Telemetry News Now

Telemetry News Now.

Welcome to another episode of telemetry news now. We got some interesting headlines going on for you today. I mean, the summertime tends to be a little slower overall. People are on vacation. The conferences slow down, but we do have some interesting stuff to talk about. At least, I think it's interesting. I don't know about you, Justin.

So why don't you, kick us off with our first headline of the day?

Yeah. Sure, Phil. Today's, first article comes from SDX Central titled appeals court sides with Cisco in virtualization patent fight. So Cisco had been sued as a title implies about some virtualization, specifically around their UCS, the Unified Computing System offering. So most people are probably familiar, but Cisco has a line of servers that they have in addition to the things we normally think of them for, which is networking equipment.

And so this lawsuit in the Massachusetts District Court was around that product line, a company called Ingera Ingera, I believe it, e g e n e r a. The court said that they failed to cite any actual evidence the district court overlooked that somehow shows the processors in Cisco's UCS system function like any disclosed embodiments, in the patents itself.

The appeals court is basically saying that Cisco has not infringed on Ingera's Ingera, how I repronounced that company's patents because there there's no evidence to prove that the functionality that's in the UCS servers matches the patent that they hold.

Right. Yeah. And this lawsuit's been going on for eight years. And and as Justin and I were kinda joking before we hit the record button, these kind of lawsuits are happening all the time in Silicon Valley and across the world with tech, you know, patent infringements and all that kind of thing. So, I mean, I think this particular and by the way, my experience with UCS servers as an engineer was, like, putting about eight billion of them into racks over the years. I remember doing a lot of, Cisco voice projects and call managers. Mhmm.

They were all on prem at the time.

That was all on UCS, a lot of, virtualized environments.

And, you know, what this offers is some, I guess, clarity for network engineers that are making decisions on what boxes to buy, what servers to buy, because it does lower the risk of that, quote, unquote, patent trap, right, where you're gonna have trouble with this platform later on down the road. And that'll I mean, that's also for folks that are in charge of buying, whether that's at all the way at the c level, like CIOs or, you know, whoever, the VP of procurement.

There's a lot of writing off of these kind of hard assets over time. There is also the whole indemnification clause nature of, like, we bought this stuff from you, and now there's problems and, you know, it's your fault. So, you know, it kinda it kinda makes things easier.

Mhmm.

And then for I was just thinking about it. For future, you know, innovation around this technology. The wording I had to read, like, nine times about, like, it's not emulating Ethernet. It's using Ethernet, and therefore, that's why the court determined that Cisco was in the clear. Right?

Yeah.

So, you know, it does kinda open the door to, more innovation, you know, smaller companies that are innovating around this kind of thing.

And, you know, for Cisco, this closes a very expensive chapter, I'm sure, with their legal fees. Right?

Well and, yeah, I mean, the suit was actually asking for four hundred and forty million dollars, in damages, right, which, you know, a company the size of Cisco, that's not a huge amount of money if you look at their balance sheet, but it's not pennies either. Right? And like you said, they've spent a lot of time on this. The original infringement dispute started in twenty sixteen, so we're almost ten years into it.

I think it's nine years Mhmm.

End of the dispute. And to your point, Phil, the the claim centered around UCS's virtualization technology, specifically their virtual NICs and their virtual HBAs Mhmm. That they use for building the links and building the, the facts. Right? The fiber, the switch fabric that they, do within the UCS and then within the Ethernet fabric that's part of their data center architecture. So it was those virtualization technologies that were the the claim centered around in this lawsuit.

Yeah. And the cost of Cisco is not gonna be the four hundred million dollars ultimately. That's gonna be just the the lawsuit.

Then, of course, there's the legal fees over the penalty.

Exactly. Then then there's the legal fees over the years, but there's also the ripple effect ramifications of, you know, UCS not being a viable option backwards and and moving forward. So there's there's a lot more than a four hundred million dollar penalty, like like you said.

Well, yeah, presumably, if this had gone through, they'd have to retool the UCS, right, to remove some of these technologies or change them at least enough that they're in, compliance with the patents and so forth.

