Alex Perkins is a Senior Network Engineer at Presidio Federal. Co-host of the Cables to Cloud podcast and AWS Community Builder, alex has a wealth of experience architecting, automating and securing data center fabrics and hybrid multi-cloud networks at scale.

William: 0:29

Welcome to another episode of the Cloud Gambit. So today I have Alex Perkins, who has been on the show before. Actually, the last time we were together we recorded in person at the legendary she shed of none other than Yvonne Sharp out in the hills of Kentucky. Welcome on, my friend. Do you want to give yourself a proper introduction?

Alex: 0:56

Yeah, thanks for having me, William. This is awesome. I know we've been trying to make this happen for a little bit and, like you said, recording in the she shed was a once in a lifetime experience. I'll say it's pretty awesome. Yeah, so I'm Alex Perkins. I'm a senior network engineer at a VAR called Presidio Federal, so I work on, you know, government and federal agency networking and hybrid cloud stuff, and then I'm also a co-host of the Cables to Clouds podcast, which you have been on multiple times, and I'm a AWS community builder, and you know just like to hang out all over various places throughout our little industry.

William: 1:45

Right on, isn't it pretty cool? I don't really talk about it as much as I should, but that AWS Community Builders program is pretty neat. There's a lot of cool perks that you get for being part of it. What do you think so far, because you're about a year in.

Alex: 2:01

I think, yeah, I just got my two-year renewal, um, so it's, it's been awesome. Man, the um, the slack community is insane. Like the slack one channel that you get access to is so big, um, you know, I've I've been, uh, I was a cisco champion for a couple years, um, and there was a community there as well. That's, that's large. But the community builder thing is just crazy. Like there's just so much stuff and you get so many benefits. You get like a swag bag every year, you get credits, you know, towards your account. Like there's a lot, of, a lot of really cool stuff.

William: 2:37

Yeah, I've met so many, so many great people and, you know, through that slack and through the community builders and it's bleeded over even to professional in some cases. I I met someone earlier on. His name was Jude Quintana. He wasn't actually part of the community builders at that point, but I sort of like pushed and prodded him to submit an application. But one time I was doing some really janky stuff with terraform, like doing stuff that, like you, typically wouldn't do, like pushing it way beyond what it was supposed to be doing, and but it was for something that was relatively important and he had done something kind of similar on a blog, and so I reached out. I'm like, hey, you want to talk? This is kind of what I'm going through. You know, if you, I'm big on favors, if you do a favor for me, I will be there for you when you need a favor, vice versa.

William: 3:35

So he, you know, we got on, we looked at it and he helped me out. Um, and it was, it was awesome, and that's what community is all about.

Alex: 3:43

He's in the. Is it the Infrastructure as Code Slack? Yeah?

Intro: 3:48

Right yeah.

Alex: 3:49

Because I remember his name. When you said his name, I was like I know that name for sure.

William: 3:54

He has a great blog too. He's got a lot of good writing. You'll have to let him know. We're propping him up here, so yeah.

Alex: 4:09

How's the summer going so far, by the way? Oh, the summer, uh, it's good, man. Um, it's been beautiful out here. Um, you know, I I moved to outside of ashville, north carolina, a couple years ago and out in the mountains, which I I love um, the weather is just perfect. It's like 80 degrees in the summer. Um, it's really humid, but it's it's just gorgeous, man. I like 80 degrees in the summer. It's really humid, but it's just gorgeous man, I love going out in the mountains, it's been lots of fun.

William: 4:31

Yeah, that's awesome just being there. Do you have any travel plans, or you're already kind of in paradise, so why travel? Yeah, it's funny.

Alex: 4:38

We went to the beach last year for a family vacation and we got home and we were like, oh the mountains, like it's just so nice to be back. I'm just not a beach person.

