I sit here and reflect back to 2008 when my supervisor suggested I look into the CCNA and Network+. My world changed from plugging a cable into a switch to setting up BGP peers, to configuring Load Balancers for High Availability. Network Engineering has evolved and from my eyes, has been entirely reimagined, retaining the foundations of networking.

As I’ve slowly pivoted to the world of Cloud Native technologies and DevOps, a lot of my previous Network Engineer has translated to today’s approach to microservices architecture. FOLLOW THE PACKET I SAY!

What does Networking mean for consumers of Kubernetes and Containers? What does K8S and containers mean Network Engineers? What does that transformation for a Network Engineer look like?

In this talk, I share my journey of Network Engineering from the late 2000s to one in 2022 surrounded by the world distributed systems, observability, the deeper need for security/identity and what our traffic tells us.