. And those those boxes just point there to a p from a public IP perspective. So, you know, you're reducing CapEx, right? So, you know, hardware, things of that nature. There's no need of, there's really no need for specialized equipment, you know, anymore, that sort of thing. So, you know, it can terminate all kinds of different. Internet providers, you know, internet types, right? So again, your fibers or metro E or regular broadband wireless 5G for LT fi, 5G, wireless it's got stuff for all of it. So, and it's just a better way to simplify management, right? It's just you get better visibility with that. You could see, you know, again the big three that it, it looks at these legs, right? Or each I s P is packet loss, latency and jitter, right? So that's you know, it's constantly measuring those three things from each internet circuit and then makes its intelligent decision on where to send that packet or when it comes in, or which leg to send it over. So, at least in the Vitello world each. I'm gonna say each I s P has its own tunnel, so again, it makes, is, it makes connections to both the controller and other SDM boxes over IP sec. And then it makes a tunnel over each interface as well. Each provider gets a, gets an own its own isp, so it handles failover seamlessly. Like for example, if you have two ISPs going into an SDWAN box and one fails, the end user has no idea. The SD WAN automatically I don't know, it's a bundle. It, It's probably that's the simplest word for it. But it's basically taking those two ISPs and making it one big pipe. And then basically if the I S P goes down it then ju it. Senses that, and then doesn't, you know, it drops that from its table and the end user has no idea. So, and then when it comes back up, it just brings it back into the fold. And again, the end user has no idea. So failover is seamless. Not noticeable, which is always a big one. Cuz in the old days, right, the old land days you know, you're usually running some sort of internal like routing protocol. Over the popular one in NPLS land is bgp. So if you're running bgp, then just the nature of BGP and how slow it is till it fails and then until it, you know, till the timers run out and all this stuff, like, there's a hiccup there. People are gonna notice, right? With SD wan it's seamless. It, they have no idea. It fails over that quickly and it just basically takes that leg out of the SD wan fabric and keeps the other good legs in. So, like for example, I was at a place once that they had two ISPs. Into an SDWAN box, and then they did a 5G lte, or I should say whatever the wireless was, the L LTE e at the time. And then they had a policy in SDWAN to say, okay, look, use these two ISPs first, only use this LTE as an absolute failover. It's, if it's the only game in town, that's the only time you use it, right? So you can write policy that way as well to say, you knows kind of traffic shape and policy-based routing, things of that nature. So, you know, so that's the flexibility there, you know, you know, as well. So, or you know, I've been to places that have one I s P and an m ms MPLS link in there. And yeah, you basically route your phone traffic or web traffic over the pls and use the i p as a failover and all the other internet traffic. It just goes out the the I s P. So, you know, there's multiple ways to really, you know, benefit from that from that policy-based routing stuff. So, but yeah, I think the visibility, the simplified management really goes a long way with the SDWAN stuff, cuz it, you know, the reduced cost, right. You know, we just find cost savings all over with that. And then, like Alex said, there's less you know, less vendor lock-in. Right? You don't have to rely on a vendor all the way through to, you know, most people stick with one vendor, but you ne you don't necessarily have to, you can spread that out a little bit. You know, so that's interesting as well. So I'm curious to see where it goes from a security perspective. Like it, it has a firewall. Most of 'em have a firewall built into them and can give you that visibility of, you know, logs and things of that nature. But I think there's a lot more there to really tap into from a security perspective. don't know if Alex or Kyle have anything to kind add to that, but I'm curious to see where that goes in the next couple of years.
Alex: 48:03
I'm talking specifically about security.
Pat: 48:05
Yeah, just from a security perspective on the SD wa boxees say, you know, like, like they have them now, but you don't know how good they are, that sort of thing. Like, they're there, they get it. But, you know, I'm curious to see if, you know, if it can if it has any more beef when it comes to the security stuff like deep packet inspection or any of that kind of crazy stuff that some of the NextGen firewalls have today.
Alex: 48:27
Well, I'm sure it'll keep getting better and better. I mean, will it eventually replace a full on firewall? Maybe for like the rural small business that will be sufficient. I think it's much more likely that you'll just end up doing what Palo Alto is doing, which is you'll buy Palo Alto because you want a firewall and then utilize SD WAN as an add-on as opposed to firewall being the add-on to the SD WAN product.
Pat: 48:52
Right.
Alex: 48:53
And I'm kind of out of the out of touch with some of the more recent security technologies out there. And yeah, maybe, I don't know if anyone here talking with us today like you or like, I can't even think of his name. What was the guy that was just on our conversation like two weeks ago or three weeks ago. But maybe we should ask people like that what the next security feature will be and then I'll be curious if SD WIN is gonna support it.
Pat: 49:24
Yeah, that's an interesting take to see what that, I really like what Palo Alto's doing with the, there's no separate box for that then. So that's, you're spending less on
Alex: 49:32
Yeah,
Pat: 49:32
it's just a plugin.
