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Hi, I'm Antho

Anthony Balitrand

Network & Security Engineer

Passionated about science and technology, I’m very curious and always looking for learning new things.

Working as a Network & Security technology specialist, I try to share on this blog some of my knowledge related to IT stuff.
My free time is mainly occupied by sports (Crossfit ®, running, swimming), traveling, cooking, reading, and of course… binge watching.

I love to discover different cultures and ways of living.
This made me move in the US (NYC, Miami, Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles, Las Vegas…), Australia, UAE, Spain, Italy, Germany…

If you want to get in touch, send me a message !

Leadership
Team Work
Hard Working
Networking
Security
Development

Recent Posts

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Firecracker Micro-VMs : the power behind AWS Lambda

We all use AWS Lambda, either at work to automate some workloads, or unconsciously on our daily lives, using our favorite apps and services. When it was introduced by AWS in 2014, Lambda marked a turning point in the way we develop and deploy our applications and services, making it easier than ever : simply upload your micro-service code, and let AWS handle the rest (compute resources, scaling, availability, and maintenance). This new paradigm, later known as serverless computing, then became a foundation for modern cloud-native architectures by introducing the FaaS (function-as-a-service) model.

    Tuesday, August 12, 2025 Read
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    AWS re:Invent 2024 : wrap up !

    This year, I had the luck to attend AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas, the “grand-messe” of Amazon’s Cloud. Despite the very ambitious agenda that I planned, I was able to attend all my booked sessions and keynotes (at the cost of dozens of kilometers of walking, but I’ll come back on it later ^^), and I will try do give in this blog post most of the outcomes from those passionating discussions.

      Tuesday, December 17, 2024 Read
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      Under the hood : Netflix Open Connect

      In today’s digital entertainment and streaming services, only a few names resonate as strongly as Netflix. With million of unique users daily, Netflix is not only known for its impressive content library, but also for the quality of the delivering of this content. As network engineers, we easily understand that smooth streaming to viewers around the globe is a huge challenge. Netflix representing (as of today), 15% of the total Internet traffic, it is a challenge not only for Netflix, but also for all ISPs connecting Netflix users. At the heart of this delivery system lies Netflix CDN, or Content Delivery Network, known as Open Connect.

        Thursday, September 26, 2024 Read

        Skills

        Advanced Routing & BGP

        Strong expertise in large-scale IP routing: MP-BGP, OSPF, MPLS-TE, MPLSoDMVPN and VXLAN/EVPN designs. Comfortable with traffic engineering, route policy, and building resilient multi-domain architectures

        SDN & Overlay Networking

        Hands-on experience with software-defined networking paradigms including VXLAN-EVPN fabrics, Geneve encapsulation, and gateway load-balancing (GWLB) patterns in hybrid cloud environments

        Socket & Protocol Engineering

        Custom protocol implementation and socket programming for high-throughput, concurrent network services. Experience with Zero-Copy I/O, kernel bypass techniques (DPDK), and eBPF-based packet processing

        Next-Generation Firewalling

        Design and operation of large-scale NGFW deployments (Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet). Covers policy architecture, dynamic address groups, API-driven automation, and threat prevention tuning

        DDoS Mitigation & Network Defense

        Designing BGP-based DDoS mitigation strategies (RTBH, Flowspec) and integrating scrubbing architectures into carrier-grade networks to protect infrastructure at the routing layer

        Python Engineering

        Advanced Python development for network automation, tooling, and infrastructure management. Good knowledge of Python internals

        C++ & High-Performance Computing

        Systems and performance-critical development. Applied to networking contexts requiring deterministic latency, kernel-bypass I/O (DPDK), and eBPF programs for in-kernel packet processing

        AWS Infrastructure
        AWS Infrastructure

        Broad AWS expertise covering VPC design, Transit Gateway, Direct Connect, GWLB, Lambda/Firecracker, and API Gateway. Good understanding of the global HyperPlane landscape. Experienced in architecting resilient, cloud-native network topologies

        GCP Infrastructure
        GCP Infrastructure

        Cloud networking and infrastructure on Google Cloud Platform: VPC architecture, load balancing, and hybrid connectivity patterns for multi-cloud environments

