Episode Details

About Corey Quinn

Over the course of my career, I’ve worn many different hats in the tech world: systems administrator, systems engineer, director of technical operations, and director of DevOps, to name a few. Today, I’m a cloud economist at The Duckbill Group, the author of the weekly Last Week in AWS newsletter, and the host of two podcasts: Screaming in the Cloud and, you guessed it, AWS Morning Brief, which you’re about to listen to.

Transcript
Corey: Hello and welcome to our Networking In The Cloud mini series, sponsored by ThousandEyes. That's right. There may be just one of you, but there are a thousand eyes. On a more serious note, ThousandEyes has sponsored their cloud performance benchmarking report for 2019, at the end of last year, talking about what it looks like when you race various cloud providers. They looked at all the big cloud providers and determined what does performance look like from an end user perspective? What does the user experience look like among and between different cloud providers? To get your copy of this report, you can visit snark.cloud/realclouds. Why real clouds? Well, because they raced AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM Cloud, and Alibaba, all of which are real clouds. They did not include Oracle cloud because, once again, they are real clouds. Check out your copy of the report at snark.cloud/realclouds.

Welcome to week 12 of the Networking In The Cloud mini series of the AWS Morning Brief, sponsored by ThousandEyes. So one of the early episodes of the Networking In The Cloud mini series had me opining and relatively uninformed broad brush strokes about the nature of BGP. Today I am joined by Ivan Pepelnjak, who is a former CCIE who wrote a fascinating blog post that I will link to in the show notes, saying, "This is great, but this is what happens when someone who's good at one thing steps completely out of their comfort zone into things they don't fully understand and start opining confidently, if not authoritatively." Ivan, thank you for taking the time to speak with me.

Ivan: Thanks for having me on. And no, I was way more polite than your summary.

Corey: Absolutely. I believe that there's a way to tell a story of the hero's journey that everyone talks about when they're building a narrative arc. Instead, I go for the moron's journey and I always like to be the moron because, generally, I tend to be, and as I walk through the world and get things sometimes right, occasionally wrong, I love being corrected when I stumble blindly into an area I don't know. First because it gives me an opportunity to learn something new, which is great, but it also gives me that opportunity to be the dumbest person in the room again, which is awesome. So...

Ivan: That's exactly why I blog to get your opinions.

Corey: Exactly. You have data, I have opinions and mine are louder seems to be the way that discourse works in the modern era. So from a high level, what did I get wrong about BGP?

Ivan: Well, you got everything right about the mess that we are in and the fragility of the generic internet infrastructure. The only thing you got wrong was that you blamed the tool, but not people using the tool.

Corey: It always feels like it's safer, on some level, to blame technology because if the takeaway is, "Well, the user experience around tool X is