The Architecture of the Internet with Erik Seidel

The modern Internet is a vast web of independent networks bound together by billions of routing decisions made every second. It's an architecture so reliable, we mostly take it for granted. But behind the scenes, it represents one of humanity's greatest engineering achievements. Today's Internet is also dramatically more complex and capable than in its early years. Eric Seidel is a network engineer at Cloudflare, where he focuses on automating global network infrastructure. He joins the show to discuss his unique journey into tech, the fundamentals of how the Internet works, the border gateway protocol, peering versus transit, Cloudflare's architecture, networking in China, and much more. Gregor Vand is a security focused technologist, having previously been a CTO across cybersecurity, cyber insurance, and general software engineering companies. He is based in Singapore and can be found via his profile at van.hk or on LinkedIn. Hello and welcome to Software Engineering Daily. My guest today is Eric Seidel. So welcome, Eric. Hello. Nice to be here. Yeah. Great to have you here, Eric. We've met very briefly a couple years ago. I say back in Singapore. I'm still in Singapore. You're now in Austin. You were then and still are working for Cloudflare as a network engineer, and we're gonna be hearing all about how Cloudflare works as well as just kind of general principles of how the Internet works today, which is gonna be very interesting. But as per usual, we'd love to just hear a little bit about your background before sort of leading up to Cloudflare. I gather you have spent a lot of time in Asia, but also, like, China specifically, which is obviously very interesting from a Internet perspective. So, yeah, can you just give us a brief history? I think like a lot of people in the tech industry, and I found I'm not unique as this, I have a rather non I'm what you might call nontraditional, nonstandard background, very varied background. I came into the tech industry a little later. It's not my first go at tech or understanding tech or working with tech. I mean, I've been doing tech related jobs since I was a student worker back in university in the late nineties, early two thousands. And then I kind of drifted off away from, like, computing and Internet altogether and towards a lot of language learning. I was classic students, Latin, Greek. I mean, I was training to be a a classics teacher at one point actually. And then I ended up going to China for a while, teaching English there and learning the Chinese language. Spent a while there learning Chinese because I just really enjoyed a whole thing of learning languages. And then after a few years in China, I kind of drifted back towards tech. And within a year of coming back to America, I found in March 2020, about less than a year after I came back to America, I found myself at Cloudflare, and I've …