Mar 19 2025 54 mins 8
The story of cloud networking rarely gets told from the perspective of those building it inside unicorn startups, but that's exactly what this episode delivers. Richard Olson, cloud networking expert at Canva, takes us behind the scenes of building network infrastructure for one of the world's fastest-growing SaaS platforms.
Richard's fascinating career journey began with literally throwing rocks with phone lines into trees during his military service, progressing through network operations centers and pre-sales engineering before landing at AWS and eventually Canva. His unique perspective bridges traditional networking expertise with cloud-native development approaches.
Unlike enterprises migrating from legacy environments, Canva started entirely in the cloud with minimal networking considerations. Richard explains how this trajectory created different challenges - starting with overlapping 10.0.0.0/16 addresses across development environments and evolving to hundreds of VPCs requiring sophisticated connectivity solutions. By mid-2022, these networking challenges had grown complex enough to warrant forming a dedicated cloud networking team, which Richard helped establish.
The conversation takes a deep technical turn exploring Kubernetes networking challenges that even experienced network engineers might not anticipate. Richard explains why "Kubernetes eats IP addresses for breakfast" in cloud environments, detailing the complex interaction between VPC CIDR allocations, prefix delegations, and worker node configurations that can quickly exhaust even large IP spaces. This pressure is finally creating compelling business cases for IPv6 adoption after decades of slow uptake.
Whether you're managing cloud infrastructure today or planning your organization's network strategy for tomorrow, this episode offers invaluable insights into the evolution and challenges of cloud networking at unicorn scale. Listen now to understand why companies are increasingly forming dedicated cloud networking teams and the unique skill sets they require.
Connect with Richard:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/richard-olson-au
Purchase Chris and Tim's new book on AWS Cloud Networking: https://www.amazon.com/Certified-Advanced-Networking-Certification-certification/dp/1835080839/
Check out the Fortnightly Cloud Networking News
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkBWCGwXDUX9OfZ9_MvSVup8tJJzJeqrauaE6VPT2b0/
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