General Update:

Its been a slow couple of months with regards to CCIE Security studies. Once in a while, life throws a curveball, which is what happened to me in June of this year.

However, instead of completely shutting down the study portion of my life, I have spent some time on “smaller” items on my to-do list. This has included:

• SD-WAN
  • Configuration Groups.
  • New home-lab for SDWAN related items.
  • Service Chaining.
  • Going through INE’s Cisco SDWAN course.
  • Advanced Centralized and Localized policies.
• Automation / Infrastructure As Code:
  • INE’s course on IaC with Rohit.
  • Some small scale labs using Ansible.
• Segment Routing:
  • SR Labs with both IOS-XE and IOS-XR in control and data plane.

I do a lot of Cisco SDWAN in my day job, so being up to date with whats moving in that area is quite important to me.

Automation / Infrastructure as Code is a must these days, so i want to spend some time in this technology area to be at least profecient in this particular way of doing Networking.

Finally, from a pure personal interest point of view, I have been digging into Segment Routing (No SR-v6 yet though (to-do)). Very fascinating really (which is not surprising, giving my interest for SP technologies.). I thoroughly like the idea of cutting down on the amount of protocols in use on the network along with utilizing tried-and-true methods for data forwarding (MPLS). It just “makes sense” to me.

CCIE Security:

At my workplace, a new CCIE Security Study Group has been formed. I am very thrilled about this, as it gives me a range of people to study along side with.

So far, its been a pretty lonely journey, but im hoping that will change with this study group.

During the summer holidays, I have mainly been doing a lot of repetitive lab tasks such as ASA, FTD, VPN configurations and ISE.

So its not like i have completely “lost” this knowledge. It has been maintained, but i need to be really fast at configuring these things.

Going forward

As the curveball i mentioned earlier has been dealt with, i will go back to full study mode for the Security track. I wish i could give you a date for my next try, but some things takes precedence and this unfortunally is one of them.

Anyways, thats it for now. Let me know if you have any comments and/or suggestions for any of the things i have mentioned in this short post.

Take Care!!

/Kim