You can’t secure what you can’t see — time to shine a light on APIs

Over the last several years, we’ve witnessed the rapid rise of APIs as the defacto interface for applications. New services and platforms are often developed with an API-first design philosophy with the APIs as the first class interface and the UI and/or CLI built on top of that API. The underlying reasons for this trend are simple:

• Automation: APIs make it a lot easier to automate the day to day.
• Componentization: Breaking down an application into multiple services communicating over APIs has benefits in both…

Or, How Networking Got Its Groove Back :)

The last 18 months have seen several changes in the networking market. Just in the last year or so, we’ve seen rapid consolidation in the industry: Silverpeak (acquired by HPE), CloudGenix (SDWAN, acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Cumulus (Top of Rack Switching, acquired by NVIDIA), Metaswitch (Networking software, acquired by Microsoft), Affirmed (Telco software, acquired by Microsoft). There have also been several new startups, as well as existing startups that have raised significant capital (Arrcus, Aviatrix, Alkira, DriveNets).

So, why this renewed activity in the network infrastructure market after several years of…

While it’s tempting to make fun of it, the reality is that Excel is a pretty good tool to consolidate the data from your network in one place, analyze it, generate reports, and much more. Unfortunately, importing data from network appliances into Excel is a laborious, manual process and keeping the data up-to-date is almost impossible.

What’s New?

Three trends have come together to make Excel, a trusted workhorse, even more useful in network operations:

1. Single API endpoint (centralized management): Next generation networking solutions, like Avi’s platform, have a distributed architecture with as-a-Service semantics. This means I no longer have to go…

In the past couple of years, I’ve had a chance to speak with over 150 customers about our technology and their use cases. These incredible teams, at the front lines of IT, are our partners in innovation. I’ve learned some surprising things from them, even some that I considered counter-intuitive at the time — but they’ve helped us build what customers are truly asking for.

As we count down the days to our BIG ANNOUNCEMENT, I want to tell you three short stories that have had a profound impact on what we’re doing.

First Story — Empowering Users

I was visiting the Head of Network…

“I checked with my champion, deal is still on for Q2”

This might no longer be enough in uncertain times…

One of the first things that happens, especially in mid to large enterprises, is that signing authority begins drifting further up in the org, even for the same amount. This is due to a combination of two dynamics that rear their ugly head in downturns:

• Spend freezes: “need to check with my boss”, and
• CYA: “don’t want this decision pinned on just me!”

Case in point — I spoke to the CIO of a large bank this morning. Normally, he’d…

Today Pensando Systems came out of stealth announcing an industry leading platform that helps enterprises and cloud providers build high performance data centers with security and observability built into the infrastructure.

Bringing web scale infrastructure benefits to enterprise and cloud providers has been a key investment theme at Lightspeed for the last decade. Companies like Nutanix, Nicira, Avi Networks enabled their customers to build highly automated, software-defined stacks to run their applications. Pensando Systems continues to raise the bar on this theme by providing high performance networking, security, and monitoring services for applications running in enterprise or cloud datacenters.

We’ve…

If you can’t have fun with physics…
…you aren’t a very fun person!

- The Physics Show

One of the many advantages of living in the SF Bay Area is the easy access to an amazing diversity of things you can do with your kids. Here’s one focused on those of us trying to instill a love of STEM in our kids.

Frank Cascarano, while teaching physics at Foothill College, puts together The Physics Show multiple times each year, pulling together wonderful live physics experiments. He picks different areas to focus on each year — this year his team focused…

So many books, so little time…

Lots of travel this year, so got quite a bit of reading done. Here are 5 of my favorites in 2018:

High growth Handbook — By Elad Gil: Elad has worked with companies Airbnb, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, and others. In the book he shares the patterns he’s observed and also interviews folks like Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, and Aaron Levie.

Boys in the Boat — By Daniel James Brown: You want to read a book on teamwork, trust, excellence in the face of great adversity… then this is the one. …