Operations vs Projects Balance in IT infrastructure teams

Operations vs Projects Balance in IT infrastructure teams

For the past two years, I have been managing a team in charge of the data center infrastructure. It is a medium-sized team in charge of the HPC clusters and bare-metal servers, storage, network, and also virtualization and containers platforms, such as VMWare, OpenStack, and Kubernetes, plus some central services.
This team has a dual mandate: keep daily operations running smoothly and carry out innovative and challenging engineering projects. As the person responsible for resource management and keeping the team’s project schedule on track, one important challenge is to find the right balance between these two responsibilities. This requires a strategic approach to resource allocation and time management.  Let me give you my take on operations vs projects balance in IT infrastructure teams.

Cisco Live 2024 Wrap-Up – Cisco Nexus HyperFabric, Disaggregated Scheduled Fabric (DSF) and SONiC

Cisco Live 2024 Wrap-Up – Cisco Nexus HyperFabric, Disaggregated Scheduled Fabric (DSF) and SONiC

Last week, I attended my 11th Cisco Live in person, in the fabulous Las Vegas. This post is my Cisco Live 2024 Wrap-up.

I can already tell you that the next edition of Cisco Live US will be held June 8-12, 2025 in San Diego, California. If my company agrees to send me there, I’m already looking forward to it, because San Diego is a wonderful city.

The Future of Network Engineering in the AI/ML era

The Future of Network Engineering in the AI/ML era

It seems like yesterday when I saw my first network automation presentation at a conference. I remember it very well; it was in 2015 at the Cisco Network Innovation Summit in Prague. Mr. Tim Szigeti was presenting the first version of the Cisco APIC-EM, the future Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) controller. I talked already about it in a previous article, written in 2018, about my journey toward network programmability and automation.

After its presentation, and for many years afterward, the question was on everyone’s lips:

Cisco-2501

25 years as a Network Engineer!

In January 1996, I entered for the first time in the configuration of a Cisco 2501 router. This was the beginning of my career as a network engineer. That was just 25 years ago!

Here’s a quick look back and a few tips for junior engineers who are at the beginning of their careers.