William: 4:48

I know lots of people are, but I I just enjoy the mountains I do like the beaches whenever I get, so usually if I've like worked a ton and we're like going to the beach, I'll just set up a chair and either read like a book, listen to an audio book, just pass out in the sun and there's something about the the sun and just sleeping in the sun. You just got to be careful. You don't want to fall asleep for hours and not put on any suntan stuff, yeah, but yeah, yeah for sure, and I'm.

Alex: 5:17

I'm originally from new hampshire, so northeast you know. I'm grew up like outside, so I I definitely am happy to be back in my, my element right on.

William: 5:28

So I guess let's get on with the technical stuff. So for the, for the audience, in my opinion, there are none people out there that exist in tech that keep track of like news, like updates, trends, like better than alex perkins probably ever, and we're constantly sharing stuff back and forth. It's been great. Um, I thought for this episode we could kind of go over some some of the good and bad in the news. Um, lately, you know things that really stood out and, you know, finished with a fun game which Alex knows nothing about yet. So, yeah, well, I'll explain that later. So, I guess, to start things off, you know cybersecurity. So, and, by the way, each of these is going to correspond to some news article and I will have those in the show notes so you can go and read it yourself and come to your own conclusion.

William: 6:24

So, first things first, cybersecurity. The article was titled Pupils, miss Classes at School Cyber Attacks Rise. From the BBC. This is EMEA. So sourcing new figures from the Information Commissioner's Office shows that 347 cyber incidents were reported in the education and child care sector in 2023, which is an increase of 55% on 2022. And this impacted childhood education in the form of temporary closures and weeks of disruption in some cases, and sometimes these cyber attacks actually occurred within days of each other and, since this is EMEA, these companies have to report breaches inside of 72 hours of discovery. What are your thoughts here, alex?

Alex: 7:26

That so much. I mean 347. I mean that's almost like one a day, right, like that's in school isn't even year-round. So I just this. This article was nuts because, um, one one of the examples was a kid that was talking about how he he can't even his assignments due from two months ago that he hasn't even been able to access because the application that they use just isn't even available. You know that it's crazy. I wish there was more focus on how this kind of stuff impacts young kids in school and what it's what it's doing to them and like maybe having alternatives, right, like coming up with different plans and and having backups for things. If it's this common like that, if something needs to happen, somebody should be planning out what to do when it does happen yeah, I mean, is it like going back to books?

William: 8:19

is it fail safe? Right, because, hey, you can't hack a book. You know, I hate, I hate to sound that way like going back to. You know, a lot of folks would say that's the stone age. But that you're, you're learning when you're young. You're, you're a sponge, you have those precious years where you're, you're taking in so much and then you know, just, we've seen it with covid and the impacts you know on the you know education of our children during covid and how that played out. Yeah, it really sets you behind, really behind, at a time where you shouldn't be set behind. It shouldn't be. You know something that you as a child, have to worry about and then pay for later on.

Alex: 9:02

Yeah, absolutely, and there's benefits, of course. Benefits, of course, to you know, having curriculum digitally, but you got to have a backup plan or there is no benefit. So definitely something to think about yeah, stay away from the kids.

William: 9:18

If there's any hackers, any bad actors out there listening, you know, attack the adults.

William: 9:23

Stay away from the children, come on grow up yeah, so, and you know, with the, the trend of cyber security things, um, ciocom, yeah, ciocom, there was an article um critical infrastructure cyber incident reporting rule. Um, and this is regarding this. You know, you can call it that or we can call it uh, circia, circia, um, this is a big one. This is usa um. So, in line with kind of what we just talked about in amia, the gdpr, uh, forcing disclosure of um and, you know, ransomware incidents.

