At the last Cisco Live in June, I was asked by marketing to do a “center stage” presentation. My days of getting normal sessions at Cisco Live seem to be over. Perhaps I’m too far into the management track (although that’s changing) to impress the Cisco Live Session Group Managers. Eager to speak again, I accepted the proposal.
The abstract was provided for me. I don’t remember the title, but it was something about AI and the campus. So, I did my best to craft a set of slides that would be interesting. When I ran them by marketing, I was told I couldn’t use my own slides. I had to use theirs. One of my secrets to success at Cisco Live is that I always build my own slides. Rarely do I use a single slide from someone else.
Still, I did my best to build a story that would work. Then I was told I’d be co-presenting with another PM, and we’d also have a customer on stage with us for an Oprah-style panel interview. Even with these constraints, I spent a lot of time in my hotel room in Vegas practicing to be sure I nailed it.
The center stage is on the show floor (World of Solutions), and presenters there are broadcast onto a series of TVs scattered around the Mandalay Bay convention center. They walk around the stage like they’re performing King Lear, but nobody watches the TVs or can even hear them. It’s very performative, but a part of trade shows.
We had a rehearsal with marketing people, stage managers, cameramen, audio technicians, and and army of other people. On the day of, there were marketing people, stage managers, cameramen, audio technicians, and and army of other people. There was also a lady there who did intros for all the speakers, to get the audience pumped up. I’m sure she showed up in Las Vegas decades ago to be a showgirl or something, but now in her 40’s she was doing corporate gigs at Mandalay. As I got mic’d up and ready to go, I looked out at my audience. Of the 50 or so chairs, 5 were occupied. Four of them were friends of the customer presenting. I looked at the intro lady and said: “I hope you can handle the stage fright.” She laughed.
I did my shtick, and it all went well enough. At the very end, the one attendee who was not with the customer, who seemed to have shown up because it was a good spot for a nap, arose like Lazarus, raised his hand and asked: “Could you guys please stop talking about AI at Cisco Live?”
If you’ve watched the Art of Network Engineering podcast, you probably are familiar with Lexie Cooper, one of the hosts. I was on the podcast a while back and had a nice talk with her and Andy Lepteff. The other day, Lexie showed up in my LinkedIn feed in clownish makeup and a bodysuit. With the audio off, I looked at it and thought, “wow she’s really desperate for attention.” Then I unmuted it. I nearly died.
“Have you ever considered…using AI?” she begins.
“Manage your network devices…with AI!”
“Manage your IOT stuff…with AI!”
“Design a PCB…with AI!”
“Automate your vegetable garden…with AI!”
“Ethernet cables? Nope…AI!”
“Every vendor in the World of Solutions…with AI!”
…and so forth.
In a minute and thirteen seconds, Lexie captured the Zeitgeist of the current networking world perfectly and hilariously. It seems that all of the protocols and technologies that make up the “Art of Network Engineering” have been single-handedly wiped away by AI. Nobody talks about networking anymore, it’s all just AI.
Of course, those protocols and technologies are necessary for AI, for the Internet, and for the modern world to function. Why do all vendors suddenly have a single-minded focus on AI, and seem to have stopped investing in actual networking technology?
It comes down to the culture of Silicon Valley, the corporate world dominated by Wall Street, and the quest for the “Next Big Thing”. As network engineers we love acronyms, so I’ll coin a new one: the NBT. (With all due respect to NetBIOS over TCP.)
Technology executives are terrified of missing the NBT, and they spend their careers chasing the NBT. It’s not entirely their fault. If a technology company is not investing in the NBT, then the industry “analysts” will write somber reports criticizing the company and hurting the stock value. Because the industry “analysts” have MBAs in topics like marketing and finance, they are experts at technology, and “analyzing” what networking companies should sell to network engineers. In fact, because they are MBAs, they are experts in anything, really, and far more so than people who actually study and learn their specific fields.
There have indeed been some real NBTs. Wireless is a good example. When I started in networking, pretty much everything was hard wired. Wireless was a major transformation in networking, and a new and different technology domain. (I’m still not great at understanding it, admittedly.) Mobile devices and smartphones radically changed the world, and nobody can argue that.
Cloud computing is an interesting one. First of all, it was (and is) a marketing term. It refers to several things, but in a broad definition we could say it refers to using someone else’s computing resources instead of your own. In the case of SaaS, someone else is hosting the application and giving you access to it, whereas in the case of IaaS, they merely host the computing power and you manage the app. Either way, it was not a new idea. The idea of shared computing resources has been around since the advent of computing. In the early days, all computing was done on shared systems. At the dawn of the Internet, I got my email and other services through an ISP. I telnetted into their system to check my email. And in the mid-90’s, I worked at a company that offered a SaaS-based timecard service, before anyone even used the term “SaaS”.
Cloud computing in 1999
Still, we could say Cloud was an NBT. I used to go to auctions during the dot-bomb of the early 2000’s, and even a small dotcom company had to purchase servers and network gear and host them in rented rack space in a colo. AWS drastically changed that.
Of course, there have been many potential NBTs that turned out not to be. The “Metaverse” was one of these. After 2 years in COVID lockdown, nobody was interested in slapping on a VR headset and meeting their friends using a unicorn avatar floating around a fake version of Mars.
Watch out when an exec begins a presentation with this apocryphal Henry Ford quote: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses.”
