NFD18 was my first Networking Field Day, after starting my adventure as a delegate with TechFieldDay last February at TFD Extra @CiscoLive.

I knew this was going to be great, but I’d never imagined it to be so great. 3 days of great presentations, enriching discussions about networking, and also loads of fun.

Credit goes to my awesome fellow delegates and to GestaltIT for having picked the right crew for the right job.

During this trip I also managed to meet 3 of my tech-idols:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cheriton

I really advise you all to google him up or click on the link above if you don’t know David Cheriton. But…really.

I really advise you all to google him up or click on the link above if you don’t know David Cheriton. But…really. https://www.ansible.com/blog/author/peter-sprygada

Peter is an energetic talker, 360 degree technologist and the most down-to-earth Ansible badass you’ll ever meet! Not all become RedHat Distinguished Engineers after all…

Peter is an energetic talker, 360 degree technologist and the most down-to-earth Ansible badass you’ll ever meet! Not all become RedHat Distinguished Engineers after all… https://packetpushers.net/author/greg-ferro/

Well, what can I say about Greg? Normally people dream about meeting – I don’t know – a movie star, or a famous singer.

I’ve (virtually) known him for 10 years since he started his Etherealmind blog. People often ask me: “how did you learn networking? was it uni? was it a training you took?” and I go: “no. it was Greg Ferro”

He devoted his like to being a proxy between the often confused and overwhelming world of vendors and the equally confused and fearful world of people like us who need to find solutions to business problems. And he (together with Ethan Banks) educated a generation of technologists.

I will cover some of the technologies that caught my attention in separate blog posts:

BigSwitch – BCF, BMF and Multi-Cloud Director

– BCF, BMF and Multi-Cloud Director Redhat Ansible – Network Engine (and the Neutron Ansible ML2 plugin…)

– Network Engine (and the Neutron Ansible ML2 plugin…) Anuta Networks – Atom. A hyper-scale evolution of NCX

– Atom. A hyper-scale evolution of NCX A10 – TPS (Thunder Protection System) and distributed DDoS detection.