Alex: 49:33
because I think generally, so anytime you're talking about security aisle, at least in my head, I'm thinking about deep inspection. And deep inspection is just so processor intensive and you feel like you need so much beef to do that, that's almost the opposite of what the SD WAN is trying to do, which is trying to be like a lightweight thing. And that's, yeah. That's why I think that it'll eventually, it'll become a limit to what these SD WAN devices can do, because that's not their immediate thought process, so,
Pat: 50:05
Yeah, no, it's a good it's a good point. And I, so just a selling point for Palo Alto. You know,
Alex: 50:11
Yeah.
Pat: 50:12
Yeah, again, you're not using, you know, you're not buying separate boxes. It's just a plugin for the Palo stuff. And Palo's app Id carries all the way through the Sdwan. So you see that app Id, you see that traffic all the way through their fabric, which is really nice. So it's really nice when it comes to troubleshooting and trying to find out, you know, who you know, who. What's eaten the packet and all this kind of stuff and you know, trying to track a lot of that traffic and whatnot. So again, you know, depending on vendor, you may, you know, once it leaves that SD wan edge, you may not see it until it comes to the other end. And if it never gets to the other end, then you don't know what's eating it inside the SD WAN fabric. So, pal, you know, Pao does a nice job of, you know, it's, it gives you visibility all the way through. And the their app ID feature follows it all the way through as well, keeps it intact, which is nice. So plus one for the boys over there at Palo. So, always a good always a good product from them. I've always had a good experience with Palo, so, Yeah, that was kind of it. That was kind of my spiel. I didn't wanna get too crazy. Technical, I mean, there's, you can certainly deep dive into Estee Wan for, you know, for days upon days, but just to, for those that may not be familiar with it, or maybe just getting into the field. I feel like Estee Wan was a good topic cuz it's everywhere, or at least you'd say it's a lot of places it's really starting to, you know, creep into more places. Like we said, you know, all sizes of business and things of that nature. So I feel like it was a good time to talk to the Sdwan stuff and and kind of give you the 50,000 foot view. But if you're looking for more, certainly like we said, VeloCloud, Palo Alto, silver Peak, Cisco Vitello, you take a couple flyers on those. I mean, just SD WAN as a. As a technology. It's, you know, it's agnostic to, you know, to all those couple of things I just mentioned, those vendors I just mentioned. If you wanna really learn how the nuts and bolts work you know, I'll post a couple links in the show notes if you wanna take a peek at those and see what you just really kind of dive in and, you know, roll your sleeves up and whatnot. So, but I thought it was a good topic and to give you a 50,000 foot view and I would assume those breaking in now they're gonna at least find you know, sdwan somewhere along their careers and, you know, quite early I would think. Cause it's here now to stay. It's not a fringe technology anymore. People are really kind of diving into this yeah. With both feet. So, Kyle, anything else from you or Alex.
Alex: 52:37
Well, I was going to close with something we often close with, and you already touched on it when we said security, and we talked about it a little bit earlier. But outside of security, is there anything else you see as like the future of SD wan?
Pat: 52:52
I would say the. Kind of adaptation into the hybrid cloud things. They're really, I think there's some cool things that they're doing now with some of their onboarding and like multi-cloud things of that nature. I know with the Cisco stuff they call it on-ramp. So basically you're, if you're in the multi-cloud game, right? The, if you're in a AWS and Azure, right? So, Cisco does they call it Cloud OnRamp. And basically it's just a, it's like we had it we actually had it already spun up in the cloud. I took a flyer on it, like I saw it later after the, after all the hard part was done. But basically what they do is if you want to do an on-ramp a cloud on-ramp, it basically builds the whole thing for you. All you basically do is tie your cloud ID if you will the tenant IDs and things of that nature to your vitello controller. And basically then Vitello goes out and It builds the networks and everything right around it. And you don't really have to do anything. It builds it all right from a push of a button. They do it via like a workflow, right? So it's just boom, you know, spinning up the vnet, carving out a subnet, spinning up the VM that's gonna support the sdwan box. Boom. You know, and it's, you know, it's done. So, I probably should have looked at that a little earlier. I did. I did it the hard way and spun it up myself manually. But it's just me being sort of a rookie when it comes to some of the cloud stuff. I'm probably at this point working harder, not smarter, but, you know, hopefully someday that may change. So I don't know. But Yeah, they basically make that on-ramp process real easy. And then if you're working in multiple clouds, they have a hook in, somewhere in the backend. It's still kind of fuzzy to me, but somewhere in the backend, they basically can hook the two. say say if I was an AWS and Azure you know, and you spun up a, an SD RamBox in both there's somewhere on the back end where it's, they can sort of blend those two clouds together and fail over and all kinds of crazy stuff. So I, I see some cloud stuff really kind of taken off with the with the sdwan stuff. So curious to see what that looks like in the next couple of years and how they sort of really integrate that more and get that visibility across, especially across multi-cloud. Cause I think a lot of people are looking at multi-cloud now. So I think again, that, that's that vendor interoperability that we talked about a little bit ago. Like, how do you make Azure work with AWS and vice versa. And so I think some of them are sort of bringing everybody to the table and, you know, kind of being the peacemaker there. So curious to see how that goes.
