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Layoffs, chips, and a lobster-shaped lesson in security—this month’s news run is a tour of how tech’s biggest bets collide with real-world constraints. We start with Amazon’s plan to complete 30,000 job cuts under the banner of “flattening the org.” That might clean up charts, but it also stretches managers thin and risks slowing the very decisions teams need to ship. The human cost is harder to quantify than a balance sheet win, and we unpack where productivity gains end and morale debt begins.

From there, we get into Microsoft’s Maya 200 inference chip and why efficiency is the story to watch. Performance per dollar, power budgets, and inference at scale matter more than leaderboard sprints. If the claims hold up outside marketing decks, Maya points to a future where better throughput and lower costs beat raw hype. We also dive into Satya Nadella’s push to retire “AI slop” and think of these systems as scaffolding for human potential—useful framing for knowledge work, but incomplete for roles where augmentation often previews automation. It’s the tension shaping careers, budgets, and product choices across the stack.

We pivot to enterprise infrastructure with Nutanix’s slower-than-expected VMware migrations. Even when customers want options, they face real friction: tooling parity, skill gaps, data gravity, and the risk of moving mission-critical workloads without bulletproof rollback. The lesson is pragmatic—platforms don’t win on promises, they win on migration paths that reduce toil and make costs predictable.

And then there’s Moltbot, the rebranded assistant formerly known as Clawdbot, which sparked a security backlash and a reminder that agents touching calendars, email, and payments need guardrails before cleverness. Limit scopes, sandbox actions, cap spend, log everything. AI that touches real life must be boringly safe before it’s impressive.

If this breakdown helped you cut through the noise, follow the show, share it with a friend, and leave a quick review. What story hit you hardest—and why?
Purchase Chris and Tim's book on AWS Cloud Networking: https://www.amazon.com/Certified-Advanced-Networking-Certification-certification/dp/1835080839/
Check out the Monthly Cloud Networking News
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkBWCGwXDUX9OfZ9_MvSVup8tJJzJeqrauaE6VPT2b0/

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Ever wonder why some architectures feel effortless to run while others need a babysitter? We invited Russ White to help us unpack the real craft of network design: building mental maps that tie history, theory, and practical constraints into clear decisions you can defend and operate. Forget packet field trivia. We focus on how to think, what to simplify, and which trade-offs actually matter.

We start with the idea that design is navigation through abstraction. Russ explains how mapping ideas the way you’d map a city lets you place new knowledge in context and predict behavior under failure. From there we separate troubleshooting from design: knowing where things break is useful, but the advanced skill is foreseeing convergence, bounding failure domains, and shaping a topology that operators can understand at a glance.

Then we dig into trade-offs. Shaving 20 milliseconds by splitting flooding domains might look smart on paper, but what debt does it add in tooling, training, and drift? We talk subsecond timers, gold plating, and the discipline of designing to constraints: budget, topology, traffic, and the humans on call at 2 a.m. The rule of thumb is simple: if you can’t explain it clearly to someone half-asleep and cross-lingual, it’s too complex. History helps here too. Understanding why BGP and OSPF look the way they do makes today’s choices less dogmatic and more grounded in goals.

We close with the soft skills that make great designs land: gathering requirements from non-technical stakeholders, telling the story of the why, and resisting needless features. If you’re ready to trade cleverness for clarity and build networks others can operate with confidence, this conversation will sharpen your intuition and your process.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a teammate who loves to over-optimize, and leave a quick review so more engineers can find it.

Connect with our guest:
https://rule11.tech
https://www.linkedin.com/in/riw777/
https://x.com/rtggeek

Purchase Chris and Tim's book on AWS Cloud Networking: https://www.amazon.com/Certified-Advanced-Networking-Certification-certification/dp/1835080839/
Check out the Monthly Cloud Networking News
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkBWCGwXDUX9OfZ9_MvSVup8tJJzJeqrauaE6VPT2b0/

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The year felt like it stretched on forever, and in that extra space the networking world reshaped itself. We traded weekly cadence for deeper focus, shipped an AWS Advanced Networking book that the community embraced, and then watched the landscape pivot as vendors consolidated, clouds connected to each other, and AI hype met the hard edges of security and reliability.

We dig into the acquisition wave with clear eyes: Arista picking up VeloCloud from Broadcom and what that means for SD‑WAN customers; HPE’s Juniper deal clearing regulatory review and the open questions around Mist and portfolio strategy; and why Broadcom–VMware didn’t trigger instant mass migrations, even as budgets and CSP support shifted. Then we chart the most surprising turn—AWS and Google offering a cross‑cloud link that’s not a one‑off database play, but a general connective fabric. If pricing trends toward pipe capacity rather than per‑GB egress, multi‑cloud networking stops being a niche product pitch and becomes an operator reality. We even explore the idea of a Cloud Exchange Point, where automation snaps providers together at scale.

