Today’s episode features an interview between guest host Ian Faison, the CEO of Caspian Studios, and David Hart, CTO and Co-Founder of NetFoundry In this interview, David discusses how NetFoundry is redefining networking in order to enable innovation, the key role networking plays in digital transformation, the critical moment IoT is undergoing, and why edge solutions need to be an ecosystem play in order to succeed.
Today’s episode features an interview between guest host Ian Faison, the CEO of Caspian Studios, and David Hart, CTO and Co-Founder of NetFoundry.
David has over 20 years of experience in the software industry and is an expert in the IoT space, having led successive generations of remote connectivity platforms and played a key role in realizing innovative connected product solutions.
In this interview, David discusses how NetFoundry is redefining networking in order to enable innovation, the key role networking plays in digital transformation, the critical moment IoT is undergoing, and why edge solutions need to be an ecosystem play in order to succeed.
Key Quotes
Sponsors
Over the Edge is brought to you by the generous sponsorship of Catchpoint, NetFoundry, Ori Industries, Packet, Seagate, Vapor IO, and Zenlayer.
The featured sponsor of this episode of Over the Edge is NetFoundry. What do IoT apps, edge compute and edge data centers have in common? They need simple, secure networking. Unfortunately, SD-WAN and VPN are square pegs in round holes. NetFoundry solves the headache, providing software-only, zero trust networking, embeddable in any device or app. Go to NetFoundry.io to learn more.
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[00:00:00] ian: [00:00:00] Welcome to over the edge. I'm Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian studios subbing in today for Metro Fierro and we have an amazing guest for you all, Dave,
[00:00:10] David: [00:00:10] I'm doing great, Ian, thank you very much. And how are you?
[00:00:13] ian: [00:00:13] I'm doing great. Excited to talk about edge and all the cool stuff you all are doing in net Foundry, and also get into your background.
[00:00:20] So let's get into it. How'd you get started in technology.
[00:00:23] David: [00:00:23] Oh, in technology, I guess, way back, my brother was really into trying to program video consoles. So we had an old Odyssey system, which was interesting, kind of piqued my interest in it. But the path that kind of sent me to where we are today really began with myself and five other guys at a company called Questro.
[00:00:44] It was back in the late 1990s. We started looking at what we called at the time appliance to business or asset to business. Saying there's a real opportunity for people to get value from connecting things out in the field. And you can see a lot of people had done it themselves, like tons [00:01:00] of Nielsen ratings.
[00:01:01] Boxes or out in, in use. And there was a lot of people connecting printers and all kinds of things, but no one had really tried to put together a platform for that. So we set about building that, and it to the point where we, we signed up some name brand customers. So we signed up GE Phillips Siemens, some others, and ultimately we were acquired by a company called Axeda.
[00:01:23] Exceed. I had a remote services platform and what services support platform. And, I started off there running their advanced development team, moving Axeda to, versus first to have software as a service application. And then from there started converting the remote service app to a more general purpose IOT platform eventually became CTO there.
[00:01:47] And, when I was CTO started looking at. I had to talk a lot more about IOT with people or MDM, I suppose it was still called mainly bios in those days. So, you know, draw pictures of what does an IOT [00:02:00] system look like at a high level? So, you know, a short haul protocol talking to sensors and actuators, there's some kind of agent technology or gateway technology whose main job in life is to convert from the short haul protocols to Manuel protocols, generally over the internet, you know, and eventually to it, to an IOT system.
[00:02:19] It definitely was striking me that there's, there's something in the middle that was missing. So people would always debate about where processing should happen. Should it happen? You know, on-prem shouldn't happen right on the device. Should it happen in the cloud? And a lot of those scenarios just really didn't make sense.
[00:02:37] There was no really good answer at that point. So we started kicking around the idea of a conductivity platform as a service. Where we started saying, okay, how are we going to solve the connectivity problem here? So we can connect to our IOT devices or to our customers, IOT devices. And we're moving on that a bit, pursuing funding on it.
[00:02:56] We'd started to do some events development around it when an [00:03:00] offer came in from PTC to purchase us and combine us with Thingworks. so I went into that for awhile and eventually I was introduced by a mutual friend of mine to glial Xeno, our CEO. No, we hit it off because Google had been thinking about similar problems, but much broader than IOT.
