Category: Training

After a few weeks of venting my frustrations on Twitter I finally completed Microsoft Azure Networking slide deck last week and published the related demos on GitHub.

I will use the slide deck in a day-long workshop in Zurich (Switzerland) on June 12^th and run a series of live webinar sessions in autumn. If you’re a (paid) subscriber you can already download the slides and it would be great if you’d have time to attend the Zurich workshop – it’s infinitely better to discuss interesting challenges face-to-face than to type questions in a virtual classroom.

Ladies and gentlemen, our Autumn 2019 Building Network Automation Solutions online course is now ready for boarding. Please make sure you have your boarding passes ready, board at your convenience, and start enjoying the pre-flight perks like over hundred hours of self-study materials.

Our flight will depart on September 3^rd with subsequent sessions on September 26^th, October 24^th and November 12^th. The guest speakers will focus on security, inventory managements, and describe their production deployments. More in a few days…

The only thing you have to do at this moment is to register (if you want to get the Enthusiast price… otherwise please feel free to wait ;)

And just in case you’re wondering: yes, I was sitting at an airport while writing this blog post ;))

Last Thursday I started another experiment: a series of live webinar sessions focused on business aspects of networking technologies. The first session expanded on the idea of three paths of enterprise IT. It covered the commoditization of IT and networking in particular, vendor landscape, various attempts at segmenting customers, and potential long-term Enterprise IT paths. Recording is already online and currently available with standard subscription.

Although the attendance was lower than usual, attendees thoroughly enjoyed it – one of them sent me this: “the value of ipSpace.net is that you cut through the BS”. Mission accomplished ;)

In April 2019 we’re starting a new cloud security saga with Matthias Luft. The first webinar in this series will focus on the basics, subsequent live sessions spread through the rest of 2019 will cover individual technologies.

Another series we’re starting is Business Aspects of Networking, opening on April 4^th with Three Paths of Enterprise IT.

We’ll also continue the math-in-networking series, this time focused on reliability functions and advanced reliability topics.

TL&DR: We ran two workshops in Zurich last week – a quick peek into using Ansible for network automation and updated Building Private Cloud Infrastructure. You can access workshop materials with any paid ipSpace.net subscription.

Now for the fun part…

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.

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: