Cisco Live 2017, engineering awesomeness.

Spending a week with amazing engineers always ranks high on my list of reasons to attend Cisco Live every year. The networking community and the behind the scenes work of the Cisco Live team make this event truly fantastic every year, and 2017 was a definitely a hit.

I especially enjoyed participating in Tech Field Day once again. OpenGear presented Lighthouse 5 which focuses on automating setup and maintenance, leveraging new API goodness. OpenGear’s API aims to enhance scale of deployments, while streaming workflows. I found it especially fun watching Slack be leveraged to enroll and communicate with the OpenGear device. Nerdy goodness I recommend checking out.

If you are looking for a monitoring solution, I highly recommend you check out this excellent PRTG demo by Benjamin Day of Paessler, who not only knows his stuff, but refuses to use even one Power Point slide for his Tech Field Day presentation. The man is a genius. The PRTG notification enhancements, maps, and overall flexibility really stood out, definitely cool stuff. You won’t be sad you watched.

And in the final bit of Tech Field Day learning for me, NetApp’s presentation on their FlexPod SF solution took a room full of network engineers and captivated their attention on storage. I know it sounds hard to believe that network engineers could find a storage presentation fascinating, but Jeremiah Dooley managed to pull off this incredible feat, and I highly recommend checking out this session. He covers all the important details of the FlexPod SF announcement, including the available architectures, in a way that makes network engineers forget that this is a solution focused on storing bits, and not just moving them.

The return of Engineering Deathmatch to Cisco Live featured several episodes with some of my fabulous (and lovingly voluntold for EDM) friends, who couldn’t be more amazing. I’m excited to check out the Engineering Deathmatch site as the episodes air over the coming weeks.

And lastly, my favorite annual tradition of Cisco Live wrap up blogging, the photo gallery of crazy, brilliant, hilarious engineers being remarkably phenomenal. I heart you all.