[00:03:20] He had some interesting thoughts about, do for networking with Twilio did for voice and video to make it easily embedded in your app, controlled by the developer, you know, remove all the pain, complexity from that. So kind of running with that idea. So we got together and. You got enough Foundry started, but combining that idea around application embedded networking, and what does that really mean?
[00:03:45] And the idea of, you know, I really want to run this as a service and we ended up looking at the world from both angles, like from the top down, what we say, when we talk internally as a company, we say [00:04:00] we are redefining networking in order to enable edge innovation. And when we say edge innovation, We don't mean edge, like edge computing.
[00:04:08] We mean like innovation around the edges. So innovation where you don't need to ask permission. So we would run into scenarios where running as fast as I can to get something done, but I can't outrun the network. I have to wait to get the network. I have to ask permission in order to get the network in place and an asking permission.
[00:04:28] I have to describe my idea and I have to justify my idea. Which sometimes it's very difficult when you're trying to do something innovative because you don't necessarily know what your end game is. Or at least me personally, I need to get into a problem. I need to get my hands dirty with the problem. I need to understand it.
[00:04:44] And the obstructions then occurred to me. And in retrospect, they look obvious, but I certainly couldn't have presented them in the first place. But from the top we said we needed to do for networking. What AWS did for infrastructure. [00:05:00] So that was the paradigm we started from, you know, focused on management and orchestration of overlay fabrics run across the internet.
[00:05:09] And then from the bottom up, we looked at what's it mean to have a programmable network. If you look at the early definitions of site, reliability engineering, where they said. SRE is what happens when a software engineer looks at an operations problem. When I say what happens when a, when a software engineer looks at these networking problems.
[00:05:28] So we started building out a tech technology that we call ZD the ITI that is a programmable network overlay with zero trust built in natively and the associated edge components needed to, to take advantage of that network. So that's kind of a long-winded. Answer to your question, but that's kind of my technology path that led me here to, in that Foundry.
[00:05:54] ian: [00:05:54] Can you walk me through like what it means to be CTO of net Foundry? What does your [00:06:00] day-to-day look like? What's your scope of responsibilities?
[00:06:02]David: [00:06:02] probably would be considered more of an internal focused CTO. So I'm looking at taking, you know, the visions of net Foundry as they evolve and turning that into working software and working solutions.
[00:06:16] So I actually have a team of engineers that reports to me focused primarily on, on ZD. There's another team that's focused on our network as a service offering. So I, I will talk and share what we're doing in forums like this, but the main focus has been internal. We get big ideas. We need to flesh out those ideas, understand those, fill dude's fractions and write the software.
[00:06:41] ian: [00:06:41] So are you, are you constantly looking at the market, looking at new things, trying to bring ideas into the Oregon and create product, you know, and on most days,
[00:06:52] David: [00:06:52] yeah, it's fairly constant across that boundary. So you'll, you'll see. Conversation about what's going on in the world [00:07:00] almost all the time, you know, edge computing.
[00:07:03] I mentioned earlier, it's something that piqued my interest, you know, with that connectivity platform, as a service idea, sitting out there, and then the paper came out right around that time on fog computing, which I thought was a, probably a really look like a really important moment at the time and evolution beyond that.
[00:07:20] So we, we do a lot of conversations internally. We do a lot of talking with customers and partners. It's a very strong belief that not Foundry that you know, for us to be successful and for these ideas to be successful, it's an ecosystem play. So we need to be out talking to people. We need to be working with people in the edge phase.
[00:07:39] We just announced the partnership with Ellis Ellis edge for their software defined software, defined mobile edge partnered with that founder using our technology to help them with how data gets moved. So we're out there. edge computing has been. A more recent focus for us, but it's been one that's been received very well by those that we've, we've worked with.
[00:08:00] [00:07:59] ian: [00:07:59] Yeah. You know, it seems like you've kind of been at this nexus of edge computing, IOT, zero trust. and we'll get into each of those kind of intern here, but let's start with IOT. So, you know, you've been in IOT for a little while. Where are we at in the evolution?
