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Memories of Cisco Live II – Berlin 2016

Posted by ccie14023 on April 6, 2021
Posted in: Reflections. Tagged: , , , , , . 3 comments

Getting a session at Cisco Live is not a given, even for a Principal TME.  I started at Cisco in October 2015, and I certainly didn’t expect to present at, or even go to, Cisco Live Berlin in January 2016.  Normally, there are three ways to secure a session at CL:

  1. Submit an idea during the “Call for papers” process about six months before a given event.  The Session Group Managers (SGMs) who manage individual tracks (e.g., security, data center) then must approve it.  It can be hard to get that approval.  SGMs need to have faith in your ability as a presenter, as well as believe your topic is relevant and unique.
  2. Carry over a session from the previous CL.  If you’ve presented a session, you can check a box in the Cisco Live management tool to ask for it to be carried over to the next CL.  Again, this is dependent on the SGMs approving it.
  3. Be handed a session by somebody who had it approved, but is not going to present it.  Perhaps they are leaving, taking a new job, or just don’t want to do it any more.  Usually the SGMs need to approve any re-assignments as well.  (You can see the SGMs are rather powerful for CL.  It helps to know them well, and it hurts when they turn over!)

When I joined Cisco, I was assigned to a wonderful and humble team working on programmability.  We met and discussed the various assignments and approvals we had for Cisco Live, and they kindly offered my two:  booth duty for an Ansible with Nexus demo, and a session at DevNet called “Automation with NXOS:  Let’s get started!”

A Principal TME is a director-level position, and normally a PTME would not be expected to spend all day at a booth.  However, since I was new to the company, position, and team, I decided it would be a good idea to do some of the grunt work a normal TME does, and experience booth duty.

My 2016 Berlin CL Booth before opening

As for the DevNet session:  DevNet, Cisco’s developer enablement team, runs a large section of the Cisco Live show floor.  DevNet has theaters which are open-seating and divided from the rest of the show floor.  A typical CL breakout takes place in a room, whereas DevNet sessions are out in the open.  In 2016, it was pretty easy to get DevNet sessions, and nobody cared when the team re-assigned it to me.  I had a free trip to Europe and plenty to do when I got there.

What you see at Cisco Live is the fruit of months of preparation.  I had to develop the entire booth demo from scratch–I was supposed to have help from another TME from a different team, but he was totally worthless.  I set up the lab and wrote the demo script myself.  For the DevNet session, I pulled together slides from my colleagues and did my best to master them.  Keep in mind, I came to Cisco after six years at Juniper.  I didn’t know a thing about Nexus, and programmability was new to me.

Every new speaker at CL is required to undergo speaker training, so I signed up for mine.  In 1 hour the non-technical trainer gave me a few pointers.  I’ve been through enough speaker training in the past that it wasn’t terribly helpful, but the box was checked.

Arriving in Berlin, I registered at CL and as a speaker and staffer was given an “all-access” pass.  I could go anywhere at the show.  Personally, I’ve always loved having backstage access to anything, and so I headed to the World of Solutions (WoS, the show floor) and spent a long time trying to find my booth.  WoS before it opens is a genuine mess–people running cherry-pickers and forklifts, laying down carpet, and well-dressed booth people all contending for space.  There are usually challenges getting the demo computers up and running, connected to demos back home, etc.

WoS is a mess when we arrive

Working a booth can be frenetic or boring.  The positioning of my booth and the content of the demo (Ansible automation of NXOS) did not generate a lot of traffic.  I spent hours standing at the booth with nothing to do.  For the occasional customer who would show an interest, I’d run the demo, and possibly do a little white boarding.  Then, reset the demo and wait for the next guy. It wasn’t a lot of fun.

Eventually, the time came for the DevNet session.  I was really nervous for my first time in front of a CL audience. Would I mess up?  Would I choke up due to nerves?  Would my audience ask questions I couldn’t answer?

Seeing your own name on the board is exciting and nerve-wracking

As I said, the DevNet sessions are presented out on the show floor, and it’s a terrible speaking environment.  It’s noisy, you cannot hear yourself, and the participants were given headphones so they could hear.  It was like speaking into a void.  I remember one gentleman bouncing between sleep and wakefulness, his head nodding down and then coming alive again.  The presentation was not one of my best, but I got the job done acceptably and the participants filled out their paper score sheets at the end.  I mostly had 5’s, and a few 4’s.  At that point DevNet sessions did not receive an official score, so my numbers didn’t “count”, but I could show them to my boss and get some credit, at least.

My wife had traveled with me and we took a few sightseeing trips.  We saw the amazing museums on Berlin’s “museum island” and also hired a driver to give us a tour.  We had several team events around the city–Cisco Live is famous for parties–and ate some very good German food.  One of my colleagues was well known for arranging parties that went until four or five AM, and many TMEs would show up to their 8am session with only a couple hours of sleep.  In fact, one of the other Hall of Fame Distinguished Speakers claims this was his secret to success!  I myself, avoid parties like that and spend hours in my room practicing my presentation before giving it.  To each his own, I suppose.

Ah, the perks of Cisco Live!

