I was fortunate to go to San Diego in 2019 for the Cisco Live US event. This was my first time attending Cisco Live with my only previous conference experience at Aruba’s Atmosphere conferences – which I thought were very well done. Cisco Live reminded me of that but on a larger scale. Where Atmosphere capped attendance at 3k attendees (in 2017 and 2018), Cisco Live had almost 30k attendees in 2019. However the show was still easy to navigate and I found that it wasn’t as widespread as I feared it might be.
Technical seminars were available on Sunday June 9th for an added cost and I attended an all-day talk on the Catalyst 9K portfolio. It was very well done and I learned a lot about the Catalyst 9400 (access chassis), 9500 (core/distribution fixed), and 9600 (core/distribution chassis) models that I didn’t know previously.
Given the scope of the rest of the conference, it was nice to bow out of a session that didn’t meet expectations and hang around the DevNet workshops while speakers gave live demos on topics like configuring IOS XE with Ansible, YANG models, NETCONF/RESTCONF, Git, and more. That and the announcement and the new DevNet certifications had me excited that Cisco is really on the right track for the future. Speaking of those certification changes…
I used the free testing opportunity to take the ARCH exam as I had been studying for it off and on since December when I passed the CCDA. Sure enough I earned a passing score, so now I have a CCDP, well at least until February 2020 when the Cisco certifications get restructured. Related to that, I have a few CCIE RS exam books for the written that are basically useless now. I understand they aren’t really useless, the knowledge is still valid and good. It’s just that I won’t be taking the CCIE Written due to the examination changes. However I have decided to tackle these two volumes over the next two months to see if I want to continue towards the new CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure track. If I can maintain interest and pace with these books over the busy Summer, that will be a good indicator to whether or not I should continue down this path.