Category: Training

It’s almost exactly three months since I announced ipSpace.net going on an extended coffee break. We had some ideas of what we plan to do at that time, but there were still many gray areas, and thanks to tons of discussions I had with many of my friends, subscribers, and readers, they mostly crystallized into this:

You’re trusting me to deliver. We added a “you might want to read this first” warning to the checkout process, and there was no noticeable drop in revenue. Thanks a million for your vote of confidence!

Almost exactly a year ago Miha Markočič joined the ipSpace.net team. He was fresh out of university, fluent in Python, but with no networking or automation background… so I decided to try my traditional method of getting new team members up to speed: throw them into the deep water, observe how quickly they learn to swim, and give them a few tips if it seems like they might be drowning.

It worked out amazingly well. Miha quickly mastered the intricacies of AWS and Azure, and created full-stack automation solutions in Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation and Azure Resource Manager to support the AWS and Azure webinars, and the public cloud networking online course.

After deciding to take a slightly longer coffee break I went through the list of outstanding projects trying to figure out which ones I could complete in first half of 2021, which ones I’ll get to “eventually” and what’s a lost cause.

Guest Speakers

We squeezed as many guest speakers as we could into the first half of 2021. Here’s what we managed to do:

Long story short: ipSpace.net is going on an extended coffee break on June 24th 2021 reducing the scope of activities on July 1st 2021. You can stop reading; the rest of the blog post is full of details you probably don’t care about.

What exactly does that mean? Since this blog post was published in January 2021, we pretty much figured out a way forward, and I’m glad we let engineers considering our subscriptions know months in advance what might happen.

Anyway, after investing two lifetimes into this project, and a few planned changes coming just before our regular summer hiatus (see below) it’s time for a longer break an adjustment. ipSpace.net will revert back to Ivan working on some interesting stuff.

As always, it’s time to shut down our virtual office and disappear until early January… unless of course you have an urgent support problem. Any paperwork ideas your purchasing department might have will have to wait until 2021.

I hope you’ll be able to disconnect from the crazy pace of networking world, forget all the unicorns and rainbows (and broccoli forest of despair), and focus on your loved ones – they need you more than the dusty router sitting in a remote office. We would also like to wish you all the best in 2021!

One of my subscribers trying to figure out how to improve his career choices sent me this question:

I am Sr. Network Engineer with 12+ Years’ experience. I was quit happy with my networking skills but will all the recent changes I’m confused. I am not able to understand what are the key skills I should learn as a network engineer to keep myself demandable.

Before reading the rest of this blog post, please read Cloud and the Three IT Geographies by Massimo Re Ferre.

Tom Hollingsworth wrote another must-read blog post in which he explained what one should do before asking for help:

If someone comes to me and says, “I tried this and it failed and I got this message. I looked it up and the response didn’t make sense. Can you tell me why that is?” I rejoice. That person has done the legwork and narrowed the question down to the key piece they need to know.

In other words (again his), do your homework first and then ask relevant questions.

The mission of ipSpace.net is very simple: explain new networking technologies and products in a no-nonsense marketing-free and hopefully understandable way.

Sometimes we’re probably way off the mark, but every now and then we get it just right as evidenced by this feedback from one of our subscribers:

I was given short notice to present a board-level overview of VMWare NSX-T for an urgent virtualization platform change from Microsoft. Tech execs needed to understand NSX-T’s position in the market, in its product lifecycle, feature advantages, possible feature deficits, and an idea of the level of effort for implementation.

Got this interesting question from one of my readers

Based on my experience, the documentation regarding Linux networking is either elementary man pages for user-space utilities or very complicated Linux kernel source code. Does getting deep into Linux networking mean reading source code?

It all depends on how deep you plan to go:

Here’s the final push before we hit the summer break at the end of June (and recover a bit from the relentless production of new content we had throughout the first half of 2020):

• I finished the Introduction to Containers and Docker update just in time to cover the nuances of Docker Networking before the summer break. The first live session will take place today, the second one on June 11th.
• Later this week (May 28th) we’ll have some fun with routing protocol basics.
• Dinesh Dutt covered Vagrant in his last live session and plans to cover other network simulation tools on June 2nd.
• We did a “should I use VMware NSX or Cisco ACI” webinar a few years ago. In the meantime both vendors launched major new features, so it’s high time for a thorough refresh starting on June 9th.
• Mario Rosi will continue the Cisco ACI Introduction series on June 16th.
• David Barroso described the basics of Nornir in our network automation course. We’ll turn that material into an independent webinar (available with standard ipSpace.net subscription) and David plans to augment it with a deep dive into Nornir internals in a live session on June 18th.
• I will need another live session on June 23rd to continue the NSX-or-ACI comparison, and we plan to start the summer break on June 25th.