How one can be a community engineer within the age of automation
I’ve been concerned with community engineering for the higher a part of 20 years now and I’ve noticed huge modifications within the trade throughout these 20 years, from Body Relay and ATM turning into out of date to Ethernet taking on and turning into a pervasive expertise. However in addition to me getting older and completely different transport applied sciences going via existential crises, the most important improvement in all these years was the emergence of community automation and programmability. That is the change that has most likely affected essentially the most what it means to be a community engineer as of late.
Sure, completely different applied sciences and protocols come and go in classical community engineering, however automation requires a very new set of abilities. These new abilities differ in complexity and usefulness from studying methods to write YAML recordsdata and dealing with Ansible, to writing HCL recordsdata for Terraform configuration, to being totally proficient in a programming language corresponding to Python or Golang. The idea and basis for all these new abilities comes from software program improvement. This has all the time been tangential to community engineering, however with the appearance of automation is taking a entrance row seat.
Relying on the scale of the networks and environments you might be engaged on, and the way your organization is organized, it could be you that has to grow to be a proficient software program developer and convey automation into your group. Or, you might need to work with software program builders and clarify to them how the community is operating, what must be executed to automate what you are promoting processes and workflows in a language and with ideas that they perceive and that they will simply flip into supply code.
You aren’t alone
If all of this sounds formidable to you, don’t despair, you aren’t alone in your automation journey. We’ve a implausible neighborhood of engineers at completely different levels of their careers which might be more than pleased to share their onerous realized automation classes with you. I host a weekly reside stream on Wednesdays at 9:00AM PT referred to as Simplifying Community Automation with NetGru that’s being broadcast reside and recorded on the Cisco DevNet YouTube channel and LinkedIn account.
In two latest episodes I’ve had the privilege of internet hosting Julio Gomez, Principal Gross sales Architect at Cisco. We’ve mentioned how purposes have developed over time – from monoliths to micro companies architectures, containerized purposes and Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, telepresence (not the Cisco one), mirrord, Okteto, and extra. Most significantly, we talked about methods to be a community engineer on this new world surrounded by all these thrilling applied sciences. Listed here are hyperlinks the place you may watch these recorded episodes:
Mark your calendars to tune in to the weekly reside stream
Simplifying Community Automation with NetGru
Wednesdays at 9:00AM PT
Broadcast reside and recorded on the Cisco DevNet YouTube channel and LinkedIn
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