Networking Events in Europe

A European networking engineer sent me this question:

I'd like to know where other fellow engineers meet up especially in Europe and discuss Enterprise datacenter and regular networking. There are the Cisco Live stuff things to go to but are there any vendor neutral meetups?

Gabi Gerber is organizing networking-focused workshops in Switzerland every quarter (search under SIGS Workshops), and you’re most welcome to join us ;) It’s always a boutique event, but that gives us the ability to chat long into the evening.

The only Europe-wide vendor-neutral event I can think of is RIPE meeting, but that’s heavily focused on service provider environment.

There are local meetups and country-level NOG (Network Operators Group) meetings that might have more balanced focus. I know there’s a large one in Poland (PLNOG), regular ones in Ireland, Italy, UK, Slovenia… Then there’s an IPv6 group in Switzerland, an SDN group in Switzerland, and I’m positive there must be similar groups and local meetups in other countries (please feel free to chime in and write a comment or two). These events are great if you happen to be around, but I wouldn’t spend my time and budget travelling there.

Apart from RIPE and maybe PLNOG I’m not aware of any reasonably-large networking-related event in Europe. Troopers always had a warm and cozy corner for networking engineers and we felt right at home there even though it’s a security conference, but it looks they became a more mainstream and focused conference this year, so that’s gone as well.

US isn’t much better. Interop was a great event, but started sliding down the slippery slope of focusing on providing value to exhibitors instead of attendees years ago becoming another marketing morass – the moment someone starts advertising free speaking slots included in sponsor packages I know who their customers are and what they’re selling as a product to those customers (see also this blog post by Ethan Banks).

Anything else? Please write a comment – I would love to know of an attendee-focused vendor-neutral networking event worth attending.

6 comments:

  1. There is the ONS at September 23 - 25, 2019 in Belgium this year : ) ... www.packetflow.co.uk
  2. Small plug, I hope Ivan doesn't mind: we just started a new non-profit foundation to help and support operator groups to connect and to exchange experiences: https://nogalliance.org/. If you have any ideas on how to improve cooperation or want help organising a community please let us know!
  3. There is an ISP go-kart competition held in Holland each year. It originated from the Dutch/NLNOG group and thus its origins are ISP focussed, but nevertheless there seems to be a large enterprise IT component in there. Check: https://www.isp-kartcompetitie.nl/
  4. for Germany there is DENOG (www.denog.de). It will be held in Hamburg in November this year. It's about 200 people. Its the meeting of the people haging out in IRCnet #denog
    DKNOG is just taking place today and tomorrow in Kopenhagen and is also about 200 atendees.
    When you are from an ISP go ahead and attend a RIPE meeting which is heald twice a year at different locations.
  5. Hey mate, we've been trying to get you to iNOG for some time, hint hint, nudge, nudge... with 100+ ppl every 2-3 months with speakers like Jason Edelman, Jose Liste, Laura Nolan etc at the last one alone, https://inog.net has had a wide range of FAANGs and focuses on all things related to networking. We also record all videos and there is now somewhat of a back catalog https://youtube.com/inognet Perhaps ask around your peers and see if they know iNOG :)
  6. ONS seems promising but unfortunately pricey. More technical and less political than SDN NFV Congress. Some bits of OpenStack Summit, Kubecon/Cloudnativecon are worth looking into.
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