MIG vs vGPU — Internals
How NVIDIA partitions a datacenter GPU (modelled on the H100 SXM5 80GB). Build MIG slices, vGPUs and MIG-backed vGPUs, run workloads, and watch spatial vs temporal scheduling, fault isolation and time-slicing live. Includes a ~3-minute explainer film.
NVIDIA Infra Controller (NICo)
Zero-touch lifecycle automation for bare metal. Add servers and watch NICo discover, image and provision them through its lifecycle state machine; assign tenants on a shared fabric and see DPU-enforced isolation deny cross-tenant traffic. Includes an explainer film.
VXLAN — MAC-in-UDP overlays
How a virtual Layer-2 network rides across a routed fabric. Build VNI segments and hosts on a spine-leaf topology, then send a frame and watch the leaf VTEP encapsulate it, route it over the underlay and decapsulate it — with VNI isolation, BGP-EVPN vs flood-and-learn, ARP suppression and a live header-stack inspector. Includes a diagrammatic explainer film.
MetalLB — bare-metal load balancer
How Kubernetes gets a LoadBalancer Service on bare metal. Define an IPAddressPool, create Services and watch the controller allocate external IPs, then switch the speaker between Layer-2 mode (one elected leader answers ARP/NDP) and BGP mode (every node advertises a /32 and the router load-balances with ECMP). Send traffic and kill nodes to compare failover. Includes a diagrammatic explainer film.
VLANs — from the wire up
How one switch becomes many isolated networks. Build access ports and a trunk across two switches, watch the 802.1Q tag get pushed on the trunk and stripped at the access port, keep broadcasts inside their VLAN, handle the native VLAN (and its mismatch), and route between VLANs with router-on-a-stick or an L3 switch. Trace any frame hop by hop with its tagged/untagged state, and inject the classic misconfigurations. Includes a diagrammatic explainer film.
LGTM stack — Mimir, Loki, Tempo
How Grafana's observability stack actually works, and why all three systems are the same system. Operate an LGTM cell: tune replication factor, zones, shuffle-shard size and caches, drive writes and queries, and watch the hash ring, ingester head/WAL, flushes to object storage, scheduler queues and cache hit ratios live — then inject an ingester crash, a zone loss, a rolling deploy, a noisy tenant, a 30-day query or a bucket outage. Includes a 19-scenario diagrammatic explainer covering every write path, read path and failure story.
Count–Min Sketch — counting at scale
How to count billions of events in kilobytes. Build a d×w grid of counters with d hash functions, stream items in and watch cells collide, then query any key and take the min. Tune width and depth to trade memory for accuracy (ε, δ), flip on conservative update, and see why it overcounts but never undercounts. Includes a diagrammatic explainer film.
LLDP — octet by octet
Link Layer Discovery Protocol (IEEE 802.1AB), computed live. Build an LLDPDU one TLV at a time and watch the hex dump encode itself; run two neighbours' TX/RX state machines with real TTL countdowns; decode the type-127 extension suites (802.1/802.3/LLDP-MED/DCBX); stitch an SNMP-polled topology graph and watch identifier mismatches break it; and step through nine scenarios from cold start to spoofing.
TCP — the handshake, segment by segment
Watch TCP as two state machines trading segments on a ladder diagram — the three-way handshake, a data push, and the four-way teardown, every state change caused by a segment landing. Then drive both endpoints yourself in a faithful RFC 9293 simulator: fire any segment from either side, edit sequence numbers, watch out-of-order data reassemble at the gap and a burst of unacked data open the send window, and see the real consequence of anything you send — repeated ACKs, an early RST, a bad ack.
TLS — the handshake
How TLS negotiates a secure channel, message by message. Step through scenarios across TLS 1.3 and 1.2 — full handshakes, session resumption, 0-RTT, HelloRetryRequest, mutual TLS, key updates, a version downgrade, and a dozen fatal-alert failures — as animated flights of records and messages on a client/server ladder: epoch-colored encryption (what's in the clear vs under which key), a live HKDF key schedule, a passive-observer byte meter that shows exactly what leaks, per-record wire bytes, certificate-chain checks, the running transcript hash, and a side-by-side 1.3-vs-1.2 diff. Built on the shared house-style design system.