Engine, engine, 99.99
On the SLA and Uptime Line
This time go from CLI to AI with VibeOps 🤖; BGP for Enterprise Connectivity in the Cloud ☁️; let go of the Certs, not your skills 🧐; where do Senior Engineers come from a decade from now ⌛️; what Network Engineers need to know about AI traffic patterns 🚦; detect region hopping with just DNS 🌏; what Microsoft learned from building an MCP Server 🎓; the shape of Leadership is kinda a “V” 🕊️ and AI just hacked one of the world’s most secure OS 😱. Let’s dive in; ⬇️
Poll 🗳️
Are we covering the NetDevOps and Network Engineering content you want to see? Vote now to shape the Reload in 10 Newsletter to be more relevant to you:
Build AI Agents for Network Operations
📆 Online Event | April 30th | Use code “RELOAD30” for 30% off
Network Engineers are tired of AI tools that quit before real deployment.
This workshop does not. You will build a working AI agent from scratch - connected to actual infrastructure, not a mock CLI - and walk away with code you can take back to your environment the same week.
👉 Use code “RELOAD30” for 30% off
Worth three hours of your time.
NetEng 🔧
From the CLI to Natural Language: A Network Engineer’s Case for VibeOps from the legend that is John Capobianco (yes, we Ctrl+C then Ctrl+V’d his name, spelling is hard) takes you through what VibeOps will mean for Networking, and it’s giving us excitations (Good, Good, Good, Good Vibr…) 🎶
BGP for Enterprise Cloud Connectivity goes into a lot of detail, and example configs, of making BGP work with the Cloud; we enjoyed the not-so-subtle dig at BT and yes, setting a really small Prefix Limit without telling your Customers it changes on each PE is completely naff 🔥
Letting the Badges Expire, Keeping the Bar High posits a different approach to playing the certification rat race, which involves a lot less swearing upfront, but might pay off in the long run that is your career 🏃♂️
RPKI Didn’t Fix Routing that’s still on you to do, but here’s some ideas on how to RPL your way out of tricky situations 💡
The Talent Pipeline AI Is Destroying: Where Do Senior Network Engineers Come From in 10 Years? certainly not from the way we all came through the ranks, it’s gonna be a RoCE Road for everyone (mmm, tasty AI frames) 🍪
Summary of proposed changes to 6 GHz Wi-Fi in the UK has a handy graph of the proposals Ofcom are discussing about spectrum band allocation for the next Wi-Fi 📡
The coming talent void in network engineering is ironically written by AI, but has some good points as to what might happen in the industry… or not, time will tell ⏰
What Every Network Professional Needs to Know About AI Traffic Patterns delves into the AI Backend Network and has a handy guide to stuff like the NCCL stack, common GPU operations and an equivalent to BUM traffic in the AI world (but without the silly name, shame) 💨
The Backhoe Checkmate: Why Dual Homing is a Scheduled Outage is a good reminder for us all that KMZs are a thing, and the only real diversity you have is physical path diversity; everything else is just lies and slander ☯️
How a Telecom Operator Detects Netflix Region Hopping Using Nothing But DNS challenges any assumptions you had about VPN’ing via Turkey for that cheaper YouTube subscription 🇹🇷
Book Club 📚
AI Networking Cookbook by Eric Chou
Full Stack Network Automation by Shahzad Qadir
DDoS: Understanding Real-Life Attacks and Mitigation Strategies by Stefan Behte
Network Engineer Toolkit - 22 Production Templates for ISP & Data Center Engineers
Training 🎓
🏦 Cisco U CE Credits
💡 Re-certify your CCNA (40 CE Credits) or CCNP (80 CE Credits) with these free Cisco U courses using Continuing Education (CE) credits:
Cisco AI Technical Practitioner (AITECH)
(Course, 8 CE Credits, 15h 30m)Cisco AI Business Practitioner (AIBIZ)
(Course, 8 CE Credits, 16h 30m)Understanding Cisco Network Automation Essentials (DEVNAE)
(Course, 16 CE Credits, 29h)Advanced Automation with Cisco Modeling Labs (CMLAPI)
(Course, 8 CE Credits, 8h)Introduction to Network Simulations with Cisco Modeling Labs (CMLLAB)
(Course, 6 CE Credits, 8h 30m)Administering Cisco Modeling Labs (CMLADM)
(Course, 5 CE Credits, 4h 30m)
🪚 Tools
Arista HUD - Purely a POC
(o11y, Network Management, Proof of Concept)iperf3 Multi-Stream Traffic Tool
(Benchmarking, iPerf, GitHub)HAM - Hardware Asset Manager
(Lifecycle, Tracking, GitHub)Minute - AI note-taking app for Obsidian
(Meeting Notes, Self-hosted, GitHub)
🎓 Learning
Don’t Build Agents, Build Skills Instead
(Video, 15 mins, AI)HFT Network Lab
(Tutorial, 5 hours, Interview Prep.)Everything I Learned Sitting in Billion-Dollar Boardrooms
(Video, 20 mins, Career Skills)The Future Of Work (& The New High-Income Skill Stack)
(Video, 30 mins, Side Hustles)
Hiring 💼
📢 The Reload in 10 Jobs Board is here 🥳, with a hand-picked selection of awesome Network Engineering, NetDevOps and Network Automation jobs.
