(UK) New skills for experienced senior network engineers?

Hi folks

I am at that stage where I’ve gained years of experience and risen through the ranks to become a technical lead in a Cisco, F5 and PA heavy network. I’ve been thinking about the future, and what we will need to learn to stay afloat.

I’ve used Python a lot and regularly write custom scripts to check and configure devices, to gather data, and to monitor for certain network conditions that we know can be an early warning sign of an outage, and I also use ansible based tools that were written by a dev but maintained and updated by me.

These have served me well but I can’t help but see that the new DC’s being built out in my organisation are using ACI, and other methods to tunnel vxlan. As well as automating the deployments of new devices using ansible. There is a lot of talk about google cloud azure and aws being used here and there by various business units.

I am sure I’m not alone in thinking that I need to get a grip on all of these things but it just seems overwhelming, there is puppet, ansible, chef, then docker, kubernetes, vmware and microservices, git etc etc...

I know these are all Utilities with specific use cases but I just don’t know where I should be focusing my efforts when it comes to skill development. Does anyone else’s have a clearer picture of where things are going and the skills that we should be picking up?