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, cloud flares 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 of 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 going to be hearing all about how Cloudflare works,

as well as just kind of general principles of how the Internet works today, which is going to be

very interesting. But as per usual, which is going to be very interesting.

But as per usual, we'd love to just hear a little bit about your backgrounds 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 an 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 that I'm not

unique as this. I have a rather non, I'm what you might call a non-traditional, non-standard 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

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