Guide to Networking Career
A complete short-glanced guide on computer network
Two years ago I got a CCNA R&S certification from Cisco, as time went by, I hear from my peers that CCNA certification is no longer a hot thing in networking world as Juniper release its certification curriculum. Plus there are vastly emerging cloud computing companies like AWS, GCP, Azure, and others. Also the network industry trend seems to be moving from physical layer to logical layer, therefore the Software Defined Network (SDN) with its OpenFlow protocol and simulator like Mininet will help revolutionize network industry. Also there is emerging cyber security issues as nework flow with its 5G technology, and don’t forget with AI, machine learning or deep learning there is an opportunities some kind of new intelligence will surface. So here it is a guide for you to take a glance for computer networking.
But first we must understand the bits and bytes in network industry, like what it is Cisco? or VMware? or AWS? or pfSense?
Cisco develops, manufactures and sells networking hardware, software, telecommunications equipment and other high-technology services and products.
Cisco is the leading networking companies in term of market share, and its main competitor is Juniper Network that also sell networking hardware like switches and routers. There is also Mikrotik, Arista, Alcatel that plays in this industries.
VMware provides cloud computing and virtualization software and services. It was one of the first commercially successful companies to virtualize the x86 architecture.
Simply put VMware is a cloud virtualization companies that runs some kind of computer and/or network virtualization. Its main competitor is VirtualBox by Oracle, but nowadays it is VirtualBox that leads virtualization industry with its open-source software.
pfSense is an open source firewall/router computer software distribution based on FreeBSD. It is installed on a physical computer or a virtual machine to make a dedicated firewall/router for a network.
pfSense is a security category in network industry, it is a software that main function is to set some firewall policies across network. Its main competitor is Palo Alto network with NG Firewall.
But what about Cloud Computing?
At first I thought Cloud Computing will replace all the network world. But cloud computing is simply lend computing resource to your companies so you doesn’t bother to buy compute resource like server or database storage. “Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage (cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. The term is generally used to describe data centers available to many users over the Internet.”
Amazon Web Service (AWS) is the leading company in cloud computing industry, its main competitor are Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), IBM Cloud Service, and many more.
What about Software Defined Networking?
As I said earlier there is some trend in network industry to make some centralized routing and switching, so the whole network will be commanded in one hand. “Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is a network architecture approach that enables the network to be intelligently and centrally controlled, or ‘programmed,’ using software applications. This helps operators manage the entire network consistently and holistically, regardless of the underlying network technology.” The SDN layer essentially acts a virtual software switch or router in place of (or in conjunction with) the physical network devices. So instead of software embedded in the routers and switches managing the traffic, software from outside the devices takes over the job.
SDN is used under OpenFlow network protocol, to start the SDN it is advisable that you use virtual machine like VirtualBox or VMware because its flexibility to launch SDN. Usually you will want to experiment to set up the network before you deploy it, the tool for you to experiment is called Mininet.
The Traditional Path for Network Engineers
You can see below the casual traditional path for mastering network as layed out in Cisco Certification:
Usually for you to master the networking skills you will want to take step-by-step certification start at CCT to CCAr, which require a lot of money for the certification and also a lot of time, but in my perspective the speed of new emerging technology like SDN or cybersecurity cannot be covered fastly in Cisco certification. Therefore you will want to take the latest certification for you to keep pacing with the up to date networking technologies. And also freed you up from vendor-dependability in Cisco.