Alex: 55:25
Yeah. Okay. Let's see if there's anything else. Well, it's a common theme just about anytime we have any technology, we'll talk about machine learning and ai. Cuz you kind of go back to one of the fundamental things that we talked about that Sdwan could do is it can intelligently route traffic over different connections that you have. So the simplest example we can give people is probably talking about voice, which is really jitter dependent, like high jitter not good for voice. So if it sees a low jitter path, you know, SD WANs today can move traffic over intelligently to maybe a path that has less jitter. But I'm sure that'll just continue to get much more advanced to the point where it's gonna any application and not something that's just specifically voice. It's any application it's gonna have much more information and just be able to better route traffic across the links that are better suited for application X, y, Z for whatever reason that may be. So I'm sure that'll just continue to evolve and. And I don't deal with SDN all the time. So I know when I was dealing with a lot, that was very manual process and it's probably much, so much less so the case today. And by manual process, I mean getting like specific applications to go over certain links. So just to where that gets to the point where it's just automatically doing that intelligently. It'd be interesting to see where that goes. The only anything else would probably be interested to see automation when it comes to SD win. You touched on it a little bit, how to, it could automatically deploy an environment, but similar kind of concept where it can, it, can it control or automatically deploy itself in another cloud region to accommodate your already existing automation strategy, which might be spin up x amount of boxes if we need it, but. Now there's an SD WAN component to it also, cuz you need to have to touch base with the data center that you have. So, piecing SD WAN into this just broader automation that everyone's trying to do, be interesting to see what they can accomplish with that.
Pat: 57:43
Yeah, I think a lot of automation is already sort of here. And I'll kind of touch on a little bit. It's not Sdwan, but it's that software defined networking and that it's in the same family. Cisco's DNA center right, is a big one with that as well. Again, very, you know, gooey driven, template driven, all your switches are the same, you know, things of that nature. And they give you a spot where you can, you know you can basically run scripts and push 'em down and all kinds of stuff. And, you know, again, the automation and the workflows and sort of how they have that, you know, there. So, you know, DNA center's doing a lot of that already, and I'm sure Estee Wan is not that far behind with a lot of that. You know, the automation stuff, the Python scripts, Ansibles again, all North and southbound you know, API stuff and you know, getting Intel from your boxes on, you know, depending on whether you, how you wanna do it, you know, most popular by api you know, things of that nature. So yeah, I'm curious to see how that rolls over the next couple of years as well as you know, some of the automation stuff and taking the taking the intelligence game one step one or two steps further. So Kyle, anything else from you otherwise? We'll we'll get outta here and we're right around that hour mark, so it's always good.
Kyle: 58:56
No, that's pretty that covers it pretty much for me. I'm the newbie here, so I'm I'm learning a lot right on the, on
Pat: 59:02
So, so what you're saying is you're gonna go to your boss tomorrow and be like, yo, we need Estee Wan. Like today.
Kyle: 59:08
Most certainly.
Pat: 59:09
Be like, I got a guy. Well, that's awesome. So, all right buddy. Thanks for joining this week. We will wrap it up here for you on this I thought it was a good episode on SD wan. So it's everybody's got any questions certainly hit us up. We like helping y'all out and making the picture a little clearer so everybody's got any questions. Certainly let us know. We're all over social media. Everybody can find our stuff in the show notes. All of our socials are there. So yeah, there's multiple ways to get ahold of us. So, obviously make sure you visit our website, breakingbytespod.io. can subscribe to the show right from there on multiple platforms. Or if you just need an RSS feed that's there as well. So you'll never miss a show Nosa rating on the Apple Podcast. That would be great if you still simply tell a friend too. That's always good word of mouth works just as well these days. So, again, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook there's a Discord server out there. The surveys still hanging out there. All of that stuff's in the show notes. I'll put a couple of links that we talked about SD WAN stuff today. I'll put that in the show notes there as well. And that's it boys. Another good episode and we'll, Alex, you got a guest next week. I think we got somebody coming on. An old friend of ours, if I'm not mistaken.
Alex: 1:00:22
Yeah. Like we've said before, it comes up a lot, but another conversation on AI machine learning. I'm sure chat G P t will be mentioned, but it's the most interesting thing out there, so why
Pat: 1:00:35
that That it is. All right. So we're not gonna tell you his name but so you gotta tune in for that. So, tune in next week for some cool AI discussions with our a good buddy of ours that Alex and I used to work with. That seems to be a theme here at the show. We're just bringing everybody back and it's all good. So, all right, buddy. We'll see you next week. Thanks.