So, yeah, it would have been a Yeah.

Pretty expensive thing one way or another for Cisco to have to deal with beyond just the penalty of a four hundred and forty million.

Yeah. And I'm not trying to talk out of both sides of my mouth here, but big win for Cisco, like the behemoth, but also a win for folks that are developing new stuff, like little little companies and innovators. So kind of weird how that worked out, but, I mean, that's my take on it.

So Alright.

The, next article has been all over the media, but, specifically, I've got the Reuters article pulled up here from the US justice department settlement of the antitrust case for HPE's fourteen billion dollar takeover for Juniper.

This has been an ongoing saga as well that we've covered a number of times on the podcast, Phil, but it is now official and final.

HPE has acquired Juniper. They will become a business unit within HPE. As of, I think, last week sometime, I saw some notes on social media from Rami Rahim, who's the CEO at Juniper, that the acquisition is now finalized, now that they've got the Department of Justice green light to go forward with it. Yep.

So, yeah, the acquisition is final. Things are are moving forward. Rami is gonna be the head of the BU of basically the the networking, I forgot what they're calling it, the department with inside of HP that Juniper is gonna roll into. And presumably, it'll be some of the Aruba stuff in addition to some of the Juniper stuff that's coming in through the acquisition that Rami will be the head of the BU for.

Yeah. Yep. And and if you remember back, January when the the deal the the department wanted to block the deal in the first place.

Mhmm.

The premise was that between HPE and Cisco, they'd control seventy percent or more of the US market for networking gear. And so is that still a concern? I mean, the deal went through. That was the premise. Was that incorrect at the time? And if not, is that going to be an outcome, or in the in the coming years as this settled?

Well, I mean, if you look at what, both HPE and Juniper's response to that allegation from the government was when they denied it back in February, it was that it depends on the specific product line that you're looking at. Right? I mean, they have obviously more than just wireless, solutions. Right? If you look narrowly at just the wireless solutions, that may be true that it's gonna be a consolidation of two of the major players and reduces the amount of competition in the market. But if you think of it as things like routing, switching, some of these other things that both companies have in their portfolio, there's a lot bigger picture than just the the wireless portfolio.

Yeah. Yeah. And and I know that part of the settlement was that HP was gonna divest itself of, their wireless networking business, Instant On.

Mhmm.

And they're going to license the source code for Mist Mist AI, which is awesome, by the way.

That's my little, commentary for that. But they were going to divest themselves of that source code as well, which is used in Juniper's wireless, line. So there there is some compromise there.

Yeah. The details on that are interesting. It's been a while since I've read the article on that, but they're required to open the source code to at least one or maybe two vendors and allow them to use it in addition to Juniper obviously using it, like you said, with their wireless product, which that came in through the Mist acquisition, of course. So mission to see whether that actually takes place.

I'd read a few commentary where people see feel like that's pretty unlikely anybody would actually take them up on it, but it does help keep the regulators happy and and got the deal done. So Juniper was, you know, agreed to that, caveat in allowing this to go through. So big news in in networking. Juniper is now a part of HPE.

Alright. Moving on, the next article is from network world. Arista buys VeloCloud to reboot SD WAN amid AI infrastructure shift. So another acquisition, which I think we talked about maybe on the previous episode that Arista is buying the VeloCloud assets, which folks may have remember VMware actually acquired VeloCloud.

And then, of course, VMware was acquired by Broadcom.

Broadcom's been going through their portfolio in general since the, almost two years ago that they acquired VMware and making a lot of changes. And and one of them is, of course, divesting the VeloCloud SD WAN platform, and allowing Arista to acquire it. The sum of the acquisition is technically undisclosed, but a lot of rumors have been flying around that it was around a billion dollars roughly somewhere on that mark is what the Yeah. Dollar amount is that, Arista paid Broadcom, in this case, to buy Velocloud Asset up from another VMware portfolio. So, you know, the interesting thing is gonna be what this looks like as Arista integrates it. Right? I think on the surface, they bought it to have an SD WAN solution, which is missing in their portfolio, but it really interesting is this article is implying to see where this fits into the AI strategy.

