The biggest challenges that most of us networking people have are around velocity (how fast we can build and scale networks) and how effectively we can operate them (avoid defects, fix them fast when something breaks).

LLMs are great in both areas. AI helps with deployment challenges by speeding up tooling development and the creation of workflows on orchestration platforms. A manual process step today, say - reserving an IP address in an IP DB — is automated the next day instead of on a backlog for years. This post is an example of that (config-gen/config-deploy).

Operations use-cases are more interesting, IMO, and address the “too many signals” problems that we face. Network substrate telemetry, overlay telemetry, service host metrics, service metrics, customer metrics, recent change data, prior alarms - the list goes on. Being a network operator is not for the faint of heart and is under-mentioned on high stress job lists. AI makes AMAZINGLY good network operations triage agents, since they are able to immediately process so many signals.

Exciting times!

I also re-investigated containerization - weighing Docker Swarm vs K3s - and settled on Docker Swarm.

I’ve hated it ever since. Swarm is a PITA to use and has all kinds of failure modes that are different than regular old Docker Compose.

I’ve considered migrating again - either to Kubernetes, or just back to plain Docker - but haven’t done it. Maybe I should look at Uncloud?

My first website was a geocities site back in ~1999, which was dedicated to StarCraft. I wish I could find it now; I remember it being really aesthetically pleasing - it would be funny to see how it held up.

It’s never good when your primary ISP’s only connection out to the world is via satellite

* 2018: $99 to $119

* 2022: $119 to $139

We should expect a price hike from $139 to $159 in 2026, assuming the trend continues.

If it’s before, then you can easily tie consciousness and free will together. If not, we are effectively watching videos of our bodies operate. Oh - and there is no spoon.

I look at it in a similar light to nutritional guidelines.

For most large businesses, 90%+ of major network events are caused by internally-driven network config changes.

Depending on how far along the business is towards automation, a proportion of the 90% can be attributed to a human going “off script” - I.e.: making a change that had not been reviewed.

My biggest/only concern - which they gloss over, mostly — is security. Combining networks puts added responsibility on every family that joins. What if friend-X’s kid downloads a virus-riddled torrent, which is capable of multiplying across hosts?

Your own hosts/perimeter can always be protected, but there’s a loss of control with this setup.