William: 10:04

This pertains to the US. It was passed in March 2022. And it sets, you know, a requirement for the cybersecurity and infrastructure Circia to basically develop and publish rules for companies that provide critical infrastructure, and they have to report cybersecurity incidents inside of 72 hours. And what was the ransomware? 24. 24 hours, yeah, so I guess kind of the gist of it is you know, this rule in the US is going to apply to various critical areas like energy, health care, transportation, and, you know, I think the goal is to ultimately protect, you know, the country as a whole. So, from the government's perspective, knowing that these attacks are maybe happening earlier on, it gives them some sort of wherewithal to protect other organizations, maybe from similar attacks. I don't know. The rules aren't finalized yet, though as far as I know, I think the aim was to have the rules published in 2024, I think the article said. So what are your thoughts on this?

Alex: 11:21

Yeah, I mean it's a good thing. Um, you know, I think net, net positive. Um I am I mean everyone does not have the same opinion as me but I almost think it's like too lax. Like 72 hours for critical infrastructure, maybe if this was just a a regular business, uh, 72 hours for a breach and 24 for ransomware makes sense. But I mean, remember what was the? Was it a pipeline a couple years ago that got hacked?

Alex: 11:52

yeah remember that. Uh, I mean, these are big deals. Like 72 hours is a long time for hackers to be inside somebody's system. Like you don't even know what they can do in 72 hours. That's a lot of damage done.

William: 12:06

Yeah, that was Keystone, wasn't it? The Keystone pipeline?

Alex: 12:08

I think so yeah.

William: 12:10

Yeah, we should talk about that. That was a. That was a big one to kind of, and I think that that whole pie, the Keystone pipeline incident was a. I think it was either a result of having a an employee that had left but their account was still available and it didn't have two FA, or maybe it was just whatever account didn't have two FA. I mean it seems like honestly a lot of those things are either phishing or lack of two FA. Um, it's the vehicle for getting in.

Alex: 12:41

Yeah, I don't remember all the details of it, I just remember that it that was one that was really newsworthy. Um, so I I think I mean even 48 hours, I guess, would be better, but 72, I think is just too lax yeah, it's.

William: 12:59

It's kind of scary because the more that we get into, you know, kind of like what we were talking about with the education and with, yeah, I mean, you can use books, but you're, you know, you're still learning, but in some ways you're, you're going backwards because you have, I mean, technology is just integrate, integrated into like our entire social fabric at so many different levels now.

William: 13:23

But when you think about like okay, like my water supply or my heat or things that I rely on to live, like hospitals, having more and more technology, and the amount of the uptick of ransomware successful, mind you, ransomware exploits for, you know, the healthcare system here in the US it's just crazy and sometimes I think like, hey, maybe it's time for the world and innovation to just take a pause for like a year and a half and let's go back and make sure that we're really not screwing ourselves over, because we don't like security is not a forethought with anything, usually, unfortunately, and we like to. It's more of like, hey, we'll get this done as fast as we can and then we'll go back and we'll you, you know, remediate that at some point, and then it never gets remediated.

William: 14:12

And then you're on to the next, thing, the next, thing, the next. Thing.

Alex: 14:16

Yeah, famous last words, right? I mean I just yeah. It's funny too, because as things get more advanced, people don't upkeep the old systems that were in place, that did work right. They just disappear. They don't need, they just stop caring about them. Like, how many places have some kind of analog backup ability at all? A lot of them just get rid of them completely.

William: 14:39

Yeah, one. I mean, at the end of the day too, everything that you do is you know it costs money and you, a lot of businesses out there are. I mean it's a it's a bad market right now and you have to make money to to keep, to keep going and you know, bad market for some, for some, not for not for AI startups, which is a good segue into, you know. Going on to the AI section of the show Gotta talk about it French?

William: 15:13

Oh my goodness, I can't even French. Ai startup H raises $220 million in the seed round. $220 million, I mean, they could have used that for all these schools that are getting hacked everywhere. But yeah, we're going to continue the AI science experiment. What do you think about this one? Oh man.

Alex: 15:37

This is just comical, almost. I mean, just in case anyone didn't hear him. He said seed round. He didn't say series A, b, c, d, e Seed round. And this company, from my understanding, is they build AI agents, right, it's not like they're building their own LLM, they're not coming out with their own product, it's just AI agents. And they got 220 million just to bootstrap the company. That is insane numbers.