Right?

Mhmm.

There's clearly gonna be a lot of traffic coming in and out of data centers that are hosting AI workloads and doing training and inference on AI workloads, and does having an SD WAN solution help make Arista more competitive in those environments where they have a more holistic solution so people can, you know, have better performance coming in and out of their data centers or doing AI training? I think that's one aspect at least of the play here, Phil. I'm kinda interested to see what your take is on Yeah. Well what their play is here.

Arista said straight out that it's gonna integrate VeloCloud's, quote, unquote, AI driven traffic optimization engines, called VeloBrain and VeloRain into EOS.

So, you know How interesting.

Yeah. And hinting that they're gonna add some SaaS class security as well and basically prep this whole platform, this integrated solution for, like, you know, the future of AI era traffic. And I do think that that we're gonna see more AI traffic over the WAN, whether it's data being sent back to train models. So it from, like, points of presence all over, which is, you know, I don't know if you wanna call that AI traffic. It's data to train AI. Sure. Or to, you know, for inference.

But it's also large volumes of traffic too.

So Large volume. Sure. So there is something, you know, to say there that it is a little bit different than regular traffic that we see today. But also in the pretraining and posttraining and and inference stages, all those stages, I think we are gonna see some more disaggregation happening as folks use continue to use foundational models, but you're gonna start to see some smaller models being used and hosted, and people are gonna be using them as a service.

I mean, I really think the idea of this AI engineer, this this term that we're hearing so much now is different than the old ML engineer where you're, like, training models and figuring out which, you know, features to to do and then evaluating it and serving up your thing to your data scientist. Right? The AI engineer now, like, they're not doing that. They're just building the apps and then grabbing from this API and this over here and this foundation model, and that's all happening over the Internet.

Mhmm.

And so, you know, whether it's super heavy ultra, I don't think it's gonna be synchronized GPU traffic per se that's happening over the Probably not over the WAN unless it's quantum computing or quantum networking. But Yeah.

No. It's not gonna be that. But it is going to be this other AI related traffic for sure, and it's gonna drive a lot of innovation moving forward. In fact, I don't know if it was Gartner or someone else, but I heard forgive me if that's incorrect.

But something like seventy, seventy five percent of investment and data center in data centers and then just data center activity overall is going to be related to AI in the coming year by the end of twenty so in about eighteen months, the end of twenty twenty six. Mhmm. Don't know if that's a hundred percent accurate. That wasn't the point of this article.

Don't quote me on that, although I just said it, so I guess you can't. But even if that's not accurate, we do see that as a trend. And so, you know, Arista's move here to not only purchase VeloCloud but integrate it into this bigger SD WAN, you know, entire platform.

It gives Arista a mature kinda like WAN edge portfolio that complements the whole data center switches, which is a big deal in AI data centers. Right? Arista is a big player there.

Mhmm.

They also have their their routing and and and Wi Fi and all that stuff. So there's certainly you know, we we just got off of talking about Cisco and HPE, and and here's Arista. You know, certainly not necessarily that level, but a viable option for an end to end solution, including, you know, AI traffic.

Mhmm. Yeah. Wrapping this one up, there's a quote here from Myriad three sixty, which is one of Arista's resellers here in North America. We all see them here at Kentik as it turns out, but their CTO, Herb Hoog, was quoted as saying, I believe Arista's acquisition of VeloCloud is a strong move that benefits customers by delivering a full suite of network solutions.

It also brings much needed clarity to existing VeloCloud users post Broadcom, reassuring them that the platform will not only be supported, but will continue to evolve. So I think that's one of the big key takeaways here. If I was a VeloCloud customer, you know, once VMware bought it, okay, that's not bad. You know, they're know, probably a vendor I'm using in other areas of my business as well.

