This week we take notes on Flow Control in high speed networks 🚰; use NAT on OCI Network Firewall 🔥; learn where BFD helps and hurts 💊; get an overview of Packet Flow through the NIC ⏳; earn 59 free Cisco CE Credits 🤑; spot Base64 encoded JSON like it was in human 🧐; communicate like a Senior with context 🙂↕️ and don’t review Vibe Code in the same way as other code 🧑💻. Let’s dive in; ⬇️
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NetEng 🔧
Notes on Flow Control for High Speed Networks covers PFC, Flow Control in general and goes into a lot of detail on the subject of building lossless fabrics for protocols like RDMA 🥽
NAT on OCI Network Firewall explains the feature for Oracle Cloud’s Firewall offering, how it works, gotchas to avoid, and how to get logging information out of it 🪵
The AI Revolution we didn’t see coming: why Network Automation is about to change forever comes out of AutoCon3 and has some thoughts about what technology like MCP means for those of you in Network Automation roles 🧐
Ultra Ethernet 1.0 Specification: A High-Level Overview gives just enough background on what UE is (and what it isn’t), why it’s probably going to dominate many AI Fabrics, and what you can do to get up to (ultra) speed ⤴️
How BFD Can Help Your Network (and Where It Might Hurt) is often a best mate to BGP, and if you played Quake in your youth, one letter away from being a big freaking gun 🔫
Limitations of Simulated and Emulated Labs discusses when Digital Twins are great, and when they’re not so good; sometimes you really need to lab the actual gear to get the idea ⚙️
Overview of Packet Flow through the NIC goes into the mechanics of the Network Interface Card, what this means for SmartNICs and DPDUs and might unlock an acronym or two you’ve never fully understood 🥁
Videos, Tools and Papers 🎓⚒️
🏦 Cisco U - Free CE Credits
💡 Re-certify your CCNA or CCNP with these free Cisco U courses.
Cisco U: Introduction to Network Simulations with CML (CMLLAB)
(Course, 6 CE Credits, 8h 30m)Cisco U: Understanding Cisco Network Automation Essentials (DEVNAE)
(Course, 16 CE Credits, 28h 40m)Cisco U: Managing Cisco Network Operating Systems (CNIOS)
(Course, 37 CE Credits, 37h 15m)
🎓 Free Network Engineer Learning
SwiNOG#40 - Network Automation with Infrahub and Terraform
(Video, 20 mins, NetDevOps)The Prompt Report: A Systematic Survey of Prompt Engineering Techniques
(Paper, GenAI, Prompt Engineering)IPv6 Address Planner is a command-line tool to generate hierarchical IPv6 space
(Tool, GitHub, IPv6)Cisco Meraki Training - Masterclass
(Video, 3 hours, Cisco Meraki)
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 👂
🔥 This week’s Hot Hirings
🇬🇧 Software Developer (Python) @ OpsMill, UK, Remote
🇮🇳 Senior Network Reliability Engineer @ Oracle, India, Remote
🇮🇪 Senior Network Engineer @ Google, Ireland, Dublin
🇬🇧 Network Engineering Lead @ Lloyds Banking Group, UK, Manchester
🇬🇧 Network Engineer @ nscale, UK, London
🇬🇧 Senior Network Engineer @ G-Research, UK, London
🇬🇧 Network Engineer @ LMAX Group, UK, London
🇺🇸 Senior Staff Core Network Engineer SRE @ Google, USA, CA
🇺🇸 Avionics Network Integration Engineer @ Blue Origin, USA, WA
NotEng 🤔
Genie 3: A new frontier for world models shows AI coming for something we didn’t expect; the Unreal Engine, and virtual worlds 🌎
You can spot base64 encoded JSON, certificates, and private keys and it isn’t just the double-equals that gives it away; Base64 is a language like any other, bonjour! 🇫🇷
4 Useful Japanese Concepts You Need to Know especially when you learn much of ITSM, ITIL, Agile and the like actually have their roots in manufacturing plants and factories 🏭
Communicate like a Senior: Add the (right) context because it turns out it’s not just LLM prompts that benefit from added context, people can do with as much of it as possible as well 💡
Bye-Bye Kafka bids the service bus farewall and discusses some other alternatives you might want to consider for your o11y and logging needs 👋
Effectiveness of AI Coding Techniques: Input & Context builds on the idea of context but challenges some traditional ideas and prompt techniques 🥾
Vibe code isn’t meant to be reviewed so why would you apply human-led approaches like PR Code Reviews, merging or other techniques which weren’t designed for mass-scale code shipping 🚢
Events 📅
🤜 Meet-ups
NetLdn, London, Monthly, Every 2nd Thursday
NetMcr, Manchester, Every Monthly, 2nd Thursday
NetBCN, Barcelona, See schedule
📢 Conferences
🎩 Hat-tip to the wonderful Pete Crocker @ OpsMill for the help
FrOSCon, Sankt Augustin, 16 - 17 August 2025
AfPIF African Peering Forum, Lagos, 19 - 21 August 2025
Open Source Summit, Amsterdam, 25 - 27 August 2025
AusNOG 2025, Melbourne, 3 - 4 September 2025
European Peering Forum, Bucharest, 15 - 17 September 2025
Cambridge Tech Week, Cambridge, 15 - 19 September 2025
FutureNet Asia, Singapore, 16 - 17 September 2025
Juniper AI-Native NOW, Copenhagen, 23 September 2025
Enterprise Tech Leadership Summit, Las Vegas, 23 - 25 September 2025
BalticNOG 2025, Vilnius, 24 - 25 September 2025
NLNOG, Amsterdam, 30 September 2025
DTX London, London, 1 - 2 October 2025
Network X, Paris, 14 - 16 October 2025
OpenInfra Summit Europe, Paris, 17 - 19 October 2025
RIPE 91, Bucharest, 20 - 24 October, 2025
ESNOG, Barcelona, 30 - 31 October 2025
DENOG 17, Essen, 9 - 11 November 2025
EMEA Arista Cloud Builders, Munich, 13 November 2025
AutoCon 4, Austin, 17 - 21 November 2025
CoNEXT 2025, Hong Kong, 1 - 4 December 2025
Industry 🏭
The plan to make all networks optical is about to take two big steps forward involving NTT, Hitachi and super fast fibre over a long distance 🗺️
Reducing double spend latency from 40 ms to < 1 ms on privacy proxy is an impressive feat by Cloudflare on a common network bottleneck 🍾
AI is doing job interviews now - but candidates say they’d rather risk staying unemployed than talk to another robot, and who can blame them; it was bad enough in the day of having to do a fawning Cover Letter to go with your CV, now you’ve got to smal talk the chatbot too 🤖
Today’s Distributed Hybrid AI requires investments in AI Fabrics, DCI/WAN, and Security and apparently could be worth $100 billion a year by the end of the decade 💰
Arista Networks (ANET) Q2 Revenue Surges To US$2.2 Billion which is certainly gunning for the big Cisco guerilla in the room at some pace 🎚️
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 💬.