William: 16:08

So that's crazy. Yeah, at the beginning it, you know, points out the obvious. There too, it's like okay, it's not often that you hear about a seed round above 10 million. I mean, that's pretty big for even a yeah 10 mil would be big for a seed round yeah, it's.

William: 16:24

Yeah, it's crazy. So the, the four other co-founders um, previously worked for deep mind, the, the ai company owned by by google um, which is pretty interesting. So there's name recognition and validation with okay, this team has has built things before and they should know what they're doing and I think that has something to do with it. But still, that much for a seed round just seems crazy to me.

Alex: 16:58

Yeah, there's actually a lot of stuff. It seems like that is a new blueprint lately is people that used to work for all these big projects for Google um are kind of like leaving and starting their own thing. You know, there's um a lot of ai startups, especially like. I think I mentioned this when we were recording in the she shed and I don't know nobody's really talked about it much because it's not really networking adjacent. But there's another company coming out called extropic and they're building uh, like a, a natural alternative to gpus, like a nature-based computer chip, if you will.

William: 17:38

So there's there's lots of cool things happening in this space that are coming from ex-googlers, so it's fun to watch yeah, I checked that out because I hadn't heard of them until you, with all your note worthiness, news stuff that you keep on top of, I hadn't heard of those, those folks, and their website was pretty minimal at the time and it just kind of had a sort of like a prospect. This, if you were kind of a you know, kind of a pitch or an overview, like there wasn't a ton of details. I don't know if that's changed, but from what it looks like yeah, they're trying to do, is actually a big game changer because sustainable. I mean, they're building data centers everywhere. Like they're running out of places to build data centers, so they're building them practically in my backyard now in the hills of kentucky. It's crazy.

William: 18:20

Oh yeah, um, aws is investing a ton of money. Meta is building a data center. It's literally like five miles from my house and like I'm not in a data center, a place that you would imagine has a bunch of data centers, right? So all of this stuff, it's not exactly friendly on the environment when you're building stuff and you're um, you're sourcing all these materials and you just yeah, it's as far as energy sustainability and all these things. It's probably not trending in the right direction, but maybe AI can solve that for us once we build enough data centers.

Alex: 19:00

So basically, computers the new currency right.

William: 19:03

Yeah, exactly, I do hope that and I know there's there. I do hope that and I know there's. I don't mean to be so snarky about AI so much on this podcast but I do hope that we sort of dial it back and sort of figure out, okay, what is real and what is not real, and it doesn't have to be this gigantic marketing hype machine all the time. There are use cases that it's good for time, there are use cases that it's good for and there's use cases that it's not good for. It's not an all or nothing thing for every category of thing humans want to do. So, yeah, so next up, oh boy, um, speaking of AI, there's a article titled Startups Weekly Drama at Techstars Drama in AI, drama everywhere. This is one.

William: 20:03

I guess there's one thing in particular, as I was reading through this and I've already listened to on many I mean it was on the national news. So one thing in particular that I wanted to take from this article, and you know that is this Sam Altman and Scarlett Johansson AI drama. You know it's like the tech world's equivalent of a celebrity scandal. You know you've got Sam Altman like the ai overlord and ceo of open ai. You know he ends up pretty much in boiling hot water because he used a voice, um, with a honestly a startling likeness to scar joe, you know, for his skynet. And what makes this bad is, prior to the release of his Skynet, he asked for permission from Black Widow herself to use her voice and she said no, and next thing, you know. You know so what's going on here, alex.

Alex: 21:02

Man, you know this is one of the few things. I did not keep up with a lot, but I know that Sam Altman tweeted out her and then it was. It came out and it's like you can't go backwards and say, oh, we didn't mean to release this and make it like this of you.

William: 21:19

So can you add color on that? He tweeted her. What does that mean?

