Chris Grundemann, Eric Bell (EB)
Chris Grundemann 00:00
You know, I mean, so going back to that, you know, 1850 like second industrial revolution, you know, viewpoint, there were definitely craftsmen who had gotten really, really good with a number three file to get, you know, a barrel to fit onto a stock, right? And that specific skill set, you know, once we, you know, when we met, when we started mass producing stuff, and got, you know, manufacturing tolerances down to the point where you didn't need that craftsman in the loop anymore, that one craftsman job maybe was no longer as valuable as it had been before, or maybe wasn't even needed. And so there was a shift, right? And I think we'll probably see a shift in networking as well, maybe not quite as drastic again, because I think there's, you know, it's not a perfect
EB 00:58
analogy. Welcome to the Baxtel podcast, where we uncover the cloud from the data center. I'm your host, Eric Bell, and today we're joined by Chris grenderman. Chris is a managing director of grunderman technology solutions and founder of full control, and he's the founder of the imposter syndrome syndrome network podcast. He's authored two books. He holds eight patents in network technology and is an author of RFC. He once and I found this on the internet. Actually, AI found this on the internet. He once ran for office for the Colorado State Senate. That'd be interesting to hear about. Chris, I really appreciate you joining us for our second episode ever. Welcome. Hey
Chris Grundemann 01:42
Eric, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. I'm glad to be here. I tried to combine those two statements into one that didn't work.
EB 01:50
It's all good. Earlier this year, you coordinated a survey at NANOG. It was a state of the network automation survey. Did you find anything interesting? Or can you summarize that a
Chris Grundemann 02:01
bit? Yeah, so I'm actually in the middle of kind of going through the data and graphing stuff out and doing a bunch of analysis on it. I'm going to present the results back to the next NANOG meeting in in June, in Seattle. So, but I mean, the highlight is that although we've been talking about network automation, at least publicly, right? There's lots of blog posts, there's lots of white papers, there's tons of presentations at NANOG, at ripe, at apricot, at, you know, lack No, I mean all the all the NOGs, all the nuffs everywhere we get a chance, we're talking about network automation, and have been for years, right? And to me, this goes all the way back to, like, 2011 I want to say when, like, open flow came out, and like SDN hit the waves, and everybody's like, Oh my goodness, like SDN is amazing. It's gonna change the world. And we talked a lot about SDN. People wrote books about SDN. Most of what people wanted from SDN was just automation. And here we are 2023 and from what I can tell from the survey, as well as just talking to people, we still have not done that much Network Automation. I mean, there are definitely caveats to that. There are some some networks that have just gone full in and have automated the crap out of stuff. There are some really good automation tools out there that have been used by some folks, although, you know, it kind of looks like a lot of the automation tools are, you know, just talking to people and not gaining traction yet? We'll see. It's interesting. SD, Wan probably is one of the most successful automation tools, platforms, technical methodologies so far, at least in the enterprise space. And that's but that's all showed up in the survey. So you know, a big part of the survey said that people you know are not doing as much automation as I think they could. Companies are not spending money on automation. They're not dedicating engineers or budget to automation, at least, you know. And again, this is generalized, right, right? This is a cost. You know. You know, several dozen folks who answered the survey. I think we ended up with like 72 respondents, mostly from different companies and kind of across the world, mostly folks in the US, and that's a big part of it, right? Is that, you know, there is some automation going on. People are still doing some scripting here and there. The scripting has advanced to some degree. And there are some folks doing end to end, full blown automation. But, you know, one striking thing was for like, Hey, we're 90% automated, or we're 100% automated, zero responses to either one of those. Everything else fell at 80% or below, and the heavier weight was below 50% so I think the difference to me in the last couple of years is that we've moved from, you know, people were talking about automation, but no one was doing anything. And again, General, generalizing here, you know, very, very, very few people were doing anything about automation four or five years ago, and now people, at the very least, are dabbling. They're getting more aware of it, and they believe that they should or need to, in a lot of cases, I think. And again, I'm generalizing. I'm using some terms here. I'm not putting percentages and things in there, but generally, I think that's been. Shift over the last couple years, as we went from talking about automation, but no one really wanting to do it, to now we're talking about it, and people kind of sheepishly know they should be doing it, and, like, actually believe that this is something that that's going to happen and that
EB 05:13
needs to happen, I see, and it's been, I think it was 2003 when I last had my enable on a network, and so it's been a while since I've been in there configuring. At that time, it was all manual. So it sounds like Network Automation, at least at a high level, can span the gamut from scripts, simple scripts, or perhaps a web interface, a GUI web interface, where you enter, you know, configure a customer, and then it will go out to the network and provision that customer. Perhaps, I'm guessing, but I'm sure that with with the advent of more advanced AI, would that be under the umbrella of network automation?