[00:08:15] David: [00:08:15] IOT is really interesting. When we first started at question, I was describing to my wife, what we were doing and why we were doing it and was going through some of the early use cases that we had, you know, in hospitals and diagnostics labs, in, in server backrooms, where we were connecting and her reaction to that was, you mean they don't already do all of that.
[00:08:38] And what we certainly found that the time is it was really hard to explain IOT to people. There wasn't a really good vocabulary for it. Once the term internet of things began to be used, you know, that was, that was kind of a big moment. That's when, it moved from, Hey, c'mon why isn't the world getting this too.
[00:08:59] Everyone's talking [00:09:00] about it and moving on it and, you know, explosion of tooling and platforms and starting to eventually see use cases, come out. For me, it's better when you don't talk about IOT. So for instance, the Buffalo bills. So I live in Rochester, New York, I follow the bills a bit. Their, their reaction to COVID was, was really interesting to me.
[00:09:22] So they're talking about, you know, how they have sensors on all the players and they can track if someone comes down with COVID that, you know, all the players who were within six feet of them for more than a half hour or whatever it is, you know, they immediately know all that information. They didn't talk about IOT when it's written the most.
[00:09:38] They don't talk about IOT. So an article the other day about a police force that was shooting a GPS tracker onto a car, so they can track it with GPS rather than getting it in high-speed JS know. Is that IOT? Sure. So. To me it's as it gets to the point where you're not talking about IOT, but you're just talking about things that are good [00:10:00] ideas and should be done is, is we're really getting somewhere, a lot of the work around the edge.
[00:10:05] That's also, I think, a pretty critical moment. And that's also gone. It's going through an important phase right now. Some of the work done at LFS putting together the open glossary, putting together the state of the edge, coming up with well, understood ways to talk about the problem. No, I think that's awesome.
[00:10:23] Getting to the point where people are focused on their solutions. So, you know, more like the platform as a service idea where I can take my idea at my application and seamlessly and easily deploy it out to the right edges. You know, kind of like when I go into AWS, I select my regions. and then, you know, design my application that is fundamentally a distributed.
[00:10:46] Application and just start there from the application perspective. So I think there's, there's a there's work to do, but the encouraging thing is there's a lot of really smart people who are focused on the entire stack of that problem space. And we're looking at it, you know, [00:11:00] obviously networking is a huge part of any digital transformation or any kind of distributed application.
[00:11:06] It's a central part of the issue. So we're looking to do, do that. The kind of idea with networking is we want the network to be application centric. We want the application developer to control the network, embed the network directly in this app. One of our taglines that you might not like because of our use of the word as say, application can be the new edge is the edge to the overlay that we're using, but it's trying to try to support.
[00:11:33] Highly secure, highly reliable, highly available, highly performing networking, or whatever kind of networking you need based on the demands of your application. So I think those, those kinds of ideas I think, is what moves us to the point we need to be.
[00:11:48] ian: [00:11:48] You know, you, you talked about the Buffalo bills example.
[00:11:51]I have a bunch of family in Rochester, so I, I know, I know about the bills mafia. Well, but it's a great example of, you know, [00:12:00] IOT in practice where it's something that, you know, I remember I'm a Rangers fan. I was, I was a Raiders training camp, like six years ago, seven years ago, or something like that.
[00:12:08] They were talking about like using technology for the first time to just like track player movements. Right. And then now you have like, COVID screenings on the go, like you just in the last six years football teams going from like, Hey, we're just trying to figure out how to get devices onto players versus actually getting not only insights, but actionable insights in real time.
[00:12:30] What would be some of the examples that you're talking about that you're thinking about where a network as a service could help someone, you know, actually deploy something and
[00:12:40] David: [00:12:40] get results. It really the problem that you run into when you're relying on networking, it hits especially hard when you need enterprise class or above networking.
[00:12:53] So if you have very high security constraints, like you see in healthcare, like you see in financial [00:13:00] systems, like you see in government, you have to wait to do things. So when we're at X X, either we, we priced based on usage. So the number of things that you connected and the amount of data traffic that you sent.
[00:13:14] And we would track that. So, you know, our executive meetings every week, we'd put up the charts that went over our customers and said, how are they tracking on this curve of rolling out more and more devices? And I know we're going on a little bit of a road show to talk to some of the customers who are we're rolling out a lot more slowly than we expected.
