The Network Engineer Paradigm Shift

As many, I come from a long line of Cisco Engineers who follow the standards and mantra of the stamped standard of networking. That is, until I was brought in and exposed to the world of Cumulus Linux. I kicked, I stomped, I complained. This isn’t what I am used to, this isn’t how Cisco or Cisco based command lines work. Then one day, I saw the elegance of it all and glimpsed the future.

The world of being a Network Engineer is changing. When I was younger, I chose a career in networking over programming, because quite frankly, every business will need a network person to run their network while programmer jobs continue to go to workers overseas. While this remains true and every company needs a network engineer, I now run a company whose primary niche is to be the network engineer for companies, so they don’t need to hire their own. So now every company doesn’t need a network engineer, so what is the obvious future for a network engineer? Multitenant cloud environments.

If you are looking to be a successful network engineer in the future, understanding and working in multitenant cloud environments is the only way to go. The cloud has changed everything, with companies moving workloads to services like Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform, understanding things like VXLAN, VRF, Bridges, overlays, underlays, unnumbered BGP, eVPN and a host of new terms is the way it will be, and these multitenant hosting services will be the place to find the best jobs. If you want to set yourself apart from all the thousands and thousands of Cisco certified people and have the advantage of knowing what most do not, simply be willing to stray from the standard.

Cumulus Linux is the stray from that standard. And believe me when I say, the standard is changing. With the introduction of DEVOPs and the new face of development, this is leading the way to redefining networking and how things operate. Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, while all things I use to avoid as the plague as an old school network engineer, are now knowledge required to run a successful large-scale network. Once you break away from the Cisco standard you’ve been brainwashed with as the defacto standard, you will realize the elegance of using Cumulus Linux and its associated tools, especially in a multi-tenant environment.

In my opinion, the amount of needed network engineers needed in the world, is in trouble. The field is saturated. Company leadership is demanding that services be moved off premise and to the cloud. They aren’t exactly sure why, they think it will reduce costs and complexity, and they know it’s what everyone else is doing. But think about it. Once your workload is moved to the cloud, do we really need a network engineer back home to run the office network? With cloud-based network solutions, can the onsite network infrastructure simply be contracted out to a company who can maintain and monitor the on-premise equipment that remains for a fraction of what hiring the network engineer will cost? Sure. That’s where Oort Cloud Solutions comes in. It’s why it exists.

While Azure, AWS and Google are the kings for now. Time will tell if these services are the future. There are many companies trying to make their own public clouds. Cloud Hosting providers trying to provide niche services and customer support that you cannot get from the big guys. As well, there are still plenty of engineers who are happy in their VMWare based environments, and while VMWare tries to find its future stretching its workloads into the big clouds or Cloud Service Providers, the fact still remains that their licensing is incredibly expensive. A small company trying to run a startup cloud hosting service using vCAN licensing, is a model that is completely unaffordable and keeps the company uncompetitive. There are glimmers of hope with companies like Yottabyte and Formulusblack working to make affordable cloud solutions for MSP/CSP’s.

In the end, the paradigm is happening. The Network Engineer will not be the same in 5 years time. And now is the time to adjust your skillset and knowledge to be ready for the future and stand out from the norm.