Chris Grundemann 06:00
Or it definitely can be. I think there are places and we've seen, you know, again, kind of an enterprise tooling space, maybe, maybe somewhat on the service writer space. You know this, this kind of latest buzz word is AI ops. So AI is definitely getting in there in certain ways. I think it makes sense that there will be this future where, you know, artificial intelligence, machine learning of different sorts, will be part of this kind of closed loop automation cycle, I think in a lot of ways. I mean, AI is very interesting. It's just one more tool, in my opinion, at this point, especially from a networking perspective, I think from a network automation perspective, we are essentially where physical manufacturing was in around 1850 1860 Right? Like we are primed for the second industrial revolution. And what I mean by that is, if you look at like the way things were manufactured in the early 1800s versus the late 1800s in the US, but also in the UK and around the world to some degree. Before this revolution, everything was handmade and handcrafted, right? Rifles are one of the examples. I don't necessarily love war or killing people, but it's a really good example of kind of manufacturing. It was going on a lot at that time. And you know, rifles were actually there was a craftsman involved in every step of manufacturing a rifle, to the point where, when pieces came out of, like the forge, or the standard, you know, whatever these, there was machines involved in helping make them, helping make the rifles. But when, when the piece came out, it would have to be, like, filed and polished. And like there was, there was a, you know, hands on process of, like, really crafting this thing to fit together. And so when you put a rifle together, if you took that rifle apart, you had to put it back together with the exact same parts, or they wouldn't fit even two rifles made by the same company on the same day. If you took them apart and swapped the parts, you could not make it work, because every piece was like handcrafted and bespoke. And I think, you know, hopefully, you know, in this analogy, you're starting to hear like the way that we design networks. You know, every engineer on the CLI configures things slightly differently. Maybe they're literally following the same architectural plan, but they're using a slightly different way to do that, in the syntax. And so these things are a little bit different. They don't quite fit together, right. And I think that's where we're at. And so I think standardization and automation are the next steps. And I think as we do that, we'll see, you know, potentially a big shift in networking across the board when we kind of, you know, put the assembly line in place, right, and actually start, you know, mass producing networks. And maybe it's not mass production. I mean, the analogy is not quite right, because maybe networks are more like railroads than they are like, you know, guns or sewing machines. But I think there's something to be learned there about where we're at in history,
EB 08:50
right? I mean, there's the legend of the 10x software engineer, software development engineer, you know, where one developer is worth 1010 other developers, right? They're just that good because they're that efficient. Their architecture, the way they build the software, is that much more efficient, and that sort of thing. Now, with the advent of AI, or generative AI, average developers can be, you know, 10x developers, at least, that's the theory, right? You know, at least they can be just as fast as a 10x developer. Do you see the same thing happening with network operations and network engineering and with that, and this is probably even a, even a more complex question, but will, will, will jobs, network engineering, jobs disappear. You know, when you make network engineers more efficient with AI and scripting, yeah,
Chris Grundemann 09:47
so, I mean, a couple things on that. So, one, you know, so, you know, just back to the AI questions in so many places, in so many networks, like basic you. So automation is all is, like, is all that's needed, right? I mean, like, like, yeah. I mean, AI is great, and there's a lot of uses for it in a lot of places, especially with, like, you know, the, especially the new stuff everybody's getting excited about, like, chat, G, BT, and natural language models and large language models and generative AI being able to, like, make chat bots even better, right? And there's, there's definitely something interesting there about that. But, you know, we still, like again, like we haven't done the standardization yet. We haven't even done, like the best basic mechanization yet. So, you know, to me, for networking, we've got a we can do a lot of good before we even really need to play too much with AI, not, not that AI doesn't have a place, but we can do a lot of good with without, with much more basic tools that just haven't been used yet. And then onto the jobs thing. I think, you know, there's a couple things that are happening, right? One is that networks have become more and more and more fundamental to like everything we do, and they proliferated and they become more complex. There's more devices making more connections to more other endpoints. You know, all the time, it's much more fuzzy. You know, where one network begins and one network ends, like interconnection is really proliferated. There's potentially like IOT networks that are, you know, working within a larger network that is then connected to, you know, maybe a Wi Fi network