[00:13:30] So they had killer use cases, killer business value. You know, why aren't you exploding like some other customers and find some, some of them were, relying on VPNs because of those security demands. So for every customer they'd come in and that have lengthy sessions talk with the customers network engineering team, they would often select a VPN technology.
[00:13:48] So they would have not just one solution for VPN, but many. And they had a huge team of people. All he did is sat around all day and tried to keep the VPNs up and running. And to me, there's no need for [00:14:00] that. So you can solve that problem with software. You can use the internet and embrace concepts like, like zero trust, or we had another customer who they, Had private ATM's.
[00:14:10] So they needed to be secure with MPLS connections all the way back into Axeda data centers. And that was just, it was very, very time consuming to get the MPLS in place. It was relatively expensive and it would block them from doing things. So they would, I remember one of our customers was in that scenario and they wanted to integrate with an external service to get weather information, which could potentially make a big difference in the quality and usage of their devices.
[00:14:37] No, they couldn't because the ambulance was set up to, to change that and to get that change in place, ended up taking like three weeks and that's just, you know, there's just no need for it. And you can't anticipate everything that people are going to do. They're going to have unique ideas and you couldn't anticipate, I certainly didn't anticipate the, you know, the COVID situation that we're in right now.
[00:14:55] So, you know what what's going to happen with? I just remember with COVID [00:15:00] in, in general, we had kind of interesting. Scenario here we had, one of our customers had posted on gardener during insights. He does prints a company that does advanced machine vision inspection systems. And he posted on there in February and net.
[00:15:17] Foundry is agility, ease of use, and performance will be a game changer for our business, which is pretty cool. You know, someone talking about networking, being a game changer for their business. And so we were all pretty happy to see that. Then in March, he posts on LinkedIn, very grateful using that Foundry software in January, we were able to configure and activate our entire staff remote access to various premise, local workstations servers in under two hours.
[00:15:41] So that's unanticipated usages are, are really what we're trying to prepare for. Giving people what they need when they tell us what they need. We don't ask questions, building our software so that a software engineer can extend it also in ways that never occurred to us, [00:16:00] putting it together, making it configurable as codes that a level above software engineering can do the same, you know, declare what they need to be and change it very rapidly.
[00:16:09] I think tie-in or like the Bill's example, speaking of edge computing, you know, I can't, I can't just easily do that. Like that kind of idea, you know, an NFL team is in a different position than most people, but you know, how about doing that in our schools? Right. If we had the right kind of infrastructure in place, the right kind of platforms in place to allow people to do things now, the world becomes a better place.
[00:16:33] ian: [00:16:33] So extending that analogy, like if you were to do that at, you know, if you were to do that at a high school in Rochester, What would that look like? Right. And like, how could that, how could that school system be able to leverage that type of technology? And I think that, I mean, we're right now, it's like, there's no way.
[00:16:50] That that could happen, even though that that's, you know, one of the would be one of the most critical, you know, places that we could put that technology.
[00:16:59] David: [00:16:59] Yeah. So we're [00:17:00] trying to get, get to a world where that's accessible, democratized as a word you don't often hear, right?
[00:17:05] ian: [00:17:05] No, you do hear democratize a lot.
[00:17:06] And I think it's definitely thrown around and I think it's thrown around in a way that that, is super critical and you know, much like the cloud, saw on Twitter the other day, someone was talking about how. The speed in which they did something and the cost in which they did something was like, you know, Hey, this would have taken us, you know, whatever six months.
[00:17:24] And it took us three hours and, or three months, and it took us three hours and it costs 10 bucks.
[00:17:31] David: [00:17:31] Yeah. Local stories.
[00:17:32] ian: [00:17:32] Yeah. It's crazy. Right. You know, but, but the other side of that coin is about trust is about security. So, you know, how does zero. Trust play into this, you know, why is this something that is, you know, critical for net Foundry?
[00:17:47] David: [00:17:47] Yeah. It's foundational and security and trust and boots step and trust. Those are the things that often lead people towards, you know, I need to, I need a dedicated circuit or I need a, [00:18:00] you know, a VPN in place or I need some level of extra security. So the fundamental premises zero trust is I don't trust the network period.
