Network engineers have been in a state of flux for a while. Most of the major shifts have been centered around the evolution of the cloud, the increasing adoption of SDN and the emergence of NFV.
While the cloud, SDN and NFV are all critical components of the modern network, the network engineer of today has to be aware of all three. We’ll go over each of these technologies and how they can be used to improve and expand the scope of the network engineer’s responsibilities.
The Cloud
Network engineers of today are responsible for designing, installing and managing the infrastructure that underpins the modern enterprise. These responsibilities are ever-changing.
In the past, the network engineer was solely responsible for the physical design of the network. Today, the network engineer must also be aware of the cloud and understand how the cloud is being leveraged to create a better network.
The cloud has been a game-changer in the way that we think about the network. With the cloud, we no longer need to design a physical network, we can simply design a logical network and then deploy it on top of the cloud.
This logical network is then taken into the cloud and instantiated using virtualization. This logical network is then deployed to the cloud infrastructure, and the cloud takes care of the rest.
The cloud has made network engineering much more complex.