Alex: 21:22

And in case folks don't know Chris is going to kill me for this. Okay, chris, my other co-host on the podcast, because I have not actually seen the movie, but there's a. There's a movie called her and it's I think it's Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson. Scarlett Johansson is like the voice of this AI assistant and, I guess, the main character, kind of like falls in love with it.

Alex: 21:48

Right, I think that's the gist of the story. But Her is the title of the movie, so it's pretty obvious, with Sam Altman tweeting out Her, that that's the implication is that it's Her voice available as an open AI voice.

William: 22:04

Well, now the lawyers are involved. So do you see it Probably like a settlement? I guess?

Alex: 22:11

I'm sure I don't think this will turn into anything huge. It probably should, because a lot of like Sam Altman has a lot of power, and if things like this don't get checked, who wants to stop other people you know what's to stop them doing it and someone that doesn't have the resources that black widow has you know to to step in and stop it.

William: 22:35

So it's yeah, yeah, I mean anybody else, it wouldn't have mattered. But since it's a celebrity, you know, since it's, you know she's, everybody knows who black widow is. There's so many, you know those movies, the Marvel movies.

Intro: 22:50

Just it's huge, she's an absolute star she's been in so much other stuff like she's.

William: 22:55

She's hit the pinnacle of her just ultimate huge, successful career and the the crazy thing about this is, you think, like, if this is happening at the highest level of just all the way up, like what is happening below that um, and it sets it's just sets such a bad example. You know, for his passionate, you know, and if you've ever listened to sam altman on like a podcast or anything else, he, I believe he's truly passionate about ai, what ai is going to do for the universe, and you know the specifically, the work they're doing at open ai to pioneer some of these things. So having this happen all the way up there, I mean I think it really nerfs a lot of his credibility and it, you know, puts a magnifying glass on him that he's gonna, it's gonna be there for a while.

Alex: 23:49

So yeah, well, funny story. But you know he can just tell his safety board not to worry about it, right, because now he's head of the safety board that advises his own board that he's head of, uh. But yeah, I mean, like you said it, it does undermine his, his credibility a lot, and I think a lot of these you know, tech rock stars I'll call them um, because sam altman is definitely, I think, fits that description they really got to start being careful. These people do not just have the freedom to go do anything they want and I'm glad that scarlet is is doing something about it because it does. It sets a precedence that we don't need.

William: 24:32

Yeah, and I think on the other, the tough side of this, on the far end of things, just I don't want to go too deep into this, but all the I think all the forthcoming regulation from the government is like the, the opposite extreme of. I think it will just really STEMI the innovation, like some of the things. I mean this could probably be its own show, but some of the things they're wanting to push with regulation, um, is just it's really like just not possible. Yeah, um, at this point, but yeah, I agree.

Alex: 25:10

Yeah, it's like you said, that could be a much larger conversation, but I agree that there needs to be somewhere in the middle. You can't have just unfettered like go as fast as you want, but at the same time you can't have things slowing it down unnecessarily either.

William: 25:25

Yeah, especially with stuff like this, it could ultimately ruin someone's livelihood, or like a whole category, a whole profession. Um, you know, we just you have to think about these things as a society, how it's going to impact. You know what is a broader impact. So, right, yeah, I guess applying right ahead. Um, cisco live is happening this week and you know if there's alex. If there's one thing I know, it's, cisco live will announce anything and everything to do with whatever the hottest trends are at the moment, and that is ai. Right now, you know, cisco decided to hyper flex. You know, deploy your AI cluster with a single click. You know it's full stack, it's intuitive. The performance is even hyper as well. Is this a marketing exercise for something that is still getting cooked up in the kitchen, or is it an existing thing that they're now wrapping in an AI story? Or is it something completely new and valuable that will enable the existing Cisco customer base? Any thoughts?

Alex: 26:36

Yeah, and I'm not going to pretend to know everything about this announcement yet, because I think I sent this to you like literally yesterday cisco.

