{"id":211,"date":"2016-03-10T08:00:05","date_gmt":"2016-03-10T08:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.darrinthomason.com\/?p=211"},"modified":"2016-03-11T17:20:57","modified_gmt":"2016-03-11T17:20:57","slug":"you-get-what-you-measure-even-if-it-is-the-wrong-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.darrinthomason.com\/?p=211","title":{"rendered":"You get what you measure…even if it is the wrong thing!"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may be reading this post thinking it is about some management philosophy – sorry to disappoint you! \u00a0This post has a two-fold purpose 1 – as a response to an article I read last week \u00a0(https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/pulse\/why-network-industry-has-been-stuck-1980s-ciscos-embrace-joe-howard<\/a>) and 2 – my new role that I picked up in the last month.<\/p>\n

For those that don’t know, I devoted a lot of my pre-children days to certification (which I highly encourage anyone getting into IT to do). \u00a0I posted previously that I got all the Microsoft and Novell Certifications that I could and I wanted a new challenge, so I undertook the R&S CCIE. \u00a0This was back in the days of the 2 day lab and scenarios that at that time were highly applicable to what I was doing day in and day out. \u00a0By the time I decided to take the Security IE, it had switched to a one day exam that was more of a “stump the chump” mentality in that what was tested was very rarely implemented in networks but was a lot of required learning nonetheless.<\/p>\n

As I read the above post from Joe Howard (which is a very good post) – I was struck with what I get to experience many days in my current job. \u00a0I get to go visit a lot of customers and no less than once a week I hear about some crazy design that makes no sense and in reality reminds me of a CCIE lab – overly complex to solve a relatively simple problem. \u00a0What I believe happened is that customer networks have slowly become the CCIE’s practice lab – not from solving problems but from creating unnecessary complexity to ensure job security and\/or prepare the individual to pass the lab. \u00a0At a minimum the art of simplicity was thrown out as the first step in solving a problem. \u00a0This in turn creates a patchwork of design modifications and point in time fixes that over the course of time becomes a big ball of mud<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I was at a large customer the other day that I have worked with over the years. \u00a0They had the simple edict\u00a0– no proprietary protocols EVER. \u00a0This adherence to discipline in itself helped keep the network clean and sleek. \u00a0As people have moved on, proprietary things have moved in and complexity ensued locking in yet another customer. \u00a0I talked with another customer the who\u00a0had a full MPLS network inside of their relatively small datacenter. \u00a0I was shocked. \u00a0When I asked why – there was no valid reason that VLANs couldn’t have solved his problem. \u00a0Combine this with yet another example of a customer\u00a0that implemented hundreds of static routes throughout the network and complained that he could never go on vacation in fear that something would go wrong and he wouldn’t be there to fix it. \u00a0We have got to stop building complex networks in the name of job security and training for our IE lab. I believe that the IE has made networks a work of art versus solving the business demands. \u00a0The industry is moving on and some of the most beautiful designs I see are those of the cloud providers who are incredibly large, but incredibly simple. \u00a0This equals more stability and greater ability to orchestrate everything they do. \u00a0Several that I spoke to don’t ever plug a laptop into the devices, everything is automated. \u00a0If it can’t be automated it doesn’t go in. \u00a0Complexity is very very hard to automate. \u00a0To drive my point home about vendor introduced unnecessary complexity, I went to a few different vendor’s sites the other day and one had over 100\u00a0data center design guides in some flavor – how in the heck do you decide how to put that all together? No wonder it takes an IE level person to make this stuff work. \u00a0The industry can do better here!<\/p>\n

Now to my second quest. \u00a0I recently took over the leadership for training and certification at Arista. \u00a0Working with some great people like Gary Donahue who is a legend in the networking industry with his Network Warrior<\/a>\u00a0and Arista Warrior series of books. \u00a0Gary and I were talking about launching the next line of Arista professional training and exams – one which will be an “Expert” level lab exam. \u00a0What I don’t want the exam to be is a reason for someone to introduce unnecessary complexity into a production network to show how smart they are. We are thinking that half of the exam will be about deep knowledge of protocols and building data center networks, but the other half will be about automating and orchestrating capabilities thus forcing simplicity in design. We plan to include items like leveraging the unmodified Linux capabilities to solve real problems, extensibility in fixing and introducing new capabilities, and then of course troubleshooting, and last but not least, using DevOps to detect and fix the problems before they ever cause a problem. \u00a0Yes we want to unleash the proverbial “Chaos Monkey<\/a>” in the lab and see how well the network stands up.<\/p>\n

\"Network\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We are early in deciding what the lab will become. \u00a0We are getting together some of the foremost experts in the company to help us build scenarios and ultimately the lab. \u00a0I won’t apologize for it being brutal. \u00a0However my hope is that it is a useful brutal to drive simplicity versus a reason to implement unnecessary complexity in real networks with little return.<\/p>\n

Yes the journey for both of my CCIE’s was worth it. \u00a0I learned a ton and implemented much of my routing and switching IE in real life. \u00a0It is time for the next generation of learning and development where we encourage creativity – but creativity starting\u00a0with simplicity to solve the problem. \u00a0In the end if you can’t orchestrated it and maintain it – you might want to think about a different approach to solving the problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may be reading this post thinking it is about some management philosophy – sorry to disappoint you! \u00a0This post has a two-fold purpose 1 – as a response to an article I read last week \u00a0(https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/pulse\/why-network-industry-has-been-stuck-1980s-ciscos-embrace-joe-howard) and 2 – my new role that I picked up in the last month. For those that don’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-211","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-architecture","category-training"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darrinthomason.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darrinthomason.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darrinthomason.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darrinthomason.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darrinthomason.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=211"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.darrinthomason.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":219,"href":"http:\/\/www.darrinthomason.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211\/revisions\/219"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.darrinthomason.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=211"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darrinthomason.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=211"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.darrinthomason.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=211"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}