Network engineers are a breed unto ourselves, and I think we have a distinct feeling of community.  Our field is highly specialized, and because we often have to defend our domain from those who do not understand it (“it’s not the network, ok?!”), we have a camaraderie that’s hard to match.  I left Berlin on a real high, feeling more a part of that community than ever having been there in a Cisco uniform, and having gotten up in front of an audience.  I didn’t know what my future held at Cisco, but it was the first of many such experiences to come.

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CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure

Posted by ccie14023 on June 14, 2019
Posted in: Certifications. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , . 5 comments

There were quite a few big announcements at Cisco Live this year.  One of the big ones was the overhaul of the certification program.  A number of new certifications were introduced (such as the DevNet CCNA/CCNP), and the existing ones were overhauled.  I wanted to do a post about this because I was involved with the certification program for quite a while on launching these.  I’m posting this on my personal blog, so my thoughts here are, of course, personal and not official.

First, the history.  Back when I was at Juniper, I had the opportunity to write questions for the service provider written exams.  It was a great experience, and I got thorough training from the cert program on how to properly write exam questions.  I don’t really remember how I got invited to do it, but it was a good opportunity, as a certified (certifiable?) individual, to give back to the program.  When I came to Cisco, I quickly connected with the cert program here, offering my services as a question writer. I had the training from Juniper, and was an active CCIE working on programmability.  It was a perfect fit, and a nice chance to recertify without taking the test, as writing/reviewing questions gets your CCIE renewed.

As I was managing a team within the business unit that was working on Software-Defined Access and programmability, it seemed logical for me to talk to the program about including those topics on the test.  I can assure you there was a lot of internal debate about this, as the CCIE exam is notoriously complex, and the point of our Intent-Based Networking products is simplicity.  One product manager even suggested a separate CCIE track for SD-Access, an idea I rejected immediately for that very reason.

Still, as I often point out here and elsewhere, SDN technologies do not mitigate the need for network engineers.  SDN products, all SDN products, are complex precisely because they are automated.  Automation enables us to build more complex things, in general.  You wouldn’t want to configure all the components of SD-Access by hand.  Still, we need engineers who understand what the automation tools are doing, and how to work with all the components which comprise a complex solution like SD-Access.  Network engineers aren’t going to disappear.

For this reason, we wanted SD-Access, SDWAN, and also device programmability (NETCONF/YANG, for example) to be on the lab.  We want to have engineers who know and understand these technologies, and the certification program is a fantastic way to help people to learn them.  I, and some members of my team, spent several months working with the CCIE program to build a new blueprint, which became the CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure.  The storied CCIE Routing and Switching will be no more.

At the end of the day, the CCIE exam has always adapted to changed in networking.  The R/S exam no longer has ISDN or IPX on it, nor should it.  Customers are looking for more automated solutions, and the exam is keeping pace.  If you’re studying for this exam, the new blueprint may be intimidating.  That said, CCIE exams have always been intimidating.  But think about this:  if you pass this exam, your resume will have skills on it that will make you incredibly marketable.

The new CCIE-EI (we always abbreviate stuff, right?) breaks down like this:

  • 60% is classic networking, the core routing protocols we all know and love.
  • 25% is SDx:  SD-Access and SD-WAN, primarily.
  • 15% is programmability.  NETCONF/YANG, controller APIs, Ansible, etc.

How do you study for this?  Like you study for anything.  Read about it and lab it.  There is quite a bit of material out there on all these subjects, but let me make some suggestions:

Programmability

You are not expected to be a programming expert for this section of the exam.  It’s not about seeing if you can write complex programs, but whether you know the basics well enough to execute some tasks via script/Ansible/etc instead of CLI.  DevNet is replete with examples of how to send NETCONF messages, or read data off a router or switch with programmable interfaces.  Download them, play with them, spend some time learning the fundamentals of Python, and relax about it.

  • Learn:  DevNet is a phenomenal resource.  Hank Preston, an evangelist for DevNet, has put out a wealth of material on programmability.  In addition, there is the book on IOS XE programmability I wrote with some colleagues.
  • Lab:  You can lab programmability stuff easily on your laptop.  Python and ncclient are free, as is Ansible.  If you have any sort of lab setup already, all you need to do is set up a Linux VM or install some tools on to your laptop.

Software-Defined

This is, as I said before, a tough one to test on.  After all, to add a device to an SD-Access fabric, you select it and click “Add to Fabric.”  What’s there to test?  Well, since these are new products you of course need to understand the components of SD-Access/SDWAN and how they interoperate.  How does policy work?  How do fabric domains talk to non-fabric domains?  There is plenty to study here.

  • Learn:  Again, we’ve written books on SD-Access and SD-WAN.  Also, we are moving a lot of documentation into Cisco Communities.
  • Lab:  Well, this is harder.  We’re working on getting SD-Access into the hands of learning partners, so you’ll have a place to get your hands on it.  We’re also working on virtualizing SD-Access as much as possible, to make it easier for people to run in labs.  I don’t have a timeframe on the latter, but hopefully the former we can do soon.

These are huge but exciting changes. I’ve been very lucky to have landed at a job where I am at the forefront of the changes in the industry, but this new exam will give others the opportunity to move themselves in that direction as well.  Happy labbing!