Another year swooshed by… it’s time for another what have we been doing in this year blog post.

Most important bit first: ipSpace.net is slowly morphing from a personal project into a (hopefully interesting) learning platform with almost 30 authors creating or participating in ipSpace.net webinars or online courses.

No wonder the ipSpace.net content continues to grow. Right now you’ll find ~150 hours of online content on ipSpace.net (over 800 videos from 58 webinars – statistics here) and over 2700 blog posts on blog.ipSpace.net (can’t imagine when I wrote them).

And here’s what we did in 2016. SDN and related topics first:

• I completed the SDN curriculum with additional four hours of SDN Use Cases and a totally revamped SDN 101 webinar.
• David Gee did two additional NETCONF sessions, including NETCONF deep dive, and Junos and Cisco IOS implementation details.
• Julian Lucek (Juniper) described the details of BGP-LS and PCEP.
• Jeff Tantsura did an overview of Segment Routing.

Data centers:

• Matt Oswalt and Dinesh Dutt described Docker fundamentals and Docker Networking.
• Together with Dinesh Dutt (Cumulus), Roger Lapuh (Avaya) and Lukas Krattiger (Cisco) we created 8 hours of leaf-and-spine fabric design guidelines. I also invited a great engineer from one of Cisco’s competitors, but for whatever incomprehensible reason he got a gag order a few days before the session. Some vendors hate third-party discussion of their technologies.
• Data Center Fabrics webinar got a much-needed overhaul of the architectures and requirements section plus the regular update sessions covering new products and features from Arista, Brocade, Cisco, Juniper and Avaya (guest session by Roger Lapuh), for a total of over 17 hours of data center switching content.
• JR Rivers (Cumulus) tried to explain whether it’s better to have deep packet buffers (and increased latency) or packet drops in Networks, Buffers and Drops webinar.

I also started completing the network automation curriculum:

• In August we started with Network Automation 101;
• Elisa Jasinska described numerous open-source network automation tools;
• We had three Ansible Updates sessions covering Ansible networking modules, YAML, Jinja2, Ansible basics, playbooks, and a few deep-dive topics, resulting in 8 hours of Ansible-related content. Further sessions are planned for early 2017.

Finally, even though I stopped doing sponsored webinars, you’ll still find plenty of free webinars on ipSpace.net. In most cases the authors decided to do them for free, and I financed logistics, editing and post-production. The free webinars include:

• SDN 101 (the very last sponsored webinar I did, but at least I didn't have to be polite toward technologies I believe to be broken)
• BGP-LS and PCEP
• Docker Networking
• Networks, Buffers and Drops

I also plan to make guest parts of some other webinars public (or at least accessible with trial subscription), but want to have them edited first… and that takes way too long. Right now there are ~40 hours of content waiting to be edited.

So, that’s it for 2016. I’m going (mostly) offline, but might publish a few network automation posts next week while preparing content for the January network automation course. I wish you a quiet and happy Christmas and all the best in 2017!