I often make the mistake of assuming that people in the networking industry will catch my references to Packet Pushers, IOS Hints and Networking Field Day. And I must admit to judging people that don’t catch these references. Now, this is only because I frankly think that any self-respecting networking pundit *should* pay attention to these excellent outlets.
It is also through them that I learned about Networking Field Day (NFD) for the first time. The concept being to get companies in the networking industry in front of bloggers of the more opinionated type. The NFD alumni are quite impressive and include people like John Herbert and Brandon Carroll on top of Greg and Ethan from Packet Pushers and Ivan of IOS Hints fame as well as others.
We signed up for NFD #7 that was held in San Jose last week with the intent of trying to go very deep and see if we could wow the esteemed select few that had been picked for this round.
Our strategy for the day was to go top-down. Starting out light and then take these guys (yes, the organizer should work on the gender mix) all the way deep into the details.
We opened up with some background on the company, an introduction to the moving parts of our NCS product and some examples of what people are using it for. This was done by yours truly and is available for viewing here:
Now we were warmed up, time to break out the running code. My colleague Tomas did an excellent job of demoing an L3 MPLS VPN application complete with multi-vendor features. He showed the transaction capabilities and the grand finale when he showed how to automatically migrate VPNs across vendors.
We then brought in one of our core engineers (and co-founder) Johan to take the audience all the way to implementation details. He talked the audience through how we’ve built a framework for device adapters that allows for very rapid (hours or days) development of support for new products with a built-in mechanism for computing rollback deltas on the fly.
Big thanks to @sfoskett and team for a very well executed event and with hope that the liquorice didn’t do too much long term damage.
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