But then once Broadcom bought it, then you have to start to wonder, like, is this going to continue to get the support in feature development and so forth that I was expecting True. From the solution. And they've probably been nervous for the last couple years since Broadcom acquired VMware, especially with some of the licensing reworking that Broadcom's been doing. So I think seeing it go over to a risk, it probably is a sigh of relief for a lot of executives that have that little cloud because now they feel like, well, we have feel feel a little better that this is gonna be supported and and be part of the portfolio that the rest is gonna continue to invest in over time.

Alright.

Moving right along, the next article is from CNBC.

Fourweave acquired a company called Core Scientific in a nine billion dollar all stock deal. And what Core Scientific does is they're actually a data center infrastructure provider. They have access, I think, to a lot of additional power that CoreWeave didn't currently have access to. So that's the reason that CoreWeave is acquiring them.

It gives them ownership of one point three gigawatts of gross power capacity in, US scientific's US data center footprint. So it gives them a lot more data center space, especially with data centers that have some access to some power. So if folks aren't familiar with CoreWeave, they're what's, now being called a NeoCloud. So there are these data center companies that specifically focus on not just they don't sell power, space, and cooling.

They actually build distributed GPU clusters and then allow people to bring in AI workloads and do their own training and inference. So they're basically renting big GPU farms. They're building and renting them out to their customers. So that's what CorWeave's business model is.

So as you may imagine, that being their business model, they can't get access to power fast enough. They can't get access to the GPUs fast enough to be able to build it. So acquiring Cor Scientific gives them access to some unused capacity, in some data centers that they can continue to grow and continue to sell to their customers.

So, Justin, you're gonna have to forgive me for this digression, but, I did grow up in the eighties.

Okay.

And when I read this article, I saw one point three gigawatts and immediately thought to myself, this is only nine one hundredths more gigawatts than needed to power the flux capacitor and the DeLorean, if you recall it back to the future. That was one point twenty one gigawatts. So why are we talking about this when a simple mister fusion from back to the future part two would is is all you need or a bolt of lightning?

Well, yeah. Bolt of lightning. Yeah. If you could figure out a way to harness a bolt of lightning and power your data center with it, then you're all set.

Then you're all set. But but really back more serious, Coreweave? Yeah. The NeoCloud is a cool new term, isn't it?

I've been seeing that pop around. You just mentioned it, and and it peaked my interest. I heard that, I don't know, a month ago, maybe six weeks ago, maybe even, you know, less than that. But when I saw that, I thought to myself, alright.

What are they talking about? And it really is this idea of these new, but pretty much hyperscalers that are offering whatever. You know, in this case, rented GPUs. Right?

And the including the networking gear and all that stuff. And so you don't need to go to AWS, Google, Microsoft, and then some of the other hyperscalers, you know, as well as far as, the rented because we're not talking about, you know, model as a service like GPT or or Claude. We're talking about rented GPUs. That's that's a different deal.

Mhmm. So, now we got CoreWeave as a new hyperscaler Neo cloud. It also signals the whole abandonment of the whole crypto thing, doesn't it? I mean, that's kind of what this was.

It was like, hey. We're done with that. Now we're focusing all that all those resources on AI. Right?

Mhmm. And so we got fresh hyperscale buyers for, you know, what we're talking about here is the networking gear, the backbone construction, the actual, you know, GPUs, but also core, we've abandoned all its leases. So what does that mean from, like, investment and, you know, with regard to real estate and and all of that? I'm not exactly sure, but that's something that I I I wanted to ask you about what your thoughts there were since you're kind of adept at the real estate thing.

Yeah. I the the abandoning of the lease thing is interesting because you'd think they need they're gonna need all that space going forward. So I'm I'm a little confused by that myself. I'm definitely gonna have to keep an eye on the additional news that comes out of that.

I mean, the idea is that there must be a cost advantage of owning real estate and, you know, megawatt and gigawatt scale substations, as opposed to leasing this out. And, I'm not sure if that's related to how you source power when you need an abundance of power in your leasing the facility as opposed to when you own it. I I'm not sure. And so it does speak to the build versus buy race, not not for, like, your AI solution, but for, you know, AI data center as well.