William: 26:46

Next is it nexus hyper fabric.

Alex: 26:48

It's yeah, nexus hyper fabric, yep, and so what this is is basically you can already use nexus dashboard to control, like a, a spine leaf fabric that you create with either Nexus devices or you can use it to control your ACI fabrics. But now there's a third option and that is this HyperFabric, as they're calling it, and essentially this is, as you could guess, an AI fabric. Some details on the hardware, I think. What I saw is that it's based on Cisco Nexus 6000 gear and the silicon is from the Cisco Silicon One line. I don't know a whole lot about Silicon One I've never really looked into that but my understanding is that this is also a partnership with NVIDIA. But it's not a partnership like you would think. It is, where it's a partnership just for GPUs. It's more actually a partnership on the software layer of AI that NVIDIA has.

Alex: 27:53

So things like you know, they announced recently these things called NIMS, which are, I think they're called NVIDIA inferencing machines, and what they are is essentially like Kubernetes, clusters that you can spin up that are kind of like LLMs, like they're like their own little mini LLMs that do just different. They're like agents. I guess they're really more like agents, like AI agents. So I mean what worries me here and I just realized this when you were talking about your Hyperflex is that they just announced HyperShield, right, which came from their acquisition of Isovalent, and now this is HyperFabric. Is this going to be a new thing now? Like everything's going to be branded as Hyper and we're going to see Because, right, they used to have HyperFlex. I don't think HyperFlex is a thing anymore, but I'm not sure about that. It's just funny, like everything's going to be named Hyper going forward.

William: 28:50

But I mean really, at the end of the day, it's just a stack of hardware with proprietary software on it, right, exactly, that's all it is, it's the same thing. Because I remember there was just these huge announcements. It was when cisco, uh secure, agile exchange came out for their hybrid connectivity play, and you know standardizing things across, kind of like integration and standardizing across clouds. Basically they ship you a stack of compute and you install it at a colo and you know. So it almost sounds like the same thing, that that always happens here.

Alex: 29:25

But yeah, it does. And also I feel like this is almost like a, a preemptive, you know, attack against um. Like hpe bought juniper and their whole messaging around that has been they can provide everything for your ai, like your on-prem ai data center, right, or a hybrid cloud ai data center, if you will. Uh, to me this kind of seems like they're trying to get ahead of the competition and saying, hey, we have this as well, you don't need to go look anywhere else yeah, and I really honestly like cisco is.

William: 29:59

I used to be the biggest Cisco fan fanboy ever. Growing up I was obsessed. I liked practically a Cisco data center in my basement when I was studying for the CCIE and you know, I really do hope, you know, cisco continues to succeed. But I think the buying and integrate like if I'm doing something and I have to have to log into like five different UIs, it's kind of a pain in the neck and there's just so much it feels like there's a lot of things are disjointed in a sense. Yeah, I think that's something that from an operational perspective, for the folks that are actually operating some of these large networks, they want a little more consistency instead of just okay, we bought this, we bolted it on.

William: 30:47

We bought this, we bolted it on. Maybe we built something here and there, but it just seems disjointed to me.

Alex: 30:54

But I could be wrong yeah, I mean and to just speak to that super quick like this is all managed through nexus dashboard, but, like I said originally, it's also with nexus fabrics, it's with aci and now it's with hyper fabric. So it's like sure there's a solution, but it's a solution to a problem that they created. You're still just using one interface to manage three separate cisco interfaces at some point, like let's just standardize on one thing and just have you know one interface that does it all, instead's just standardize on one thing and just have you know one interface that does it all, instead of just abstractions on abstractions, on abstractions right, yep.

William: 31:30

Well, and since, since cisco is a market leader in ai now with hyper things, there must be a certification track to go along with it. Because, why not? So we have a ccde ai infrastructure certification now. Um, it's supposed to be vendor agnostic. Uh, you actually sent me this link and I got a chuckle out of it. Um, what do you think? Are you actually shortlisting this one for your studies, alex?