It’s also free to list a job if you’re hiring and want to let us know 👂
🔥 (just some of) This week’s Hot Hirings
🇦🇺 Network Engineer @ Australian Securities Exchange, Australia, Sydney
🇧🇬 Senior Network Engineer @ Man Group, Bulgaria, Sofia
🇩🇪 Cloud Network Engineer @ Hannover Re, Germany, Hanover
🇮🇳 Senior Network Engineer @ Twilio, India, Remote
🇮🇪 Senior Network Engineer @ Mastercard, Ireland, Dublin
🇬🇧 Global Network Manager @ Merlin Entertainments, UK, London
🇬🇧 NetDevOps Engineer @ Deutsche Bank, UK, Birmingham
🇺🇸 Principal Staff Cloud Network Engineer @ Oracle, USA, Austin, TX
🇺🇸 Network Engineer @ Akuna Capital, USA, Chicago, IL
…and over 280 more jobs at the Reload in 10 Network Engineer Jobs Board
NotEng 🤔
Fiber Optic Cables Turned Into Hidden Microphones to Secretly Spy on Your Conversations which is going to be interesting when you tell your ISP you’d rather they left you on the old copper instead 🥫
Everyone Is Talking About AI Side Hustles - But Nobody Mentions This because downtime is important for your uptime; Patching Schedules are as much for humans as they are for Networks 🧘
100 Jumps starts out as just a quick game, and then before you know it you’re still sat on the toilet about 12 hours later than you should have pulled your pants up already 🚽
Why I Still Build a Lab After 20 Years in IT may be food for thought for those of you not as “on the tools” as you used to be; there’s no time like the present to get messing with gear already ⚙️
How to coach your team (without making them defensive) starts with honest feedback, but ends with actually following-up on what this means for them, how to help and actually caring what happens next 🤔
What Microsoft Learned Building an MCP Server and now you can learn for free without going through (too much) of that pain 💪
The Mythical Agent-Month challenges the idea that AI Agents can do your bidding for you while you sleep, but gives enough optimism that there might be some hope in off-hours work yet 🦿
The Path to Automated TLS - Part 3 Automated Certificates with Cert-Manager is interesting reading for all the other places you could kill off self-signed Certs for good (cough pesky WLCs cough) 🔐
The shovelware cometh suggests that everyone is gonna be a SaaS provider by the end of next Tuesday, hey wonder if there’s a SaaS to help code that…. 🧑💻
The Shape of Leadership is more triangle-shaped than you might think 🕊️
Events 📅
🤜 Meet-ups
NetLdn, London, Monthly, Every 2nd Thursday
NetMcr, Manchester, Every Monthly, 2nd Thursday
NetBCN, Barcelona, See schedule
Network Automation Community Exchange, London, 21 April 2026
NL Network Automation Meetup, Amsterdam, 13 May 2026
CPH Network Meetup, Copenhagen, 2 October 2026
📢 Conferences
🎩 Hat-tip to the wonderful Pete Crocker @ OpsMill for the help
TORNOG, Toronto, 13 April 2026
FutureNet World 2026, London, 21 - 22 April 2026
SwiNOG, Geneva, 28 April 2026
AI Networking Summit, Dallas, 13 - 14 May 2026
RIPE 92, Edinburgh, 18 - 22 May 2026
Cisco Live USA, Las Vegas, 31 May - 4 June 2026
AutoCon 5, Munich, 8 - 12 June 2026
NetUK 3, London, 6 - 7 July 2026
AusNOG 2026, Brisbane, 3 - 4 September 2026
BalticNOG 2026, Riga, 23 - 24 September 2026
AI Networking Summit, New York, 28 - 29 October, 2026
Cisco Live APJC, Melbourne, 9 - 12 November 2026
Industry 🏭
AI Just Hacked One Of The World’s Most Secure Operating Systems and it’s not that one it’s that other one that’s got the acronym you know of, but don’t know what stands for 🤔
New fibre-optic record allows 50,000,000 movies to be streamed at once but who’s got the attention span these days to even stream half of…. wait, what were we talking about again? 🍿
Japanese firm develops optical fiber with 4x traffic capacity, could be used for undersea cables — MCF retains the same diameter and works with existing infrastructure meaning the core doesn’t have to change too much to whack more fibre pairs in, pretty cool 🥛
Subsea Cable Break Knocks Out Broadband and Mobile for Part of Orkney may also be a good education to where those isles are in the relation to everything else 🗺️
Networking and eBPF Predictions for 2026 and Beyond has some thoughts you might like to read about where the ubiquitous ACL-on-steroids technology is going next 🏋️
That’s all for this week, but if you have any tip-offs, blogs, events or job posts you’d like us to feature then please feel free to let us know at newsletter@reloadin.net 📮 and we’ll see if we can add them in 💬.