And then, you know, if you are leasing the facility that provides that kind of service that requires that many resources, it's not just the power, but also your, you know, your wide area network that you're bringing into it and other things and the infrastructure overall. So that was my guess. I don't really know, but I I did notice that They they got rid of literally ten billion dollars in leases, in this in this particular move.

Well, the other thing that might be behind this, Phil, is there's a tax status called, REIT, real estate, investment trust. Mhmm.

Yeah.

And a lot of your data center operates qualify as that. So if you really look at the way their their corporate structure is set up and the way their tax structure is set up, they're actually a real estate investment trust, like a fund that people can invest in for real estate. So companies like Equinix and CoreSite, some of these companies who buy space, build these data centers, and then historically prior to the AI boom, would lease them out one rack at a time to companies to come in and build their own data center, you know, compute infrastructure in. They classify themselves as a REIT because they get a good tax break based on the real estate assets and real estate portfolio that they, hold.

Now the downside of that is they can only get a certain percentage of their revenue, I believe it's twenty percent, don't quote me on that, from activities other than real estate. So if they're selling, network services, they're selling GPU time and so forth, they can only get so much percentage of the revenue from that. So Coreweave themselves is not actually classified as a REIT for that very reason. The majority of their revenues, which I think in this article, it said they already crossed over a billion dollars a quarter in revenue.

You know, so they're they're at a huge scale of four billion annually in revenue now. They can get as much of the revenue as they want from renting GPUs and they don't have to stay under that twenty percent to meet the tax code because they're not classified as a REIT. So that may have something to do with why they got some of these leases that they let go because they may be changing their structure slightly for for tax purposes. That's the only other thing I can think of.

Mhmm.

So next, we have from the Google Cloud website dated July ninth, that's today, Google has announced the Sol Subsea Cable, a new transatlantic fiber optic system connecting the US, Bermuda, the Azores, and Spain. And this complements the existing NuVim cable, and, Sol will enhance network capacity, of course, reliability, latency for Google Cloud and presumably AI services globally. The landing point here in the US is in Palm Coast, Florida and, Santander, Spain on the other side with tell Telseyas's, assistance. Excuse me. So this cable is the only active fiber route between Florida and Europe at this point. Though there are plenty of other transatlantic cables, this does mark a a new route here, and it's part of Google's broader infrastructure expansion. The cable positions key regions, like, you know, for digital hubs, which ultimately is gonna foster economic growth, you know, more global connectivity.

But my guess is that this is gonna be a big help for AI driven innovation and moving things longer distances as we see more AI traffic over the cloud and from data center to data center, which I guess you can call the cloud as well in a sense.

Mhmm. Well, you know, what is it about undersea cables that's like catnip for network? There's still I always love a good new undersea cable, you know, investment, and I I just find it fascinating.

Like, geopolitical plays into it, technology plays into it, and just learning a lot of times these cables are connecting places and I'm like, wait. I've heard of that country, but I've gotta go look up on a map to figure out where that is. So it's just Yeah. I don't know.

There's something about it I find really fascinating. But, yeah, this one is interesting because it kinda it runs through I would call it the South Atlantic. Right? It hits Bermuda then ultimately from the US, hits Bermuda, and then ultimately winds up in Spain on the Sol route.

So, yeah, it'll be interesting to to see additional bandwidth, like you said, basically, ultimately between US and Spain, but it benefits those who live on the island of Bermuda because there's a landing point there. So it gives them better Internet access, as sort of a byproduct of Google connecting the US and Spain, like you said, presumably for transmission of workloads between their cloud regions in those two locations.

Yeah. And that's what I assume that you know? And, of course, there's likely some interactivity that's gonna happen with other organizations and with, you know, countries and things like that. But it is a Google cable, so that is something to consider.

By the way, I looked around on the Internet because this is brand new news. I did start poking around who else is saying stuff about this and almost nobody. Like, there was, like, something from the Jacksonville newspaper or something like that, Jacksonville, Florida. Couldn't find that much else. So I don't have a ton of information.