Alex: 32:03

No, definitely not. So if you ever listen to Russ White talk about the CCDE, it was always meant to be vendor agnostic, right, and whether that's true or not I can't speak to. I've never even looked at what the CCDE covers, but the only thing I'll say about this is this is an elective for your ccde. So again, I could be wrong in how this works, but I guess it's more like having a specialty. So it's not like the entire. It's not a new ccde where the entire exam is about ai infrastructure. It's just that that is like a small focus. It's like when you get a college degree and you have a minor right.

Alex: 32:43

It's that kind of thing.

William: 32:45

That's good. I mean I got to say, like most of this, I would say most of the Cisco search that I took over the years were pretty vendor agnostic. To be honest, I think the one that I took that wasn't really as much was the um, the ccnp security certification back in the day and granted, that's going to be more focused towards their products and how you do security where the network ones were much more open. You know you're using, you know ospfs, route redistribution, route aggregation. You know all aggregation, you know all the way. You know layer two all the way up to layer three, all the different things that you would need to know which are pretty portable amongst your networking. Is networking BGP? Is BGP TCPIP? Baby under the hood really hasn't changed much over the years.

Alex: 33:39

Yeah, I think that they do a really great job of the ones that are not specific, are pretty vendor neutral. I mean, if you ask it, most people, hey, I want to get into networking. What should I start with? They're most likely going to say the CCNA right, like they've done a really good job with some of them, and then, like you said, something like security. You would almost expect it to be Cisco cent centric.

William: 34:01

So I do appreciate that with their exams yeah, for sure, and that's definitely you know, taking some of the cloud exams. Cloud exams are not cloud agnostic at all. No, they're not at all and they never will be probably. They are um so far from cloud agnostic that it's painful, but I think it's the nature of the beast with cloud and operating cloud. It's just going to be the way it is. It would be cool, like for some sort of I don't know, like a truly vendor, like taking more standard certifications and licenses, like outside of the peer review of vendors and more of like a real open standards body. But then you know, we've all seen how that, I don't know how that plays out a lot of times.

Alex: 34:56

It's, it's tricky yeah, I don't know. I it would be awesome if somebody could come out with some kind of vendor neutral thing for cloud certifications. But, like you said, they're all so different, right, they're all so opinionated in how they do things and have such specific products. It's really more just. You kind of have to piece it together yourself, and I'm sure that will change someday, or someone who creates a layer on top of them will come out with a cert, you know yeah, yeah, it's funny.

William: 35:30

I have read on linkedin, I think, twice in the past week or two, um, but just two folks in the network industry that have said, hey, they made an announcement about it. I don't know why you would announce this or if it matters, but you know, I'm just going to let my CCI expire Like it had its value and it's great, but now I'm doing more things and I'm much more busy and I just don't have time maybe to keep re-upping which I thought. You know, if I don don't know. I feel like if I went through and got I mean, I know I got halfway through the ccie I was getting ready for the labs when, you know, my, my first child was born and it just nerfed all my time. I just couldn't. I, yeah, I could never take it.

Alex: 36:18

So I think if I had a ccie I'd at least try to stick it out to get that emeritus status at least. I don't know if I could just let it lapse, although I had a ccmp and I let it lapse, so maybe me too not yeah, yeah, pretty, pretty interesting.

William: 36:36

That's a. That's a pretty crazy debate, though. Whenever you start, there is so much drama, always about certifications and oh, ccie isn't valuable anymore or something. Somebody will say something and then people come out of the bushes everywhere it's a hot topic.

William: 36:51

Yeah, tackle it. You know it's like linebacker on, you know middle schooler, just boom and yeah, people, people, take that really seriously. There's a lot of pride with the CCIE, for sure, yes, there is. So, getting to the last leg of the show, I will title this Tech Trend Takedown. So we're going to play a game. We'll see if I keep this in the actual episode recording or not. I was just Okay. So, making myself serious.