AI was everywhere and still uneven. We call out real wins—friendlier automation workflows and eBPF‑powered visibility via Cisco’s Isovalent acquisition—while laying out the unsolved work: agentic AI with least privilege, auditable actions, and enforceable data boundaries. Until those controls are standard, enterprises will limit autonomy and keep AI close to expert hands. Against the constant layoff drumbeat, we offer direct advice: build skills across cloud interconnects, Kubernetes networking, and eBPF telemetry; document outcomes in the language of cost and risk; and lean into community for opportunities and perspective.

If you want a no‑nonsense guide to what changed, what actually matters, and how to prepare for a faster 2026, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share with a teammate who needs signal over noise, and drop your take: which shift will shape your architecture next year?
Purchase Chris and Tim's book on AWS Cloud Networking: https://www.amazon.com/Certified-Advanced-Networking-Certification-certification/dp/1835080839/
Check out the Monthly Cloud Networking News
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkBWCGwXDUX9OfZ9_MvSVup8tJJzJeqrauaE6VPT2b0/

Visit our website and subscribe: https://www.cables2clouds.com/
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A bus-powered hackathon, a $100K prize for a gloriously “useless” app, and keynotes that said AI so many times you could turn it into a supercut—re:Invent 2025 brought energy, irony, and real signals hiding in the noise. We’re joined by AWS Hero Chris Williams to unpack what actually matters: where AI is genuinely useful, where it’s lipstick on a feature, and how builders should adapt without losing the plot.

We dig into the Road to re:Invent hackathon and why the winning project—turning a tiny script into a sprawling multi-repo monster—was the sharpest commentary on over-engineering all week. From there, we break down the AI-first keynotes, new Graviton efficiency gains that could tame power budgets, and the push to own the entire stack from silicon to agents. Kiro’s spec-driven development gets real talk too: amazing for scaffolding, documentation, and repo exploration; risky when you ask a confident hallucination to write production without tests, reviews, or security controls.

The conversation shifts to careers and craft with Werner Vogels’ parting challenge: become a “Renaissance developer.” Learn systems, networking, security, and economics, then layer AI to explore design space faster. If you’re just starting out, don’t begin with prompts—build fundamentals and use AI to shape your learning plan. We wrap with the sleeper headline: first-party multi-cloud connectivity. It’s overdue, it’s serious, and it could reshape how enterprises stitch providers together while raising new questions about SLAs, accountability, and incident response between hyperscalers.

Hit play for a clear-eyed debrief that filters the hype, celebrates real progress, and offers practical guidance for teams shipping in 2025. If this helped you make sense of re:Invent, follow the show, share it with a teammate, and drop your bold prediction for the year ahead.

Where to find Chris:
https://x.com/mistwire
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisfwilliams/
https://vbrownbag.com/
Purchase Chris and Tim's book on AWS Cloud Networking: https://www.amazon.com/Certified-Advanced-Networking-Certification-certification/dp/1835080839/
Check out the Monthly Cloud Networking News
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkBWCGwXDUX9OfZ9_MvSVup8tJJzJeqrauaE6VPT2b0/

Visit our website and subscribe: https://www.cables2clouds.com/
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We break down Cloudflare’s outage, why a small config change caused big waves, and what better guardrails could look like. We then unpack AWS and Google’s cross‑cloud link, Megaport’s move into bare metal and GPUs, Webex adding deepfake defenses, and a new startup aiming to tune AI networks at microsecond speed.

• Cloudflare outage root cause and fallout
• Automation guardrails, validation and rollbacks
• AWS–Google cross‑cloud connectivity preview
• Pricing, routing and policy gaps to watch
• Megaport acquires Latitude SH for compute
• Bare metal and GPU as a service near clouds
• Webex integrates deepfake and fraud detection
• Accuracy risks, UX and escalation paths
• Apstra founders launch Aria for AI networks
• Microburst telemetry, closed‑loop control and SLAs

If you enjoyed this please give us some feedback or share this with a friend we would love to hear from you as well and we will see you in two weeks with another episode

Purchase Chris and Tim's book on AWS Cloud Networking: https://www.amazon.com/Certified-Advanced-Networking-Certification-certification/dp/1835080839/
Check out the Monthly Cloud Networking News
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkBWCGwXDUX9OfZ9_MvSVup8tJJzJeqrauaE6VPT2b0/

Visit our website and subscribe: https://www.cables2clouds.com/
Follow us on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/cables2clouds.com
Follow us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@cables2clouds/
Follow us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@cables2clouds
Merch Store: https://store.cables2clouds.com/
Join the Discord Study group: https://artofneteng.com/iaatj