I don't have throughput and things like that, but or or time frames. But, I I Yeah.

I so the time frames is what I felt like was missing. It's like they they're announcing they're doing this. They're announcing the partnership of who all is gonna be involved in it. But is this as we know, these cables take a long time. Right? Mhmm. By the time they get all the permits and you get the ship out there to bury them, so I don't what do you think?

Ten years maybe it'll be before this thing actually goes live or Could be.

I mean, it's gonna take a few years just to do the environmental surveys.

Mhmm.

And then, you know, some of it's gonna be regulated by the FCC. Homeland Security might get involved as well a little bit. You know, you have the ICPC, the International Commission on oh my goodness.

I don't remember the what the acronym stands for, but you're gonna have, of course, other countries involved.

But I think because you're sourcing this from Google rather than a consortium of companies and countries, that might smooth things over and make it a little faster. I also wonder if there's going to be expedited timetables if they keep dropping the the term AI in there and all the, in all the literature that that might give, people a kick in the pants to keep moving.

So next up in an article from SDX Central, Rackspace Technology has launched Rackspace OpenStack business, a new private cloud offering aimed at, organizations with strict security and compliance needs. So, you know, think of companies like those in finance or health care, obviously, the government.

It's built on open source, OpenStack, and designed to deliver dedicated resources. It's fully managed and supports high performance workloads. When I say high performance, what's the first thing that comes to your mind, Justin?

Quantum? Is that where we're going with this?

Quantum? No. No. No. Two little letters that we love to talk about all the time.

A Yeah.

Yeah. I. Okay. Yeah.

So when I see high performance workloads, I'm thinking high AI training, probably high frequency trading and things like that if you're a Wall Street person. And this expands on Rackspace's existing OpenStack flex offering. So, you know, this is gonna allow businesses out there utilizing the service to modernize securely. Right?

That's important. And because it's vendor neutral, you don't have that vendor lock in. You know, there is this thing now, and I keep seeing the term sovereign cloud and sovereign cloud services popping up. So I think this fits into that, you know, that rising demand for sovereign cloud services and and, you know, where you're moving data around in the world.

But in any case, Rackspace is, reporting a seven percent year over year revenue decline. So, hopefully, you know, this helps with that.

Yeah. I mean, Rackspace has had an open stack based private cloud offering for some time. Right? I think what's new here in this article looks like, like you said, Bill is the high performance.

The article does go on towards the end to give away your punch line, which is they're unveiling the launch of GPU as a service offering, announced it late last year, but that, presumably fits into this. Right? They're using NVIDIA h one hundreds in their SJC three data center located in Silicon Valley in California for the launch of this. So, yeah, presumably, the new what's really new here is that they're gonna start offering GPU as a service similar to, like, CoreWeave we were talking about earlier where companies can bring in their own workloads and do the training and the inference on the OpenStack based infrastructure that Rackspace has in their data centers.

Because like you said, there's they've been a struggle a little bit to keep up, right, with, some of the other hosting companies that are out there, both private cloud and then obviously the the hyperscaler public cloud environment. So they're getting in the AI game, it appears.

Yeah. And if they can price it right, maybe that'll help with this, decline in revenue, you know, in spite of having decent, you know, service booking. So we shall see.

So last but not least, and in the words of Monty Python, and if you're new in the UK, it's Monty Python. Excuse me. Now for something a little different. From Substack, the White House is reportedly preparing to announce a major change to TSA screenings.

Not tech related, but Justin and I travel quite a bit. Many of you do as well. So travelers, even without TSA precheck, which is what I live and breathe by, and also, what is that called now? CLEAR?

That helps a lot.

Yep. We'll soon we'll soon be allowed to keep their shoes on during airport security checks. So internal TSA sources say that, updated protocols were already circulating within the organization, but public confirmation is still pending. So the move is probably driven by political pressure rather than, like, security concerns.

