Category: Training

Long story short: I’m launching Ansible for Networking Engineers self-paced course today. It’s already online and you can start whenever you wish.

Now for the details…

Isn’t there already an Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar? Yes.

So what’s the difference? Glad you asked ;)

Last week I published self-study exercises for the YAML and Jinja2 modules in the Ansible for Networking Engineers webinars, and a long list of review questions for the Using Ansible and Ansible Deeper Dive sections.

I also reformatted the webinar materials page. Hope you’ll find the new format easier to read than the old one (it’s hard to squeeze over 70 videos and links on a single page ;).

Oh, and you do know you get Ansible webinar (and over 50 other webinars) with ipSpace.net subscription, right?

The first half of 2017 is almost gone, so it’s time to check how far I got with the plans I made in January.

Delivered:

• Total refresh of Networking in Private and Public Clouds;
• Right-sizing the network;
• Open Networking (and single-SKU data center networks);
• Two additional network automation use cases;
• Ansible deep dive material (delivered)

The spring craziness is still in full swing – we’ll have three webinars this week (a first) and I was so busy I didn’t even have time to write about them. Let’s fix that.

Data Center Updates on Monday is the second part of server virtualization, virtual machines and containers update to Data Center 3.0 webinar. We covered virtual machines in the last session (April 25^th), this time we’ll talk about containers.

David Barroso (now at Fastly) will talk about NAPALM in Ansible on Tuesday.

Do you have the feeling that you should know more about network automation, but don't know where to start? I was facing that same problem in 2015, and then started exploring Ansible (plus YAML, Jinja2, Git, Puppet…), creating small playbooks, and finally came to a point where I said "now I know that you can have a small solution solving an actual problem ready in a few weeks even if you know absolutely nothing today".

One of my readers sent me a few questions about the leaf-and-spine fabric architectures webinar because (in his own words)

We have some projects 100% matching these contents and it would be really useful this extra feedback, not just from consultants and manufacturer.

When I explained the details he followed up with:

Now, I expect in one or two weeks to find some days to be able to follow this webinar in a profitable way, not just between phone calls and emails.

That’s not how it works.

Johannes Weber built a CCNP practice lab, configured 22 different protocols in it, and took packet captures of all of them happily chatting. To make things more interesting he created 45 challenges that you can solve with Wireshark using the pcap file he published.

I often get questions from engineers wondering whether my webinars or courses would be too tough for them. Here’s a question I got from an engineer who wanted to attend my Building Next-Generation Data Center course: “What specific prior experience do you expect for this workshop?”

One of my readers sent me a simple question: “Do you plan to have a Python for Networking Engineers webinar?”

Short answer: no immediate plans.

Here are just a few reasons:

Most network automation tutorials out there assume you’re running Ansible on your workstation and accessing virtual machines via SSH ports mapped by Vagrant. That’s great if you’re an experienced Ansible/Python user; for a clunky beginner like myself it’s safer to run Ansible within a VM that can be destroyed and recreated in seconds.