[00:18:09] So, the play on rate around a Reagan's trust, but verify it's don't trust and verify constantly. So if I don't trust the network, what do I need to do? Well, I need to have very, very strong means of identifying each endpoint on the network, each user of the network, and that needs to happen before any kind of connectivity happens.
[00:18:31] So today, when I go to my, you, even to my bank, I go to my bank, I know the URL to hit. And someone having that URL can now attack the bank. We don't, we don't support that we do and authenticate before it connects you authenticate through the, the controller and the attended case, you can have it in different ways.
[00:18:47] The most fundamental way is through mutual TLS. So ultimately by a certificate that's been signed, not through a CSR process, and then constantly looking at the conditions on the device [00:19:00] or really any information to say, is this entity still someone that we trust right now? The second thing we do is, or I think the second thing that's important in a, in a zero trust concept is least privilege access.
[00:19:13] So I only grant that identity exactly what they need to see. So I'm like grant, you know, different levels of access to someone in finance than I would to someone in, in my dev ops team. So finding grading condition, at least privilege access model, very strong auditing of what you do, continuous authentication, part of that.
[00:19:33] And that's all to build the trust. There's other aspects of why you'd want to use an overlay network. You can, you know, improve your throughput. You can improve your latency, but trust has always been one of the most fundamental parts of the system. And if I, if I do want to plug something, the, I would plug, open ZD dot.org or open CD that get hub.io.
[00:19:55] I think get a page just to get a pages site out there. There's a blog on there that one of the, of our [00:20:00] guys wrote about bootstrapping. I think that's really important. And it goes through a lot of the ideas in there are based on, you know, certain RSCs. But it gives a practical explanation that's you don't need to be super technical to get it.
[00:20:14] So it kind of breaks down. Here are the issues. Here is a way to solve it. Here are maybe some other ways you could solve it. No. So, so we're heavy on that and the, the initial identity
[00:20:23] ian: [00:20:23] and we'll link it up in the show notes, but I was just going to say, you know, like, I, I hadn't heard the term bootstrapping it as much.
[00:20:29] I mean, obviously familiar with the term for startups. Is that something that, you know, you would say is more you all talking about it that way or common parlance?
[00:20:38]David: [00:20:38] I think it's common in security environments. So if you ended up talking to people who are work with HSMs or people who work with trusted execution environments, Or, or other people just see this problem in IOT?
[00:20:52] There's often, not a person in place, so you're not going to prompt them for something that they know. So well, how do you establish, you know, sort of initial [00:21:00] trust, if you add a person into that equation? Well, man, you just made a rollout heck of a lot harder. and sometimes, you know, near impossible. So a lot of IOT devices are, are headless.
[00:21:10] So how do you, you know, you're adding costs to your, to your situation for something like that. So the question is how do I, how do I establish the initial trust on which everything else is built? Right. I can have this great continuous auth module. I can have this great set of policies that control what services, you know, given identity is allowed to access.
[00:21:29] But if the initial trust is poorly done, then what do you have? Like IOT, you would see a lot of IOT platforms and there are still a lot of IOT platforms. They go with a tofu approach, which is trust on first use. Maybe that's okay for some things, but you know, for an awful lot of scenarios, it's not the way you want to.
[00:21:49] I want to get started.
[00:21:50] ian: [00:21:50] What are some common misconceptions about zero trust?
[00:21:54] David: [00:21:54] Well, it's like any kind of, any kind of good word that describes something tends to get corrupted. [00:22:00] So people will apply it in ways that aren't zero trust. So someone who builds a network perimeter or that fundamental to not trusting the network is, you know, I don't want to have a perimeter.
[00:22:11] You know, they talk about the M and M with the heart outside and the chewy vulnerable inside. You know, someone who is building something that is fundamentally a network perimeter with really no changes they'll have been done before, encountering the term zero trust and calling that zero trust. You know, you'll see a lot of that and it's because of the popularity of the term.
[00:22:28] And I think it's kind of natural when a term starts exploding, like zero trusted. So on one hand, I was really glad to see George will start to take an uptick because that was central to us. You know, from the time we started. On the other hand, it gets, it gets confused as different people try and apply it in places where, you know, maybe, maybe some other term would be better.