And it really does mark one of the biggest TSA procedure shifts in over twenty years ever since, if you remember in two thousand one, the shoe bomber incident, and then that's what sparked marked, you know, all of us having to take our shoes off. Now there is a catch. Only those lacking real ID compliant identification might still be required to remove their shoes. So we'll, you know, get a get a real ID or get TSA precheck anyway.

And the change should take effect, it says here, as early as July seventh, and today is July ninth. So I gotta go and look and double check that if it's if it's taking effect. I haven't seen any new news about this.

Well and you may still get random screening. Right? Those of us who have TSA pre check are probably familiar with the random screening. We have to go through and follow the non pre check rules anyway.

So it's not, not a hundred percent. There may still be some exceptions to when you may have to take off your shoes. But, you know, I was reading another article this morning, Phil, about this topic, and they were saying that the reason that TSA is making this change is since the incident with the shoe bomber like you were talking about. There's been very few incidents of explosives being hidden in shoes.

So the the thinking is, that's not particular attack vector that they're super concerned about versus some other things. So if they can focus the security screening on other particular more likely attack vectors, that'll hopefully hopefully keep people, safer and allows people to more quickly get through the checkpoints without having to take off their shoes and put them back on, which is a welcome change for passengers who who don't travel with precheck.

Yeah. I will say, though, even without precheck and I I I have precheck, and I always, you know, go through the precheck line and everything. And, but I I had to travel recently with my family and my my kids. My three kids don't have precheck, and I'm not gonna get it for them.

So I'm with them, of course. I didn't make them go separately. We still breeze through even in larger busy airports. I I think, you know, the difference between the TSA years ago and today is is just phenomenal, the improvements.

And it's annoying. It's a pain in the neck. I get it. I get it. But it isn't as terrible as it used to be.

I remember when it was, like, the butt of every joke.

The the only annoying thing for me is that I have a particular belt. It's a ratchet belt, and the buckle is, like, heavy, solid metal. And I love this belt, but I do have to take that off. But the thing is that I I'm I already know what I'm doing.

So I, like, quickly take that off, stick it in my laptop bag before I even get into the line. So anyway, not tech news, but I thought I'd bring that to your attention if you're a frequent traveler. And, and if you're not, you know, go out there and get a real idea. If you don't have one, consider PreCheck and, make your life a little easier.

So, let's now move on to some upcoming events. Summertime is a little slower, with events in general, conferences, a lot of folks on vacation taking some time off. I do have a few for you, though. Starting with the Ohio networking user group this July tenth in Cleveland, so that's tomorrow night.

And for those of you listening to this podcast when it first comes out, tonight, we have the Florida Network and User Group in Jacksonville, Florida, also July tenth. And then we have the AWS Summit in New York City next Wednesday on July sixteenth. This is not AWS's biggest event like re:Invent, but it is a big event.

I'm not exactly sure how many people, twelve thousand, fifteen thousand people Oh, that's still a big event. Have run the it's still a big event over in the Javits Center in New York, so that'll be a lot of fun.

And we had the Iowa networking user group in Des Moines on July seventeenth, and I believe, Justin, you're attending that one?

Yeah. I'm not gonna be presenting around the panel or anything, but I am gonna go and attend. Andy Whitaker, who's the local organizer, asked me to to come. So I'm gonna go check it out and participate and, support the work he's doing up there.

Great. Yeah. And as we get into August and September, I already see the list of events growing very quickly. So we'll have a lot more updates for you soon on those.

Some places where I'll be speaking, Justin, I assume you as well. So, for the USNUA events, please go check out the USNUA dot com or go check out the website, USNUA.com, to find an upcoming, NUG in your area. And, if you happen to be in New York next week wait. Actually, Justin, are you gonna be in New York next week for that?

No. I'm not coming out for that one. So Oh, okay.

I forgot to ask you. Sorry.

We'll not be able to see you in person yet.

So I'll be there. So if you happen to be in New York next week at the AWS Summit in New York City, come say hi. And, for now, though, thanks so much for listening. Those are the headlines for today. Bye bye.