It’s time for Eyvonne, Tom, and Russ to talk about some current stories in the world of networking—the May roundtable. Yes, I know it’s already June, and I’m a day late, but … This month we talk about the IT worker shortage, Infiniband, and the “next big thing.”

So draw up a place to sit and hang out with us as we chat.

What has been happening in the world of network automation—and more to the point, what is coming in the future? Josh Stephens from Backbox joins Tom Ammon, Eyvonne Sharp, and Russ White to discuss the current and future network operations and automation landscape.

SONiC is a long-standing open source network operating system. While it cannot (quite) compete with a full-blown commercial network operating system, SONiC+FR/R can solve a lot of the problems network operators face today. Mike V Dvorkin joins Tom Ammon and Russ White to talk about the current state and future of SONiC.

The Internet of Things is still “out there”—operators and individuals are deploying millions of Internet connected devices every year. IoT, however, poses some serious security challenges. Devices can be taken over as botnets for DDoS attacks, attackers can take over appliances, etc. While previous security attempts have all focused on increasing password security and keeping things updated, Kathleen Nichols is working on a new solution—defined trust transport in limited domains.

Join us on for this episode of the Hedge with Kathleen to talk about the problems of trusted transport, the work she’s putting in to finding solutions, and potential use cases beyond IoT.

On this episode of the Hedge, Mike Dvorkin joins Russ White to talk about the cloud, tradeoffs, rethinking the cloud value proposition, and the road to becoming an architect. A key point—it is harder to fix hardware in production than it is to fix software in production.

It’s time for the April Hedge roundtable! This month Eyvonne, Russ, and Tom are talking about OpenAI, the hype around AI, the “pause letter” and the lack of a real conversation, and the rising costs of building and operating a data center. As always, let us know if you have topics you’d like to hear us talk about, or guests you’d like to hear.