William: 37:28

Now, to finish off the show, I want to play a spinoff of a game that I remember people playing when I was a kid. I actually played it as a kid, like middle school age, but the thing that made me think about it the other day I was walking around the neighborhood and I heard some kids playing a game like this. But basically, the rules are as follows. So you must choose one of three actions to take in response to a tech phenomenon that I will name. You have 20 seconds to answer and your actions that you can take are one of the following three Be stranded on a desert island with, for two years, work in an open office with this until you retire, or you can throw in the towel and join the trend. Okay, let's go. Yikes. So three great options, just to rephrase be stranded on a desert island with this trend for two years, work in an open office until you retire, or you can throw in the towel and join. So are you ready?

William: 38:41

Yeah, I'm begrudgingly ready, just do one round, this, one round, this one thing. So the phenomenon is tech influencers making dancing videos on TikTok. You have 20 seconds.

Alex: 38:51

Oh man, you went there. Okay, 20 seconds, jeez, okay. So Island OpenOffice? Oh gosh, definitely not an open office. I don't want to be taking dance breaks throughout my workday. For the next, 20 years.

William: 39:07

OpenOffice is down.

Alex: 39:10

All right, so Island or gosh, what was the last one?

William: 39:14

So be stranded on a desert island for two years Two years only on the desert island, or you can throw in the towel and just join the trend wholesale.

Alex: 39:22

Oh man, I'm not a dancer man, as much as I would love to just join in. I think I'll be stranded on an island just watching TikTok and Instagram videos and just dancing.

William: 39:38

Hey, at least you have the sunshine, right, the sunshine you have a nice tan you'll be nice and bronzed.

Alex: 39:42

coming back to real life Of course, after two years of being alone with that, I'll probably come back and be doing it myself, right?

William: 39:51

That's funny. I'm not a dancer either. If anybody's ever seen me dance, I'm sorry Even when. I'm trying to be funny, it's just not fun yeah.

Alex: 40:01

I'm not a dancer.

William: 40:04

Anyhow well it has been. It's been awesome having you on. It's been a great show. Where can people find you? I mean, they already know where to find you. You're like a celebrity now, with Cables to Cloud. Your all's podcast, by the way, is so good. Like you all you know, the news episodes are like a short and concise. They're just valuable. Um, I think those are my new favorite. I mean, well, I mean, all of the the cables to cloud content is good, but the news episodes are fantastic and you're. You always have such good guests.

Alex: 40:36

So, yeah, where can where can people find you? Well, I, we. Where can people find you? Well, I, we, all. I'm sure I speak for all three of us, but we, we definitely appreciate that. We've got a lot of feedback and changed a lot of things over. You know, we've been doing this just a little over a year and I think we got a good sweet spot going right now. So you're hey, your show is awesome too, though, man, I, I these episodes and you've had some really good guests and live shows and lots of cool stuff. But where people can find me at bumps in the wire, I'm on X and Twitter. I'm on LinkedIn. Linkedin is probably like where you find me the most. I don't really tweet much. I mean, I'll kind of reshare things here and there um and discord, I guess. So you can find me in the a1 uh discord server and that's that's about it. I have a blog, but I don't post on it, so you want to.

William: 41:31

You have one, I think you have one blog article sitting out there and it's pretty good, I do, I.

Alex: 41:35

I have one that I spend a lot of time on and then I just haven't. Haven't had time too much, too many other things to do, but I should probably make time for it.

William: 41:42

I just haven't had time Too many other things to do, but I should probably make time for it. Stuff, competing for your time. Story of our lives Working in tech. It's crazy. All right, sir, enjoy your summer. Bye, bye.

The Cloud Gambit

Strolling through the AI/ML, Cyber, and Cloud News Cycle with Alex Perkins

Listen to this podcast on