The Devnet associate certification sets the stage to help network engineers begin understanding how their role is transitioning in a cloud first world. It can also give developers a finer appreciation for the network constructs and network applications work. It covers a number of important concepts I have taken for granted as I have focused the last 10 years in data center technologies, but are very important building blocks to understand for our network teams. Its these technologies, coupled with the network constructs that will allow companies to evolve a thoughtful discussion around how to better instrument and automate their mission critical systems.
When I first heard that there were going to be devnet certifications for Cisco my initial response was tepid. I had concerns about the applicability of the content across many technologies in a constantly changing environment. I had concerns about the relevance of automation and programmability from a single reference point (although, that is especially common in the industry with every company presenting their view of the world, through their viewpoints.)
I have been exploring this in more depth and the more I have explored, the more I have liked. The content is very relevant across the entire domains in which they work. One aspect that is unique and that I appreciate, is the associate certification focus a lot on the constructs and protocols, with only 15% of the exam being the application of this specifically to Cisco products. The same protocols and constructs would apply to any implementation, regardless of today’s specific implementation. This is like learning BGP 20 years ago, the concepts applied across IOS, IOS-XR, and NX-OS, even though 2 of those 3 didn’t even exist 20 years ago.
This is the aspect I had concern about: being to focused on one technology or implementation. I have witnessed the hype cycle of too many cloud technologies and network technologies in the past decade, to invest a 3 month training evolution on any one horse. However, the devnet certification does a good job incorporating all of these open building blocks and tools, to give a high level understanding of where they fit, and goes deeper on the mechanisms that are common between them. Understanding how API’s work, how to research them, and apply them, as well as their implementation across technologies, opens up a common skill set applicable to openstack, or kubernetes, or public cloud providers.
The investments will help our engineers transition to new skill sets which will offer near term benefits in adopting new tools to drive operational efficiency. In the long term, these skills sets will pay dividends over the next 20 years of networking.
I encourage you to check these out today @ developer.cisco.com
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