[00:22:50] ian: [00:22:50] Yeah. I mean, you know, it's, it's obviously something that, was already
[00:22:55] David: [00:22:55] starting
[00:22:55] ian: [00:22:55] to explode and then
[00:22:57] David: [00:22:57] work
[00:22:58] ian: [00:22:58] from home happened. And then now it's, you [00:23:00] know, bring your device to work turned into, you know, all of your, your work devices are now at home. All of your devices are at home. You're on, you're on your home computer and your home.
[00:23:10]You know, wifi, you know, how have you seen kind of the landscape change or, you know, in your conversations with your peers change, as it comes to how they view things now with shelter in place and potentially a new normal with a more
[00:23:25] David: [00:23:25] hybrid workforce going forward. Yeah. I mean the first place that really struck me, I'm a very, I come from a very large family.
[00:23:31] So I have two brothers and sisters at net Foundry we're cloud native from the start. So we were using a zero trust solution for our day-to-day business. So as far as work there, wasn't a lot of change because we generally worked from home quite often and get together maybe once a week for some FaceTime.
[00:23:50] So, you know, disruption wise for us was very minimal in that regard. And then, you know, talking to some of my family and like the changes that happened in their work environment [00:24:00] was pretty massive. you know, and shame on me for not reaching out to, you know, to some of those companies, but, you know, they were doing, you know, massive initiatives, you know, massive stop, stop, and using work people, really not being able to accomplish anything at home.
[00:24:13] Very, very fortunate. and our customers who had our software, we're very fortunate for me personally. I had been pushing that Foundry very, very much into not work from home scenarios. Because I saw that as, you know, high potential and zero trust, high potential. I mean, Google is beyond court paper was, there was a really kind of a Seminole Mark for zero trust, I thought, but we've been looking at, you know, how do I solve these problems?
[00:24:37] You know, in an IOT type scenario, how do I dissolve, you know, all the problems around distributed computing using our network, we deploy our network very much like an IOT system. So we have the fabric that we roll out that we support that we own and control. But then we have end points that are deployed, you know, all over the place on different networks that are owned by different people, with different, you [00:25:00] know, ID practices and policies.
[00:25:01] So for us, it was our time to get really serious of looking at, you know, what it looks like. For working on scenarios. So we're early on, I drew a picture on a board saying this is something we need to get to. We need to get this to this idea of what I call it. because I'm coral in naming things, human plus thing.
[00:25:20] You know, you need to combine those two identities. If you really want a nice foundation for a zero trust work from home. You know, so we layered that in, we started doing different kinds of integrations for business systems that would, you know, always kind of hanging out that we thought would be important at some point.
[00:25:34] But, you know, we just. Sort of going really heavy on it, making sure we could integrate it in with a very wide variety of them, if they type solutions, make sure we could integrate with different directory solutions. So, I mean, for us, some of those kinds of changes just to, you know, prepare for, you know, we think of it as, you know, the, the second wave of work from home.
[00:25:53] So there was the initial kind of panic. I need to figure something out to be able to do some level of work from home. Now we're getting into a separate [00:26:00] wave, you know, new normal you say, I think a lot of people are going to do a lot more working from home because we're going through an evolution right now, technology evolution, or that becomes.
[00:26:08] Viable and, you know, safe enough to a degree that that businesses are, are becoming more open.
[00:26:14] ian: [00:26:14] Yeah. So what becomes of the VPN?
[00:26:16] David: [00:26:16] It's interesting. My relationship with VPNs, I don't think ZD becomes a VPN that remains what it is. I mean, it is virtual virtual network, right? It's the network overlay. But I, my experience with VPNs has been just horrible.
[00:26:32] One of our customers said that the number one support ticket they get is related to their, to their VPNs.
[00:26:38] ian: [00:26:38] That's a great insight. I, gosh, I couldn't agree more.
[00:26:42] David: [00:26:42] Right. Yeah. So in the experience of ESPN is horrible because it's controlled by somebody else. It's not controlled by the guy making the application.
[00:26:49] It's not controlled by the guy who is trying to run as a business. So it's the wrong entity to make those kinds of decisions about what the, what the experience should look like. So when we say the app is a new edge, we certainly [00:27:00] have technology that uses some VPN Lake techniques, right? Because brownfield applications exist.
