NetUK3: Two great days with the UK network engineering community
Over the past two days, we had the pleasure of attending NetUK3, spending some time with network operators, ISPs, vendors and infrastructure engineers from across the UK at The Brewery in London.
We've travelled to quite a few conferences around the world this year, so it was especially nice to attend one much closer to home. FastNetMon continues to grow internationally, but London is where the company is headquartered, and the UK networking community has always been an important part of our journey. It was great to spend a couple of days catching up with familiar faces and meeting new people.
A big thank you goes to the NetUK organisers for putting together another excellent event, and to everyone who we had a chance to connect with. These conversations are always one of the highlights of attending community events.
A great start to NetUK3
The first afternoon opened with a strong lineup of presentations. One that immediately caught our attention was Ritesh Mukherjee's talk from Nokia on routing security. The presentation explored recent route leaks and hijacks, the current state of RPKI deployment, the role of ASPA, and the importance of improving visibility into routing anomalies. As a company working on network security every day, these topics are naturally close to what we do, and it was encouraging to see practical discussions around strengthening the resilience of the Internet's routing infrastructure.
Later in the afternoon, Geoff Bennett from Nokia took the audience in a completely different direction with his fascinating presentation on space-based data centres. It is one of those ideas that initially sounds like science fiction, but the talk carefully walked through both the motivations and the engineering challenges behind the concept. Whether or not orbital data centres become reality, it certainly sparked plenty of conversations afterwards.
The first day concluded with the conference social event in the Brewery courtyard. London treated us to fantastic weather, making it the perfect setting to continue conversations that had started during the sessions. Some of the best discussions at conferences happen after the presentations have finished, and NetUK was no exception.
Talks, ideas and more conversations
The second day continued with another great set of talks and plenty of interesting discussions.
David Flores kicked off one of the highlights of the day with a presentation on rethinking network monitoring. Instead of looking at monitoring as just a collection of alerts and dashboards, the talk explored a broader observability approach: bringing together metrics, logs and flows to help operators understand not only what happened, but why. As networks continue to grow more complex, having this kind of visibility is becoming increasingly important.
Ralph Smit from RIPE NCC gave a great overview of Autonomous System Provider Authorisation (ASPA), a relatively new addition to the RPKI ecosystem. ASPA allows AS owners to publish their authorised upstream providers, helping to prevent route leaks, BGP path spoofing and other routing security issues. It was particularly interesting to hear that ASPA adoption is picking up speed and that more of the ecosystem is starting to support it. Stronger routing security depends on broad industry adoption, so seeing this progress is encouraging.
Pete Crocker's presentation on the Network Automation Forum Framework rounded out another interesting set of talks. The framework aims to provide a vendor-neutral reference architecture and common language for network automation, making it easier for operators, vendors and developers to build systems that work well together. Bringing more consistency to automation practices across the industry is something we’re happy to see.
As always, one of the biggest strengths of NetUK wasn’t just the presentations themselves, but the community around them. The opportunity to exchange operational experiences, discuss real-world challenges and learn from fellow engineers is what makes events like this so valuable.
Thank you again to the NetUK team for organising another fantastic conference, and thank you to everyone who spent time talking with us over the two days. We had a great time and are already looking forward to NetUK4.