        Kubernetes & OpenShift

        Architecting and operating containerized workloads at scale on Kubernetes and OpenShift. Covers cluster networking (CNI), ingress design, workload resilience, and integration with cloud-native infrastructure

        Infrastructure as Code

        Industrializing infrastructure provisioning with Terraform and Ansible across multi-cloud and hybrid environments. Focus on reproducibility, drift detection, and pipeline integration

        Linux Internals

        In-depth knowledge of Linux operating system internals: process and memory management, kernel networking stack, and system tuning for high-performance workloads. Daily driver for engineering and production environments

        Observability & Monitoring

        Implementing end-to-end observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/OpenSearch) for distributed systems and large-scale networks. Covers metrics design, alerting strategies, and log correlation

        Experiences

        1
        Airbus

        Jun 2016 - Present

        Toulouse, FR

        Airbus designs, manufactures and delivers industry-leading commercial aircraft, helicopters, military transports, satellites, launchers and more.

        Connectvity Tranversal Technology Specialist

        Sep 2024 - Present

        Responsibilities:
        • In charge of designing, testing and deploying complex infrastructures relying on multiple pillars (network, security, automation)
        • Working closely with all my technology experts colleagues and coordinating the technical decisions and actions
        • Managing operational crisis and improving global reliability my automating monitoring and incident remediations
        • Challenging constructors, and thinking about the future of our technology orientations
        Security Technology Specialist

        Sep 2019 - Aug 2024

        Responsibilities:
        • Design and improve security infrastructure NAC (Cisco ISE), Firewalling (Palo Alto, Fortinet)
        • Highly scalable designs (transit and publishing landing zones on AWS with GWLB, connecting 1000+ client VPCs)
        • WiFi6 deployment industrialization (Aruba IAP) by fully automating access-points and underlying network provisioning
        • Campus network transport moving from MPLSoDMVPN to VXLAN-EVPN
        Network Architect (subcontractor)

        Jun 2016 - Aug 2019

        Responsibilities:
        • Industrial network design, allowing full seggregation and insolation of industrial lines and automated provisioning of new cells and endpoints
        • Mobile devices connectivity (dedicated WiFi network + transparent proxy / URL filtering) + VPN integration with MDM
        • Wireless obsolecence management (+ 7000 APs replacement + multiple Cisco WLC / anchors)
        • design and validation of a connectivity solution allowing integration of mobile ruggerized routers to the Airbus infrastructure, using 4G. Wi-Fi (WGB), IPsec, MPLS over FlexVPN, NAC, BGP VPNv4
        L'Oréal

        Sep 2013 - Dec 2015

        Paris

        French multinational personal care corporation. It is the world’s largest cosmetics company. L’Oréal owns 36 brands and 497 patents.

        Network Engineer

        Sep 2013 - Dec 2015

        Responsibilities:
        • Technical leader of the LAN & Datacenter Operations team for the group
        • MOC and participation to design projects
        • Troubleshooting switching, routing, load-balancing issues
        • Improving monitoring and proactivity in incident resolution
        2
        3
        EVA Group - BSSI

        Sep 2013 - Aug 2019

        Paris - Toulouse

        IT services and consulting

        Agency Directory - Technical leader

        March 2016 - Aug 2019

        Responsibilities:
        • Built the Toulouse EVA Group agency from scratch, from 1 to 18 members
        • Recruit and enforce skills of technical people (network and security engineers)
        • Identify customers and technical missions
        • Learn how to build and lead a team of experts
        Network consulting engineer

        Sep 2013 - Feb 2016

        Responsibilities:
        • Various technical missions for several big customers
        Total

        Sep 2011 - Aug 2013

        France

        Oil & Gas - Exploration & Production, Upstream, Refining, Shipping

        Intern

        Sep 2011 - Aug 2013

        Responsibilities:
        • Layer 3 network operations support for all worldwide Total subsidiaries
        • Includes work on satellite links / radio point-to-point bridges (connecting oil production platforms)
        4