Aside from the fact Ford never said it, this quote is recited ad nauseam to inspire people to disruptive innovation. Nobody ever seems to notice the obvious, however. The automobile was popularized by Henry Ford over 110 years ago. It hasn’t changed much since. Sure, your Subaru is a lot different from a Model T, but the basic idea and design are the same. The changes to automobiles–fuel injection systems, automatic transmissions–have been major, but nonetheless incremental improvements on the base design. Once the NBT happened and spawned an industry, things reached a steady state.
From a corporate/investor perspective, this is problematic. Stock prices are an indicator of future value, and investors demand “growth”. (Hypothetical question: is there an end-state to “growth?” I.e., is a company ever done growing, and if so, when? Related: is there anything in nature which can grow indefinitely?) Steady-state is not good for Wall Street. So, execs need to go hunting for the NBT.
“Now wait,” many MBAs will correct me. “The EV is a major disruptor in the automotive industry.”
Leaving aside the fact that EVs have existed in the past, and their questionable future, it just proves my point. It took 100 years for the Tesla to exist. But let’s circle back to that in a minute.
Recently I saw a LinkedIn post from a woman, Debbie Gomez, who is making a career change to become a network engineer. She was joking about the contents of a woman’s purse, comparing it to the books she has in her car. One of those books was Internet Routing Architectures by Sam Halabi.
When I was studying for my CCIE R/S in 2004, I used Halabi’s book. It’s clearly visible in a picture of the stack of books I used to study for the infamous exam. Debbie is studying the same content I was 20 years ago.
This is because, like the automobile, once networking was invented, change became incremental. BGP hasn’t changed much because it can’t change much. It’s run across multiple providers and multiple vendors, and it’s not easy to make changes. Sure, it’s been extended since Halabi’s day, but it’s close enough to the original that his book is still totally relevant.
I’ve written in the past about how non-technical executives view the complexity of networking as a creation of engineers who “revel in complexity”. In their view, the NBT in networking is to just have “simplicity”, where you don’t need all the fancy BGP, OSPF, EIGRP, ISIS, EVPN, VXLAN, STP stuff. Just like the Tesla is so much simpler than a traditional car.
I recently started working on cars, because I always like to do things with my hands. My 2011 BMW 328i is probably the wrong car to start working on. It’s complex, and designed so that simple tasks require disassembling large parts of the engine. I recently replaced the valve cover, successfully, but man was it a nightmare of carefully removing various parts. To even get the thing out took about 30 minutes of me standing on the engine and my brother-in-law working it from the side. If I learned one thing, it’s how complex a modern car is.
I have a Tesla as well. There’s no question it’s simple. There’s hardly an engine to speak of. There is no gear shifting when you drive it. You don’t even turn it on. There is no maintenance required except for tires and brakes. The only fluid required is for the windshield washer.
Many technology executives feel this transformation needs to happen for networking as well. The problem–they don’t seem to realize–is that the underlying complexity of networking, the protocols, cannot go away. They exist for a reason. Can they be improved? Sure. Can they be eliminated? No.
That’s not to say much of the mess of networking cannot be improved. Vendors have created a lot of that mess, and all are guilty to some degree. We can distinguish unnecessary complexity from necessary complexity. A lot of it is unnecessary, but even if you remove that, you’re left with the necessary complexity.
The only option for simplicity when you cannot really simplify, is to abstract. That is, you hide the complexity. It’s still there, but it’s easier to deal with. Take a modern airplane. It’s just as complex a machine, perhaps more so, than a plane built in the 1970s. But the cockpit is throughly automated, and the systems throughly instrumented. It’s much easier to manage than a 1970’s plane. And yet, someone still needs to know how it all works.
This brings us back to our starting point, AI.
Why is AI driving Lexie to the point of putting own garish makeup and screaming into the camera? Of course, everyone thinks it’s the NBT. But is it?
We can easily understate the importance of GenAI and the significance of the technological advancement. It’s nothing short of astounding. ChatGPT makes a great search engine, but apart from that, it’s ability to interpret and generate language and code in creative ways is incredible.
Even though I worked on programmability, my knowledge of Python is pretty poor. If there’s one programming language I feel absolutely comfortable in, it’s Applesoft BASIC from the 1980s. I’ve found I can have ChatGPT explain some of the more challenging Python concepts by translating them to BASIC. It’s crazy. Computers haven’t been able to do anything like that before.
I’ve asked it to generate NETCONF code blocks for configuring IOS XE, with less success. It gave me an operational data model to configure an IP address on an interface. These errors can and will be corrected, however.
And yet, even if AI reaches the point of being able to configure and operate network devices, it will still be an abstraction layer. I cannot fathom AI somehow doing away with networking. At most, it would be like the automation systems on the plane, not like a Tesla.
I asked ChatGPT to design a networking system that does not use protocols. It responded: “Designing a data networking system that does not use protocols is a challenging idea because protocols are fundamental to networking—they define the rules for data exchange.” It then dutifully attempted to frame out a protocol-free system, but the result was unimpressive, and the AI admitted that it would have a lot of problems.
I am among those working on AI projects at Cisco, both out of interest and out of necessity. Working at a vendor, I’m caught up in the NBT just like we all are. While I cannot talk about the specifics of any of the projects, I do see potential for its use beyond the current applications of AI. (Mainly analyzing operational data.)
Is it really the NBT? Is it really a “disruptor” on the level of wireless or smartphones? Or are we tilting at windmills as with the Metaverse?
Time will tell. But I’m sure Lexie will have plenty of content for more videos.
Meanwhile, keep reading Halabi. We still need him.