Tuesday, November 2, 2021

Is routing and switching slowly disappearing in enterprises?

Currently hold a university degree in internetworking and CCNP R&S certificate.

I've been working as a network specialist/engineer for about a year. Our organization has 10.000+ users.

We are a team of around 12 people responsible for the network geographically spread at multiple sites.

I was extremely excited to start a networking career and get hands-on experience in a production environment with the various IGPs, BGP and layer 2 protocols. Everything that I studied for so long - and was the reason I started in the first place.

However, since job start I got to troubleshoot a single BGP issue - this is basically the only routing task I remember working on.

In our organization all access networks, remote user VPN and most DC equipment are Cisco. We have implemented DNA-C, ISE, FirePower, ACI and many more of their products.

The most exciting tasks we have (in my opinion) is when we need to troubleshoot using "show" commands in the CLI on our switches. The only reason we would enter global config mode is to shut/no shut interfaces.

Let's say one day there is a layer 3 issue on one of the edge switches at the SDA site - I know we would not even consider looking at IS-IS, LISP, or the VRFs on the device(s). All we need to do is remove the switch from the fabric and reprovision it.

Is this method easier? Definitively yes. Is it more exciting? To me, not even close.

Most tasks today are looking at the RADIUS logs in ISE, updating software, creating firewall rules, automation and APIs, etc.

I feel more like a sysadmin than anything else.

Am I looking for something that's about to die? Perhaps ISPs are different?

Will this eventually be similar everywhere? If not Cisco, then simply the SDN solutions from other vendors.

TL;DR: With all the new (Cisco) SDN solutions I feel more like a sysadmin than a network engineer.



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