Category: training

We’re starting the Spring 2019 workshop season in March with open-enrollment workshops in Zurich (Switzerland). It was always hard to decide which workshop to do (there are so many interesting topics), so we’ll do two of them in the same week:

• Network and Security Automation with Ansible on March 12^th and
• Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds on March 13^th.

Rachel Traylor will continue her Graph Theory webinar on March 7^th with a topic most relevant to networking engineers: trees, spanning trees and shortest-path trees, and I’ll continue with two topics I started earlier this year:

You might have noticed that our Winter 2019 webinar schedule got crazily busy with seven live sessions in the first two months of the year (another first)… but that’s not all, there are two more live sessions that we haven’t announced yet as we always schedule a single live session of a particular webinar.

Wondering what’s coming during the rest of 2019? Starting with committed ideas:

My friend Andrea Dainese (of the Route Reflector Labs fame) sent me this observation:

Because of lack of fundamental skills, I see two groups forming: junior guys with low salary (the bigger group), and a few experts (hopefully with higher salary). The middle group is disappearing. Intermediate-level engineers are either moving to the entry level (because the complexity is increasing and they are not keeping up with it) or to the upper level.

I call this phenomenon bifurcation of knowledge (I’m positive it has a formal name – would appreciate a comment with a set of pointers), and it’s a direct result of commoditization and the changing shape of the learning curve.

December will start with three on-site events:

• We’ll run Using VXLAN and EVPN to Build Active-Active Data Centers workshop in Zurich on December 5^th;
• I’ll talk about making SDN better with IPv6 on December 6^th;
• Next day (December 7^th) I’ll talk about Real-life SDN in Rapperswil (a lovely medieval town at the tip of Lake Zurich).

On the webinar front, December will be a storage month:

David Gee decided to talk about hygiene of network automation in the Spring 2019 Building Network Automation Solutions online course, and (not surprisingly) Christoph Jaggi wanted to know more:

You highlight the hygiene of automation. What is it and why does it matter?

Hygiene is the important but boring bit of automation most beginners and amateurs pass by.

The “everyone should be a programmer” crowd did a really good job of scaring network engineers (congratulations, just what we need!). Here’s a typical question I’m getting:

Do I need to be good in scripting to attend your automation course.

TL&DR: Absolutely not.

Earlier this month I got this email from someone who had attended one of my online courses before and wanted to watch another one of them:

Is it possible for you to bundle a 1 year subscription at no extra cost if I purchase the Building Next-Generation Data Center course?

We were planning to do something along these lines for a long time, and his email was just what I needed to start a weekend-long hackathon.

End result: Expert ipSpace.net Subscription. It includes:

One of my subscribers sent me a nice email describing his struggles to master Ansible:

Some time ago I started to hear about Ansible as the new power tool for network engineer, my first reaction was “What the hell is this?” I searched the web and found many blah blahs about it… until I landed on your pages.

He found Ansible for Networking Engineers material sufficient to start an automation project:

Did you know that many networking engineers use ipSpace.net webinars (and subscription) to prepare for the job interviews?

Here’s one of their success stories (name changed for obvious reasons):

The fast pace of webinars continues in October 2018:

• Rachel Traylor will talk about graph theory and its relevance to reliable network design on October 8^th;
• The Amazon Web Services Networking webinar will start on October 11^th. The second session is planned for October 25^th;
• On October 16^th we’ll have the third session of VMware NSX technical deep dive (unless I manage to finish on time later today… not likely).

There are no on-site events planned until early December:

• We’ll run another on-site workshop in Zurich on December 5^th . This time we’ll focus on using VXLAN and EVPN to build multi-site fabrics;
• I’ll talk about making SDN better with IPv6 on December 6^th.

You can attend all upcoming webinars with an ipSpace.net webinar subscription. Online courses and on-site events require separate registration.

Here’s a bit of good news for those of you scared of network automation replacing your jobs: even Elon Musk didn’t manage to pull it off, so I don’t think a networking vendor dabbling in intent will manage to do it (particularly considering the track record of networking vendors’ network management and orchestration systems).

Last year’s experiment generated so much interest that I decided to repeat it this year: if you’re an undergraduate or Master's student and manage to persuade us that you’re motivated enough to automate the **** out of everything, you’ll get a free seat in Ansible for Networking Engineers online course.

Interested? Check out the details, and apply before October 1^st.

Too old? Please spread the word ;)

We migrated the self-study materials for the network infrastructure and services module of the Building Next-Generation Data Centers online course into the new format, and split the largest module of the course into manageable chunks: data center fabrics 101, designing leaf-and-spine fabrics, overlay virtual networking, IPv6 and network services.

Feedback on the new format is obviously highly welcome. Thank you!

When I started the Building Next-Generation Data Centers online course, I didn’t have the automated infrastructure to support it, so I had to go with the next best solution: a reasonably-flexible Content Management System, and Mediawiki turned out to be a pretty good option.

In the meantime, we developed a full-blown course support system, included guided self-paced study (available with most ipSpace.net online course), and progress tracking. It was time to migrate the data center material into the same format.

After fixing the Building Network Automation Solutions materials, I decided to tackle the next summer janitorial project: creating standard curriculum pages for Building Next Generation Data Centers online course and splitting it into more granular modules (the course is ~150 hours long, and some modules have more than 40 hours of self-study materials).