Listening to (some) industry evangelists you would believe that there’s no future in being a networking engineer. After all, all workloads will move into the cloud, and all clients will connect through a universal 5G network… but even if that utopia eventually comes true, you can’t get away from the laws of physics (and the need networking infrastructure).

TL&DR: our new online course will help you master the shiny new world. You can register right now or keep reading ;)

Not surprisingly, once you start exploring how public clouds really work you find tons of traditional networking concepts even within the virtual world - ranging from NICs, private and public IP addresses, NAT, subnets, and networks to packet filters, VPN connections, firewalls, and load balancers… and someone will have to understand how those things work if you want to have a reliable and secure public cloud deployment (see also: Memcrashed).

Just to give you an example: Microsoft published a great blueprint describing DMZ implementation in Azure. Open that link and look at the first diagram… and now tell me how someone without networking knowledge can troubleshoot that when something inevitably goes wrong.

On the other hand, you have to forget tons of traditional networking tricks when moving into the public cloud. VLANs no longer work, so there are no dirty layer-2 tricks. You cannot simply snatch an IP address from a failed appliance to implement high availability. Subnets are a weird mix between router interfaces and VRFs… and to top it all off, every public cloud does it differently.

We launched our new online course focused on networking in public clouds to help you survive in the brave new world. It will focus on networking but also address topics like containers, infrastructure-as-code, and high-availability architectures. We’re starting in February 2020, and the only thing you have to do to get the extremely low Enthusiast price is to register ASAP (the number of seats is limited... and the Believer tickets already sold out).