for the employees, and then maybe that's connected out to multiple different cloud service providers for your infrastructure as a service platform, and you have a bunch of SaaS platforms. And so, you know, I think with with the growth and importance and scale and scope of networking, I think that we need all the tools we can just to, like, not lose our minds. So I don't see, you know, jobs going away anytime soon. I do think there's probably shifts that'll happen, right? And, you know, I mean, so going back to that, you know, 1850 like second industrial revolution, you know, viewpoint, there were definitely craftsmen who had gotten really, really good with a number three file to get, you know, a barrel to fit onto a stock, right? And that specific skill set, you know, once we, you know, when we met, when we started mass producing stuff and got, you know, manufacturing tolerances down to the point where you didn't need that craftsman in the loop anymore, that one craftsman job maybe was no longer as valuable as it had been before, or maybe wasn't even needed. And so there was a shift, right? And I think we'll probably see a shift in networking as well, maybe not quite as drastic again, because I think there's, you know, it's not a there's, you know, it's not a perfect analogy, but we've already seen this happen before, right? Like at the top echelons of network engineering, you see these the, you know, the people who move from industry to vendors and back again, right? So there's a number of engineers who have kind of moved. They maybe they worked for Cisco or Juniper or Rista or brocade, and then they invent some new protocol, some no weight, new way of doing something. And then they go out and work for service writers and deploy that thing. And then once that's deployed, they kind of come back in, right? And, you know, and not that everybody's gonna be at that level. Not everyone's gonna be a Distinguished Engineer at Comcast, right? But this kind of shifting has already been happening in a lot of people's careers, and I think we'll just continue to see that. So if you're really, really, really attached to, like, you know, one specific version of one vendor, CLI and like, that's how you've built your whole career, then, yeah, that's a fragile position to be in, right? If you know version two of XYZ vendors, you know, x2, 3000 you know, software, and that's, that's the only thing you know, that's very fragile. And so I think we're going to be adding different skills and different pieces to that, for sure.
EB 13:31
Yeah, yeah. The telegraph operator needed to be flexible and learn new skills as as the telegraph kind of phased out and the telephone kind of phased in. There's a shift there. And I think people, the technology is moving faster than ever. And I think you just really need to be really flexible and continue to learn, yeah, I mean,
Chris Grundemann 13:51
hopefully you got into technology in the first place, right? I mean, like that was, I mean, that's what I signed up for. Was never getting bored,
EB 13:58
right, right? And I guess, yeah, you can, you can get set in your ways and learn, you know, just, just stay with what you know, but it might hurt you in the long run if that technology runs past you. Yeah, interesting. Let's see So partly where networks, you know, intersect with datacenters, right? Your expertise is more in the networking side is, is open IX and your, your, you know, you're involved with the open IX organization, but do you have any updates of what open IX has been up to in the last last year or so,
Chris Grundemann 14:40
yeah, yeah. So, yeah. So, maybe more than last year, you know. So, a couple of things. So one open Ix is now oh IX. We went through a rebrand, and wanted to kind of keep continuity there, which is why it's now OI X. But like a few other you know, brands that have gone before us, it doesn't really mean anything anymore. It's just just. You know, just OI x is the name now, and part of that was because we do see, you know, the role changing a little bit. Obviously, Oi X still holds standards for fair and non discriminatory access to interconnection facilities, right? And so there's oi x1 which is a standard for Internet exchange operators. And then there's OEX two, which is for datacenter operators. And again, both of those really talk about, not necessarily the technical details, but how are you transparent and open about the way you do things and how things work and how customers can come on board? And it's just about, again, openness and transparency in general, and then making sure that things are fair and non discriminatory. The newest standard is oi x3 which is for edge datacenters. And again, this kind of, and again, it's, you know, it's not the whole package for an entire edge data center. It's really looking at the interconnection piece of it. But you can get your, you know, Edge facility certified with oax Three to show that you are, you know, not only an edge data center, but you're operating in a way that is, again, you know, following these friend policies and kind of open and transparent and making sure that, you know, interconnection can actually flourish in your facility. So the rebrand and oi x3 are kind of big ones outside of that. You know, again, it's been a few, a couple years now at least, but all of the OI X standards are ANSI standards. So OI x is an accredited standards body by ANSI, which happened, you know, in the last few years anyway, and in the OEX standards are our ANSI standards as well, which is pretty cool. I think, cool.
