How To Be Network Ninja In 21st Century

I have been asked so many times by Network Engineers right from starter level to Expert level people about how network industry is changing at rapid pace in last few years and questions like if certification and in particular CCIE holds any value any longer. I also spoke with couple of friends that I truly admire and are working in US , Europe & Australia to get feedback on how Network industry is evolving there.

Now to start with, following technologies are definitely picking up in some form or shape :

- SDX like (SDN - Software Defined Networks)
- CLOS/ Spine & Leaf Designs
- NFV (Network Function Virtualization)
- Virtualization ( In Areas like Network, Compute & Storage)
- Automation ( Chef, Puppet etc...)
- Scripting & Programming ( Python, Bash, Java etc...)
- Cloud Computing
- Network Visibility 
- Overlay Networks/Tunneling Technologies (VXLAN, NvGRE etc...)
- Network Modeling Methods
- API (Application Program Interface like REST )
- Understanding on Unix & Linux
- Big Data
- Active Active Data Centres
- Machine Learning
- Segment Routing 
- Containers ( Docker...)
- Deep Understanding of Applications Structures/Component & Life Cycle 

And last but not least deep understanding of protocols like TCP, HTTP etc...

But again the impact these may have on current network industry (What they call traditional networking now) may vary by large margin depending upon:

- Which part of the world you are living in
- How IT Industry is driven there and Network Industry in particular
- Which company you work for
- What are your personal/political views
- Company's IT Strategy & Road Maps
- Your current skill set & fears about these new technologies
- Is there any simulation tool to get familiar with these technologies
- What is the maturity level of given technology (RFC ?, New Model ? etc...)
- How you want to manage these solution (Afraid of Open Source ? Multi vendor   blame game ? etc...)
- Do you really have a good business case 

Now there are of course other factors including budget/cost, ROI, How to get your operational staff ready etc...

But hope you get the idea. In the coming series of posts I would express my personal opinions around all these but those articles are going to be semi technical rather being completely technical since I am more of a Pre-Sales guy now.

Regards,
Deepak Arora
Evil CCIE