Network Engineering in the years to come

To the guys who have been in the game for awhile...what will your study and career focus be for the nest few years? I would typically say the Cisco data center track would be mine but in the last year I have seen a lot of push to the cloud places like AWS now hold a % of pro and non-prod resources. This obviously at some point will lead to a need for less infrastructure engineers. Also and I admit I have not had much hands on with ACI and fabric path data centers, but it seems to me for most of that is pretty self reliant once its functional and will not require as many engineers to manage.
I am not attempting to be a storm crow or an alarmist for us CLI jockies but I do see our job changing and a need for new tools in the tool bag...so Just wondering what some of you other guys are looking into?

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Comments

networker050184

I've moving back into the DC space recently as well, but not really due to it being in anymore demand that the SP space I like to be in usually. Cloud is obviously a big thing with AWS, Azure etc. but cloud providers is also a big space right now. Plenty need for engineers there. In the end though I just always keep my base skills up to par and then you can change with the times much easier. Someone that can get datagrams from end to end will always be in demand. The way it's done will obviously be ever evolving so this will always be a relevant question. Technology will never stop evolving.

As far as things like ACI, it won't really be less people, just different skill sets. Make sure your skill set evolves and you will be good to go.

hurricane1091

I'm just now breaking into Network Engineering. Major companies will continue to do things in house I would assume. Hopefully anyway. Might be tougher competition though. I'd be willing to learn some programming or something.

VAHokie56

could be a mix...I work for a massive financial institution and we are pretty invested in AWS...

Hondabuff

We have a big push towards flexvpn for our VPN tunnels. If it works as planned it will eliminated the administration overhead of building each tunnel on the firewall and the static route. Since we are turning up 25 VPN tunnels a month this will help out a lot and make our 2 firewall guys happy.

hurricane1091

VAHokie56 wrote: »

could be a mix...I work for a massive financial institution and we are pretty invested in AWS...

True. I was just offered a position from a big financial institution that does it all in house fortunately. I've definitely interviewed at placed that did a lot of cloud based solutions. I don't know what the future holds. It better hold enough until I finish all my education and get enough experience for management though. I wish I knew more about SDN and what that potentially is going to turn into.

VAHokie56

I think at a high-level Networker is right and there will always be a need for people that understand more theory of networking and how the various protocols work. At the same time SDN, network automation and pushes to cloud kind of make me nervous. I am trying to spin it into an excuse to push my self to learn a broader skill set, kind of why I was sniffing around to see if any other hard core route/switch guys at the large enterprise level where thinking.

shodown

We are deff about to see some big changes, and I'm starting to get more and more into DC as well to go on top of my VoIP skills. Friends of mine that work on some of the largest networks in the US who are already doing SDN are looking to have CLI access removed from all network engineers in the next 24 months and only scripts will log into the devices. Network engineers will still be around, but the job will deff change.

pevangel

I haven't been in the game a while, but I was lucky enough to land a gig in a service provider. Right now most of my focus is on MetroE, EoDWDM, and EoTDM. I also get to dabble in cloud services.

I think big companies will keep IT in house, but most small to mid-size businesses will probably go to service providers.

hurricane1091

I really hope it doesn't go away. Can someone provide me with some reading materials for SDN? I have obviously Google'd it before. But I just can't seem to grasp/understand the mystery that surrounds it. What about all the initial config? How can that be replaced?

networker050184

At this point some are saying SDN will never happen. Something is going to change obviously, but whether that is SDN or not is still yet to be seen. Hybrid type solutions like ACI seem to be the most realistic at this point. Even then I don't think there are a lot of adopters.

As far as replacing initial config, templates. Dumb hardware that looks for the controller on boot and pulls a templated base config. After that forwarding rules are pushed etc. Something the server guys have had a leg up on us networking folks for a while now.

There are a few open source solutions out there you could likely get your hands on now though.

philz1982

Eventually CLI will go away and then it will come back. Look at powershell, it's easier to config through powershell than through the GUI. I think there will be a big push for GUI driven networking especially with SDN, then there will be a snap back to CLI although it will be called something different.

Eventually an algorithm will be written that auto-configs and adjusts faster then any person can and will build a repository of network designs and will automatically design and deploy software based networks that do not rely on physical network gear at the edge/distro b/c mobile devices and IoT will become the mesh edge/distro and only the core will remain.

AwesomeGarrett

Cloud services have been a game changer. The more customers continue to push the boundaries of what the cloud providers can do, the faster you will see in-house data centers shrink. Most of the market is still using physical servers, or so I've been told. The cloud will allow small to medium businesses to save big as they transition to virtual environments and push off low risk applications to the cloud.

Back to your post, in my opinion, the routing and switch part of the network won't see any big changes until the cost of a 100Mb circuit comes down to the cost of today's 10Mb. You might say, "Well, you can just order some DSL or Broadband and setup a VPN!". This solution works well, stateside. Internet outside of North America and EMEA is unreliable and your going to want that SLA.

I see less switches, more wireless, more nexus but smaller data centers, and the CLI remaining king.

Phil has a great point, however, the CLI is still popular because the vendors top customers keep demanding it. Maybe one day they'll change their minds.

kohr-ah

Someone will always need to be there to make point A get to point B but I see the game changing greatly.
Automation is a big thing right now and is the primary reason I am learning Python.

My work is a big "CLOUD!!!!!!! YEAH!!" kind of place and the reason is just that. The solution is on site therefore we aren't responsible for it if it goes down and we dont require the staff to maintain it. They are also learning the downsides of it. Cloud based network storage is great, until it goes down and you no longer control getting it back up. It is a double edged sword. Automation at the moment I am the only one doing it at my work and honestly it isn't to take work from anyone it is more along the lines of I have people come ask me constantly for things like available switch ports. I can make a script that I enter my credentials once and it logs into every switch at a site and puts out all the ports that are "sh int status | i not|dis" and email it to someone via a relay server. It saves a lot of time I need to finish projects assigned to me.

Data Centers I think will fluxuate in size as stated before. What can be moved off site will be moved off site unless cost justifications show that on site is more of a value.

All and all I dont think it is something to worry about but just make yourself aware and adjust to the trend as any IT person has to and you will be alright.

NetworkNewb

My company got rid of our physical exchange server recently and went to Exchange Online with Office365 a few months back. Last week, we had an issue where the PDF attachments when using scan-to-email would come just as a bunch of random letters. I banged my head away for hours trying to figure out the problem. Then I worked with Microsoft support for a couple more hours for them only to realize it was an issue on their end. The problem didn't get fixed for a couple of days... That was extremely annoying!!

rcsoar4fun

2015 marks the 20th year that I have been doing networking. I started in college earning pizza money by setting up peoples dial-up connections.

In those 20 years only one thing has remained the same in networking, change. There is ALWAYS something new around the corner that will mix things up. The single skill every networking people needs is the ability to learn new things, and rapidly at that.

And yet, the CCIE Routing TCP/IP Volume 1 book is still relevant. TDM and SONET are still out there. And Cisco devices still come with a serial management port.

UnixGuy

kohr-ah wrote: »

.... Cloud based network storage is great, until it goes down and you no longer control getting it back up. It is a double edged sword......

But VPs and executives can justify the downtime if you're saving thousands and thousands of dollars. You'd be surprised how tolerable they can be if there is money to be saved.

philz1982

Yep funny how that works you get yelled at for the system being down when they approved the SLA and OLA