EB 16:38
Good. Good. Yeah. You know, interconnection is robust, but also fragile. At the same time you know you have, and every any one city you have, likely just one or two, maybe three buildings that really, you know, conduct that interconnection for that region. And so you don't want to have any one company, you know, kind of squash that, right? I mean, perhaps their policies, they can. We've seen, over time, where we're we're interconnection facilities have been kind of slowly replaced, you know, you have the May, May east, may West, you know, may east, it kind of slowly transitioned over to Equinix, Ashburn, you know, that sort of thing. So, but it takes a long time, and there's a bit of pain involved with it in the industry to transition. But I think the open acts helps to, it sounds like it helps to guide, you know, guide the industry in a way, guide the participants.
Chris Grundemann 17:34
Yeah, yeah. And as far as those trend lines go to, I guess that's another thing that's fairly new up on the oax.org website there is a tool called the interconnection navigator, which was built by the oax team, which is basically in a lot of ways. It's kind of like a visual front end for peering DB data. But what it does is it also looks back in time, so you can look at trends and things. So if you want to see how the interconnection market has changed in a specific area over time. You can chart that all out through this tool, which is kind of neat, and just look at how things happen. It looks at you can look at it at the continent level. You can drill into a specific continent. You can drill into specific countries, specific cities. You can look at like number of ASNs, number of ports, sizes of ports. Again, it's basically all the peering DB data, but it's historical, and it'll graph it kind of in a lot of different
EB 18:24
ways. For you, interesting. I have to check that out. I didn't know peering dB, or at least something's capturing the changes over time. It sounds like interesting. Okay, it looks like, speaking of peering interconnection, datacenters, that sort of thing, it looks like you've founded last year, full control. You tell us a little bit about that.
Chris Grundemann 18:44
Yeah, so full control. And I'll say it's F, U, L, L, C, T, L, because I always say full control. And people go look for, like, full control, like all written out in a word. It's, it's CTL, which kind of harkens back to, there's an old, there's a Unix tool that used that CTL moniker and that kind of Unix philosophy is a big part of what drives what we're doing. So myself and Matt Griswold, Griz, who happens to be the architect of the interconnection navigator, as well as the architect and maintainer of peering dB, him and I have gotten together to kind of take a bunch of software that he's written over the last 15 years and dust it off, in some ways, open source as much of it as we can, and then we've also set it up as a platform. So it's like a SaaS offering, and it's basically intent based networking. So all the network automation stuff we were talking about, but really, really specifically focused on interconnection. And so the two big tools that are available right now, one is called IX control, and one is called peer control. You can see the naming convention kind of playing through there. IX control, as you might guess, is an internet exchange point. In an Internet exchange platform, it basically automates route server creation and configuration and maintenance, as well as member management and. For an internet exchange point, and then peer control is kind of the other side of that coin. In some ways. It's for networks who do interconnection. And it basically has a workflow manager to, if you're looking for peering relationships, there's actually an email workflow manager in there to like, you know, have that conversation and connect person to person with other networks to find out you know where you can connect and how you can connect, or to negotiate those agreements. And then the main core of it, though, beyond that workflow manager, is an automation tool, again, to basically automate configuration of BGP. And so it now works for bilateral peering, for multilateral peering, for transit, for transport, p and i anything you're doing with BGP, you know, particularly EBGP, we don't have constructs in there for, like, internal meshes and route servers and stuff, our route reflectors and things like that. But as far as, like, EBGP connections go, for interconnection between your network and someone else's, it'll handle all that configuration. And so the idea there is, you know, kind of going back to your point, you know, I don't think that there's any risk of taking people's jobs away. I think that from what I can tell, especially on the interconnection front, for so many people, for so many companies, BGP is still a four letter word, and finding CCIE or J and CIE or whatever, folks who really understand BGP and interconnection and traffic engineering is really, really, really tough, and it's really, really scary for a lot of companies, but it can benefit both them and the networks that they connect to, to, you know, get a little bit better at some of this. And so we're hoping that this software will help people be able to kind of take that leap and really, kind of look at, oh, wait a minute, like I'm connecting to maybe a NAS vendor and an SD Wan vendor and, like, three cloud vendors, and I've got, you know, employees working from home all over the world, like I actually probably need an interconnection strategy. We may not be able to help with the actual strategy of figuring all that out, that you probably still need, you know, somebody to, you know, maybe a consultant, or somebody on the team, to really understand kind of how and where to interconnect, but then actually getting those configurations done, we can help
EB 22:00
with that. Wow, yeah, when I was back in 2003 the last time I had enable one of my expertises was in BGP and in configuring sessions with other peers, right? And I remember there's always a fear of God in me for misconfiguring and leaking a full table to peers, right? And I don't know, I don't think it happens as often anymore, but I think that it sounds like, perhaps, you know, peer control. Peer control would, would help, not enable you to leak, you know, because I know that was one of my biggest fears, is turn up the connection and actively, you know, advertise in a full table, rather than just just in our routes.
