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My bingo card for 2024 did not have “get invited and approved to talk at a technical event in an official capacity“. Yet here I am, having done that while thoroughly enjoying the experience. Red Hat invited me to speak at their Automation Everywhere event on the 21st of November 2023 in Perth, Western Australia. I was given a 15-minute slot to summarise the last four years of my work that has involved stepping towards automated systems of work within an operational technology context. That is, as you might imagine, quite difficult to do. Especially considering I had to balance the level of det ..read more

I believe that automation as a discipline is relatively immature within a networking context. Hell of a take, but hear me out. A significant amount of network automation content I have viewed over the last three years tends to focus exclusively on the technical aspects. Download Visual Studio Code, Python, Ansible Core or Nornir, spin up a git repository set up a VENV, and start tinkering while following a trainer’s instructions. Of course, there is more to it than that and exceptions do exist, but you get the gist. This is great, as content accessibility will only see automation adoption incr ..read more

It has been 757 days since I last posted an update on my CCIE journey on April 11th 2021. This journey should have been over quite some time ago. Alas, here I am, CCIE unnumbered, starting to receive the dreaded “12 months until your certifications expire” emails. Yikes! Time to talk about the gap and what I am doing. No Lab Date? No motivation. I started studying for the CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure lab exam around January 2020, “formally” committing to snagging that CCIE number in May 2020. Fast forward to August 2020, and I felt comfortable with most of the blueprint. I broke into the Sof ..read more

The Problem Studying the “Software Defined Infrastructure” topics has been one of the more difficult aspects of preparing for the CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure lab exam. Not only do Cisco SD-WAN and Cisco SD Access require a fair amount of study to understand from a theoretical perspective, but they are also difficult to gain practical experience with. Unless a lab candidate happens to work for an employer that is trialling or using these technologies, then they are entirely dependent upon the offerings of Cisco dCloud or the DevNet Sandbox to gain experience with these technologies legitimat ..read more