[00:27:05] You didn't write them. You don't have access to the source code. So we can go ahead and intercept. Traffic from the underlay and run it over our interlay with, with controls one small step away from zero trust in that point. But we also have SDKs that I can embed directly into my mobile applications directly into my desktop applications.
[00:27:21] Containerize. I can run them as side cars in a Kubernetes environment, so I can put the, the trust directly in the app. And I can design an experience there that is very nice for the end user. We just put together a, an in-browser SDK in JavaScript. So if your main apps are being delivered, you know, through a browser, well, there you go.
[00:27:41] You can now create an experience. That's a, up to your zero trust experience running over a Z network. So that's a big part of why I've had a bad relationship with VPN those ones. Cause they cost me money early in the IOT career. And two, when I've had to use them, it's just that horrible, [00:28:00] clunky.
[00:28:01] Experience that, you know, is just getting in my way.
[00:28:04] ian: [00:28:04] It look like for the, for the modern worker,
[00:28:07] David: [00:28:07] for the future
[00:28:07] ian: [00:28:07] worker that, that doesn't have to, that doesn't have to deal with that. Like, what is the, the 20,000 person company what's the end user looking at instead of that type of clunky,
[00:28:18] David: [00:28:18] they're looking at their application and doing what's needed in their application.
[00:28:23] The part that's interesting there, and that we're working through different scenarios is. Again, around the bootstrapping of the initial trust, because when you have a chink in the experience, it's usually around the enrolling and onboarding. as I mentioned, we, you know, we first focused on things like IOT, headless scenarios.
[00:28:42] So, you know, integrated in with hardware root of trust, make sure that we could support third party CAS and automatic provisioning in manufacturing environments. You know, similar to the kind of problems that you see, like Azure IOT, trying to address one touch, no touch, provisioning and enrollment for business applications.
[00:28:59] I'll [00:29:00] give you an example. Internally at net Foundry. We wanted to make sure everyone in our company was using software based on our SDKs every day for business critical conversations. Right? So if there's a problem with our technology, a problem for the experience that we're going to feel it because it's going to impact our business.
[00:29:17] So the first thing we did is we took a technology called Mattermost Mattermost is an open source variant of Slack. And we integrated directly into their electronic application code and integrated into their react native code that they use for their mobile devices. So we can have a zero trust experience.
[00:29:34] Now for us to onboard, you know, we don't want it. We didn't want people to go through a lengthy experience. You certainly didn't want the administrator to have to sit and enter each person in the company's name into a, you know, some tool. So we put together, you know, we call it magic enrollment, which is similar to what you see for onboarding tools like Slack.
[00:29:54] So if you can prove to me that you have an email address. For net Foundry that comes to you and [00:30:00] have access to a couple other pieces of pertinent information, we'll go ahead and totally fully automate the, the enrollment process for you. So I think, you know, we intend to continue to innovate in that environment.
[00:30:12] As we see more experiences as more companies use our software. But I think the key to me is that the person building the application can solve those problems in whatever way is best for their users. So,
[00:30:26] ian: [00:30:26] you know, looking into the, the old crystal ball, what's next for zero trust, what's next for edge.
[00:30:31]you know, what are the next 18 to 24 months look like?
[00:30:35] David: [00:30:35] What I, what I hope they look like? You know, it's continuing down that democratization path. So, you know, redefining, networking in order to enable edge innovation, getting the world to the point where. People who don't necessarily have access to tons of money or the ability to roll out a message distributed systems that we can start getting that in their hands.
[00:30:57] Some of the evolution around zero trust. I think it just [00:31:00] keeps going. It keeps on people innovate around it. We had a company we work with who, for their trust, they wanted to integrate biometrics information. So you could only have access to this system. If your heart rate was under a certain level and your breathing was under a certain level or, you know, for, for whatever their use case was.
[00:31:19] But that's interesting that you can build in all kinds of different information about the person, about the devices, about their location. I mean, things like Fitbit sense where they have the ECG and skin type and the EDA for stress. There's just tons of information out there. And I think with zero trust, a lot of that becomes more natural.
