Software-defined networking

And so then the question became, okay, well, wait a minute, like...

OpenFlow caused all these big SDN waves now like 14 years ago.

This has been talked about for a long, long, long time.

And then in my own personal experience, I was writing scripts to help run service writers 20 years ago.

It didn't go that well.

That's where we realized that what advanced means is different to almost everyone you ask.

Kind of like SDN was or cloud was.

Now it's, you know, advanced.

So if you're someone who's wondering, Is that a term we really need to know? Just go to the exam objectives and see, oh, infrastructure as code is abbreviated as IAC.

Software-defined networking is abbreviated as SDN.

Those are the only ones I'd worry about knowing.

But the advantage here is that you're going to learn those acronyms as you go through the exam materials, just organically.

And so then the question became, okay, well, wait a minute, like...

OpenFlow caused all these big SDN waves now like 14 years ago.

This has been talked about for a long, long, long time.

And then in my own personal experience, I was writing scripts to help run service providers 20 years ago.

It didn't go that well.

That's where we realized that what advanced means is different to almost everyone you ask.

Kind of like SDN was or cloud was.

Now it's, you know, advanced.

So I'll start with, I mean, a lot of network people watch the show.

So I'll start with, if you've been around networking for a little while, Every time there's like a new wave of automation, like SDN or whatever it is, some new things, oh, we're going to automate all of networking and network engineers will become obsolete.

And it is actually couched that way in those terms, often directly to customers when those products are being sold.

Nasira, before they got bought by VMware back in the SDN heyday, famously did not want network engineers in the room when they were selling Nasira to the people that managed VMware.

Right.

They said, nope, network people aren't allowed in the room because they derail the conversation.

Been here for about twenty-three years now.

Um, my whole career pretty much, uh, focused on, you know, kind of core, um, routing, switching, security, right? And, um, with a, with an emphasis on, I would say SDN solutions, right? So kind of starting with, um, you know, this technology called Optimized Edge Routing, which was, you know, application aware, um, kind of morphed into, um, you know, performance routing, which then became, um, you know, IWAN, the IWAN solution.

So I did a lot of work with that.

You know, wrote a lot of the CBDs, did customer design work.