Meet NetActuate at NANOG in Arlington, TX Oct 27-29!
Explore
Meet NetActuate at NANOG in Arlington, TX Oct 27-29!
By clicking "Accept all" you allow cookies that improve your experience on our site, help us analyze site performance and usage, and enable us to show relevant marketing content. You can manage cookie settings below. By clicking “Confirm selection” you agree with the current settings.
By Brandon Wick, Director of Marketing, NetActuate
It had been seven years since NetActuate’s last appearance at All Things Open, and we weren’t quite sure what to expect. Our company has grown and evolved significantly since 2018, and so has the All Things Open event. This year was the “Lucky 13th” installment of what has grown to the largest annual open source event on the East Coast. Over 6,500 people registered from 75 countries with over 200 sessions and speakers focused on the critical issues around solving industry challenges collaboratively and in the open.
The keynotes included visionaries like Jim Jagielski, Nithya Ruff, and Matt White, while Todd Lewis and Jono Bacon did a great job as emcees. Artificial Intelligence was of course a focus of conversation, and while there is legitimate concern about how AI will impact the workforce and the possibility of AI taking away jobs, some interesting new angles emerged, such as:
Rather than just being reactive to the big AI players, it’s apparent that AI users and the broader AI ecosystem have a significant role to play in the evolution in AI at this critical, formative stage.
There are a myriad of ways that AI is impacting global edge infrastructure and networking and we were thrilled to have a NetActuate customer, Koyeb, with us at the event to showcase an open source-powered and developer-first AI stack
NetActuate was pleased to participate in 3 speaking sessions throughout the event.
Enterprise technology leaders are turning down many worthy AI projects due to the punishing cost of hyperscaler AI tokens. Massive investments in GPUs from a single vendor end up underused due to poor software solutions. This AI Infrastructure was built with graphics in mind rather than the operations that commonly make up AI training and inference operations. And the closed ecosystem operates as a black box, limiting engineers’ abilities to optimize performance and fix issues.
This is not an inevitability and we, as an industry, are working on increasing average utilization and increasing diversity of accelerators. The choice, control, and affordability that Open Source and Open Standards have brought to traditional software development the past 40 years have now finally come to AI.
Yann Léger, Co-Founder & CEO of Koyeb, a next-generation serverless cloud for developers, and Greg Wallace, Director of Partnerships at edge infrastructure provider NetActuate, detailed and demoed how they deployed novel AI accelerators into the cloud, allowing AI developers from all parts of the stack to access GPU alternatives in seconds. They showed how they overcame the challenges of deploying novel accelerators in a traditional server environment to put Tenstorrent Wormhole and Blackhole technology in the hands of kernel developers, machine learning engineers, and AI technologists. Attendees learned how to try novel AI accelerators today and contribute to their optimization.
Slides and video coming soon.
Edge computing requires a physical footprint at the network edge in multiple locations. Maintaining configurations and inventory tracking for various Points of Presence (PoPs), spread out over a global footprint, with a mixed infrastructure environment –- such as colocation, bare metal, VMs, and cloud — is no simple task.
Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) is an industry standard approach and very helpful for configuration, but is also prone to human error which slows down deployments. In this talk, Craig Jackson, DevOps Engineer at NetActuate, showed how to automate for DCIM and IP Address Management (IPAM) using Open Source Software (OSS) tooling, extend capabilities with additional plugins, and marshal data through the various APIs. He demoed this using Open Tofu modules and NetBox plugins to extend Netbox’s inventory tracking and BGP Session controls.
Craig showed how by increasing automation and decreasing manual tasks in DCIM, administrators can accelerate global deployments to the network edge.
Slides are available here. Video coming soon.
The global routing table is constantly in flux and can change with or without your awareness, causing issues that affect you, your customers, and fellow peered networks. NetActuate has extensive experience deploying global anycast networks using a variety of open source tools. In this talk, Craig Jackson, DevOps Engineer at NetActuate, demonstrated how effective observability of an anycast service can make it as resilient as anycast itself. He demonstrated a fail-over in real-time of a high-performant, resilient global network.
Slides are available here. Video available soon.
Supporting the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Research Triangle Community
As part of our Gold Sponsorship, we gladly chose the option of providing a number of free passes to the We Love Open Source community, All Things Open RTP Meetup Group, and Open Source South Carolina Meetup Group. We’re participants in the local Triangle Linux User Group (who we also saw at the event!) and we recognize the importance of participation in local open source communities around technology challenges and opportunities.
This contribution got us thinking about additional ways we could support the triangle, and we chose make donations of $2,500 each to organizations driving meaningful progress:
It was a pleasure to work with Cyndy Yu-Robinson from Kramden and Leslie Rand-Pickett from NC State on these donations and we look forward to future collaboration.
When brainstorming about what we could demonstrate at the show, we evolved the theme of a presentation we made recently to the Triangle Linux User Group: From Dial Up to DevOps, mapping the evolution of networking technologies, tools, and best practices for building and managing global infrastructure and networks.
Mark Price, NetActuate’s VP of Infrastructure and Co-Founder, is also the Co-Founder of The Serial Port, a virtual museum that highlights technology from years gone by. Mark and Serial Port Co-Founder, Ben Grubbs, provided a hands-on dial up demo on 1990s hardware! The sound of the modem logging on would stop people in their tracks with early internet memories from long ago. Check out this great recap video from The Serial Port on the All Things Open booth experience.
The NetActuate side of the booth showed how we manage global edge infrastructure and network services for our customers. We showcased how an anycast deployment expands around the world across our 45+ global pops and how we onboard and manage edge infrastructure with open source DevOps tooling like OpenTofu and Netbox.
Great tech conferences allow opportunities to meet with and engage the community and this is clearly a priority at All Things Open. We enjoyed meeting and engaging with the community including new and old friends like Todd Lewis, Jennifer Suber, Jono Bacon, Mindy Faieta, Mark Hinkle, Ray Paik, Katie Greenley, Chris Aniszczyk, Alex Kretzschmar, Alex Williams, Jason Clark, Arup Crakravarty, Ghassan Shahrour, Brandon Glover, Chris Beatson, and many more.
We look forward to meeting you at future events including All Things Open 2026! If we missed you at this year’s ATO and would like to connect, please reach out.
Reach out to learn how our global platform can power your next deployment. Fast, secure, and built for scale.
.svg)