[00:31:37] I loved seeing that Apple watch, I have a fit, but I saw an article where Apple watch added the, I fallen and I can't get up functionality to the watch where it detects that and integrates out over different system.
[00:31:49] ian: [00:31:49] No way. That's crazy.
[00:31:51] David: [00:31:51] I thought that was pretty wild, but I mean, those kinds of things I think are where we're trying to get to what the next steps are.
[00:31:58] Frankly, and another call out [00:32:00] to, to Ella veg. I think the work being done there is important. So I think we'll start seeing some consolidation. We'll start seeing no more common understanding of what the space is. We are seeing more people focused on, you know, custom content down into the edge for custom applications, which I think is part of the equation along with the other network overlay type work we've discussed.
[00:32:22] So it's moving, we'll see some disruption, disruption happened that, We'll look back and we'll look back on and say, I should have saw that coming.
[00:32:30] ian: [00:32:30] We love the folks at elephant edge. and for our listeners, you can always check them out LF, edge.org if you haven't already. But yeah, I think that they're, you know, part of the reason why we're doing this podcast is to just start to figure out all, all the smartest minds in edge and to be able to say, what are people working on now that you know, are in the trenches that.
[00:32:52] You know, you're not going to see publicly, but are being worked on obviously, you know, net Foundry being a part of that. What's what's, what's next for you? What's next [00:33:00] for, for net Foundry.
[00:33:01] David: [00:33:01] There's a, there is so much, there's so much that can be done. I was just talking about this earlier today. Cause when we look at the vision of things that are floating around in the back of our mind, you have foreign ideas, some, some way more formed, and we're just getting into some of those things.
[00:33:18] Like we have tremendous, tremendous information and insight about the internet and we call it our data net. So we have all kinds of information everywhere that our favorite creditors are, are deployed. You know, I can tell you from an endpoint that I'm sitting at, what is the best path to use across the overlay, how that compares to, if I'd use a BGP route, how that, how that.
[00:33:36] Different ESPs that are involved in that path affect it. So one of the things that's coming up for us is saying, what's, what's our next step to do with that information. And we're certainly building it into our fabric to make smart routing decisions. But, I think there's probably some more we could do with that.
[00:33:49] You asked those what happened to be on my mind earlier today and something to push on further with,
[00:33:54] ian: [00:33:54] well, Dave, this has been absolutely awesome. Having you on the show. Any, any final thoughts, anything, to [00:34:00] plug, obviously everybody can check you all out@netfoundry.io and, a lot of great stuff on the website for folks who want to check it out.
[00:34:08] David: [00:34:08] Yeah. Two things occurred to me when I mentioned the importance of things like LFS. I mean, the importance of things like this podcast obviously are in that same, same vein. And in addition to net foundry.io, when I talked about the two different, you know, the top down approach with network as a service.
[00:34:23] And the bottom up approach was ZD and core networking software. Z, you can learn more about ed CD that dev, or you can, you can go see and get your hands on it at get hub.com/open CD. Have a look.
[00:34:37] ian: [00:34:37] You said you weren't good at naming things, but. ZD five-year application. It's a pretty great,
[00:34:42] David: [00:34:42] Oh, the name was ADA.
[00:34:44] It was it, it was funny. So, so I was talking with a group of folks, mostly engineers, about the things that I saw that were fundamental and important right here are the things that we are going to hold most dear as we move forward. And I'd spend a lot of time talking about zero trust because the number of number of people, I hadn't really thought about it, or even [00:35:00] understood what it was at the time and people.
[00:35:02] Started throwing out names that were all had zero trust in the name. And I said, no, zero trust is a key critical, important feature, but this isn't a zero trust solution. Right? It's a programmable network overlay. It's different. So what do you want to call it then instead of how about Z D, Z ITI, not an abbreviation for GTL, zero trust, but reflects it
[00:35:22] ian: [00:35:22] and the delicious meal as well.
[00:35:24] David: [00:35:24] Delicious pasta.
[00:35:26] ian: [00:35:26] Awesome. Dave. Thanks, Ian. Thanks for being part of this, this show, you know, being a founding member of this show and, all the work that you all are doing.
[00:35:34] David: [00:35:34] Great. Thanks again. Take care.