Chris Grundemann 22:45
Well, that's exactly right. And that's definitely the things too, is, you know, a automation platform like this, and a 10 based automation platform like this. It allows someone to come in, right, a BGP architect, to come in and set policy and say, Hey, here's how we're going to do things. And then it allows a, you know, essentially, almost infinitely sized team, however you want to do it, you want to hand it over for you want to hand it over to provisioners. You want to hand it over to tier one. Knock like whoever you need, who don't necessarily need to understand BGP policy and order of operation. So I accidentally muted that was fun. You need to understand all that stuff you you just, you know, say, Okay, I want to connect these two things together, and then the machine knows all the policy and all the configuration that goes into that to make it happen in a safe way, right? We've built in RPKI and being able to do like, row validation, all that stuff, if you want it. So, yeah, exactly right. It kind of takes the fear out of it,
EB 23:35
indeed. So question in regards to it looks changing the subject just slightly in a bit. So it looks like you had you're introduced to the IPv six Hall of Fame. Is that? Is that the case?
23:50
Yes.
EB 23:52
And did that come with a trophy? Or who did you think in your acceptance speech?
Chris Grundemann 23:58
Yeah, no, it's pretty, I lack luster is the wrong term. It's a pretty just like, you know, I was, I was told that I was inducted, and that was kind of it. My name's on a website somewhere, so, you know, take it for what it is, I guess.
EB 24:11
Yeah, well, I, I'm not inducted into, into any Hall of Fame. Yeah, that could be a crowning thing. Because, I mean, I don't think many people are, at least on our level, or our industry, are in a hall of fame. And so for free in Hall of Fame, that's pretty good. And, yeah, and question in terms of, this is a little bit more of a random question, but looks like you have a ladder in the background there. What is that ladder for?
Chris Grundemann 24:42
Yeah, so there is a ladder behind me. It's a step ladder because on my move my webcam, you can see there's actually books up there. Oh my, oh, cool. The ceiling in here is is higher than I can reach, and there's books all the way up.
EB 24:57
Nice, classic ladder. Library ladder. I like it. It
Chris Grundemann 25:01
doesn't like, it doesn't like slide around the room, which I think would be pretty cool. Someday, maybe I'll have a house where I have, like, a ladder that's on a wheel that I can like, you know, slide and like, I think there's a movie or something, maybe Sound of Music where they're like, singing and like sliding around on ladders in the library. Someday, recreate that, I'll have a full life, you know,
EB 25:19
awesome. Yes, when full control goes public, sure you can, you can buy that, that house with that library in it. One question in terms of IPv four versus IPv six, it seems like the industry, you know, even when I was a network engineer, the industry was transitioning to IPv six. It's still happening now, I guess it's a loaded question to say, why haven't we transitioned yet? But do you think we'll ever transition? And maybe that's a loaded question itself, but it's a difficult thing. I think to transition to IPv six. For
Chris Grundemann 26:00
me, it's super, super tough, right? There's a really good book, I think, oh, what's her name? Barbara Van schweck, well, I'll have to get you the actual book and, like, put in the show notes or something, because, but, but she wrote a book. She's brilliant lady, and she wrote a book called, I think it's called Internet architectures. And it goes into, like, you know, kind of like a little bit more academic and theoretical look at, like, how all this stuff kind of works together. And again, I forget all the terms. I'm terrible at attribution and paraphrasing. But essentially, you know, Internet Protocol. The Internet protocol itself is, you can think of it as kind of this, like thin stem, almost like on an hourglass. And above IP it broadens out into what would maybe like a wine cup or something. But then it also does that below also does that below. And so the whole idea is that IP is this protocol that is a like, it's like a translation protocol, almost. And so IP is really, really, really cool, because you can use almost any protocol below it in the stack, meaning what's on the wire. So right now, we almost always use Ethernet, but that doesn't have to be the case, right? Fiber channel works just as good. And there's other things that work fine too, right? There's other layer two protocols and layer one protocols, right? The layer one stuff is the one where we still do a lot of different stuff. You can use Wi Fi, you can use fiber, you can use copper, right? This, this, there's this physical protocols that have to be used