Category: Training

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).

The materials and descriptions for the Building Network Automation Solutions online course got a slight makeover: all live session recordings are now part of self-study materials, and the module description pages use consistent format for self-study materials and live sessions.

Next on the janitor’s list: a similar makeover for the Data Center online course.

An engineer attending Ansible for Networking Engineers online course sent me this feedback:

This is a great place to learn Ansible and Network Automation from scratch. Starting with an emphasis on the fundamentals (YAML, JSON, Jinja2, how to group your network devices for automation, etc.) you progressively build up towards useful network automation.

He particularly liked the additional features that are part of any ipSpace.net online course:

In mid-May, I ran an onsite network automation workshop, and the manager organizing the workshop for his team invited me to a dinner with his peers. Not surprisingly, they wanted to hear about the topics covered in the workshop, and as soon as I mentioned Network-Infrastructure-as-Code several of them said “yes, that definitely needs to be covered.”

So many things have happened since I wrote “this is what we’re going to do in 2018” blog post. We ran

• An automation course and a data center course, resulting in three new modules in the automation course, and over 20 hours of fresh content
• Three workshops, two of them brand new and resulting in material for VMware NSX Deep Dive and AWS Networking webinars (both coming in early autumn).

We also did a ton of webinars:

On Tuesday I had the last webinar in spring 2018. One more online course session and it will be time for long summer break. In the meantime, we’re already planning the autumn events:

• We’ll start with Lean Start in Network Automation workshop in Zurich, Switzerland, on August 30^th. Register here.
• Building Network Automation Solutions online course starts on September 20^th.

We also have the first webinars scheduled:

• We’ll start with two introductory webinars: SDDC 101 on August 28^th and SD-WAN Overview on September 4^th.
• The first session of technical deep dive into VMware NSX will be on September 11^th.
• Amazon Web Service Networking workshop was a huge success, and we’ll turn it into a webinar in early October.
• There will be an interesting math-focused webinar on October 8^th;
• Dinesh Dutt will talk about fabric troubleshooting in mid-November;

You can attend all these webinars with an ipSpace.net webinar subscription.

Wow. Where did the spring 2018 go? It’s almost June… and time for a refreshed list of upcoming webinars:

• Christoph Jaggi will run do another free webinar – this time on Ethernet Encryptors– on June 5^th;
• I’ll run an Amazon Web Services Networking workshop in Zurich on June 13^th;
• We had to change the schedule a little bit: the last webinar before the summer break will be an overview of real-life automation wins on June 19^th.

When the Spring 2018 Building Network Automation Solutions online course started, we didn’t know whether we’d run another course in 2018, so we offered engineers who wanted to get an early start Believer price.

The wait is over: the autumn 2018 course starts on September 18^th. The schedule of the live sessions is already online, and we also have the first guest speakers. We’ll announce them in early June at which time you will no longer be able to get the Enthusiast price, so register ASAP.

Got this question from a networking engineer who couldn’t decide whether to go for CCIE Data Center certification or attend my Building Next-Generation Data Center online course:

I am considering pursuing CCIE DC. I found your Next-Generation DC course very interesting. Now I am bit confused trying to decide whether to start with CCIE DC first and then do your course.

You might be in a similar position, so here’s what I told him.

The networking engineers attending the Building Network Automation Solutions online course created numerous amazing automation solutions, most of them already deployed in production networks.

I described some of them in my Troopers 2018 Real-Life Automation Wins talk. The presentation is online and the video has been published on YouTube a few days ago. I hope you’ll find it as inspirational as the Troopers attendees did.

Did you create an awesome automation solution? I’d like to hear about it!

This blog post was initially sent to the subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.