on these different mediums, and none of that matters, because IP just takes it all right? And then the same thing happens above where, yeah, we usually use TCP and UDP at that layer four, but it goes beyond that up above right now, a lot of what we do on the internet is HTTP, but it doesn't have to be, right? We also get to use SSL, and so we do encrypted stuff. And there's also all kinds of other, you know, protocols out there for video and voice and even messaging. And, you know, like I said, we've kind of come to HTTP in a lot of ways, but that could change at any time. And the reason is because, again, IP is this, like, it's like, almost translating protocol there, right? So that's what makes it really, really powerful, but it also makes it really, really fragile in trying to change it, or maybe not fragile, but just, it's just tough to change, because everything in the whole stack above and the whole stack below is dependent on this IP layer. And so then when you're trying to swap out the IP layer, that becomes really, really difficult. And so that's the biggest challenge with IPv six, is it's not backwards compatible. And other than that, it's a great protocol. There's a few other things, right? Like extension headers were a great idea on paper that maybe isn't that great in the real world. You know, one of the challenges, I think, with IPv six is that it was designed when they, when we first, when people first realized IPv four wasn't big enough, and that this experiment had escaped the lab, right? VINT CERF and Bob Connor, like crap, the internet's taking off. There's not enough addresses. There's other people involved, obviously, as well. And they said, We need a different protocol with more addresses. And this all happened, what like 2025, years ago, right? And so at the time, they saw that v4 wasn't going to be enough to handle a global internet. But at the time, the deployment was very, very small, and so there was no reason for backwards compatibility. And it was also a different world where security and some other things weren't as important as they are now on a global commercial internet. And so that's one of the biggest challenges I 56 is that it's almost as old as IPv four, and you see some of that age and some of the things that happened with it today. That's a lot of that's been ironed out. And so it really just comes down to, okay, how you know, how hard is it to to build a new network, a new IP network alongside your existing IP network? Now, dragging your feet and not doing it is part of the problem, too. This probably could have been done if people had just done it, but, you know, on a business side, you've got to have a reason.
EB 29:32
It seems to me, though, and I'm again, pretty distant to this, to this, because I know a lot, there are a lot of passionate people on both sides. But it seems to me that it's IPv six is like doing a new language. I mean, subnetting in IPv four is fairly easy, it seems right. You know, some somewhat easy, right? Maybe,
29:53
yeah, it's more concept. Yeah, it's more conceptual.
EB 29:55
I can see it, and I can understand, okay, that's a slash 28 That's a slash 24 it's, you know, I can see it and understand it. And it's not necessarily from a math perspective, but I just it's more intuitive to me. And perhaps, maybe, if I look at IPv six and work with IPv six more, it might
Chris Grundemann 30:16
be intuitive. I think it's a familiarity thing,
EB 30:19
yeah, but when you get to alphanumeric, it feels hard,
Chris Grundemann 30:24
harder, yeah, I mean hex, Hex does definitely open up the field a little bit, right? It feel, it feels differently, but you learn where the nipple boundaries are, and the other thing is again. So going back to, you know, let's stop banging rocks together and use some tools. You know, have an IPAM, like, you know, why are you subnetting even after before, in your head or on a spreadsheet, right? Like, you know, get, you know, write or buy or use, you know, find a free, open source like, like, a decent IP address manager, and let it do subnetting for you, and set up the policies. And, like, you know, let the tools work for you a little bit more. I think that's part of the problem, too, right? And problem too, right? And that's one thing that'll help with IPv six just as much as any other
EB 31:06
networking problem. And so maybe that, you know, kind of tie it to the themes earlier that we talked about, maybe it's when we use more network automation, is when there'd be more adoption with IPv six. Maybe we're less reliant on manual, very true configuration for that. So curious. So let's move on to the to the last section I know we need to wrap up pretty soon. And I would love if you could, you know, give, give a pick or two, you know, kind of a top pick that you find useful in your life, that other other people here listening might find useful in their life.
Chris Grundemann 31:45
Yeah, so I'll tell you, I think you know for me, one of the most useful things in my life is my morning routine. And that may sound pedestrian, I don't know, but you know for me, so you know, I basically have a set time that I want to be in, sitting down in front of my computer to do work at. And so I back out from there how much time I need to do all the things I want to do in the morning. For me, it's pretty long. I, you know, I wake up probably, like two and a half three hours before I want to be at work, and that's with no commute. Because, you know, I go out for a run in the morning, and I sit down and do meditation, and I sit down and do journaling, and there's, you know, a few other things I put in there. I take some vitamins and drink some green tea. And so, you know, it's not necessarily that, you know, any specific morning routine. I think everybody's probably gonna be a little bit different. But for me, I know that there's a few things that are important, right? So I think that, you know, having us, having a, you know, healthy and strong mind, having a healthy and strong body, having a healthy and strong heart and a healthy and strong soul, right, those kind of four pillars are really needed, and however you want to define those things, right? But, but they, they are, you know, they do reinforce each other in a lot of ways, I think. And so for me, a big part of the morning routine is that I get to take care of myself in all of those ways before I even start my day. And so for me, after my morning routine where I've taken care of my body and my mind and my, you know, my heart and my and my spirit. And so I've, you know, I've connected with meaning in some way. I've connected with, you know, with my feelings and my myself. In some way, I've strengthened my body and used my mind in some ways. I do some reading in the morning. Usually, I can kind of check all those things off my list, and by the time I sit down for work at seven or 8am my day is already a success. I've already done everything that I had to do that day. For me, it's all done, right? And so now, all of a sudden, my entire work day is bonus round, and I find it a really great way to live
EB 33:50
that's interesting. And I don't do that now in terms of a morning routine, I know that I feel like aspirationally, I want to have you. Have you done some, in other words, AB tests, you know, where you might have skipped out on running or skipped out on journaling because you're short on time you're traveling or something like that. And how does that affect your day? Yeah, that's
Chris Grundemann 34:10
a great question. Yeah, for sure. So I tend to So, so for me, a lot of it hooks off of the run. So, so getting up and like when I wake up bleary eyed, and I don't get out of bed like that. That moment of like willpower to, like, get out of bed, put my shoes and shorts on and go out for a run, that's the key trigger. And then after that, everything becomes really easy, because everyone wakes me up, got some good chemicals going in my in my body, the endorphins and stuff is going and everything else, then kind of just like triggers off of that. And there's a bunch of work on this around habits. There's a couple of books. One's called The Power of Habit, and one's called the, I think it's called atomic habits. Those two are really good kind of one two punch for a lot of this stuff, and they break down how habits actually work, which is like this, like, you know, there's a trigger and then there's a, you know, attention and a reward. I'm not gonna do a very good job of just. In it. But you can, like, do this, like habit stacking, where, like, the trigger for the next habit is the one before it. And so you could do this routine. So I find that the order definitely does matter. And then, you know, but, yeah, so I squeeze out certain things so, so on a day when, like, I have early meetings, I'll do a shorter run, and maybe I won't journal, because there's not quite enough time to sit down and do that, right? And, and, yeah, and, and, I mean, the whole thing I've, you know, it's, it's developed over years, right? This is definitely, like a, you know, probably really consciously thinking about morning routine and, like doing these things, is four or five years of kind of developing, you know, the one that works for me, and how it works, and and then, and then, consistency is still always an issue, right? But what I find is the more consistent I am, one I have a better day, but then, because I had a better day, it makes it easier to be more consistent with the routine, because you get reinforced and you see the good effects of it.
EB 35:57
I love it. That's good. And with that, we're about out of time. Is there? How can the audience find more about you, find more about your consulting services, that sort of thing?
Chris Grundemann 36:10
Yeah. So Chris grundyman.com, online is probably the best resource. You can also find me on LinkedIn, but chrisgrunaman.com, should have links out to everything else. Full Control is out there. Full control.com as well. But again, if you find me on if you find me on LinkedIn or go to Chris gunnerman.com that should have
EB 36:25
links out to all the rest of stuff, awesome. Well, thanks for joining today.
Chris Grundemann 36:30
Thank you. Thanks for having me. This was fun. You.