Well, I got to tick a big item off my list of goals last week. I successfully delivered a presentation at Cisco Live! in front of a large group of people. It didn't kill me and I didn't trip over anything and embarrass myself so no matter what, I have those two points to feel good about :-)

All joking aside, it actually went a whole lot better than that.

Well, it looks like another major item will get struck from my bucket list this year. I've been accepted to present at Cisco Live in Las Vegas this summer! 👊 This session is designed to walk through an enterprise network and look at how EIGRP can be engineered with purpose to best suit the needs of the different areas of the network. I will focus a lot on stability and scaling EIGRP and will show the audience how, where, and when to leverage common EIGRP features such as summarization, fast timers, BFD, and wide metrics.

Presenter: Paul Lysander, Technical Marketing Engineer, Cisco

Presented by: Russ White, LinkedIn

Presenter: Fred Niehaus, Technical Marketing Engineer, Cisco Wireless Networking Group

Presented by: David Prall, Communications Architect, Cisco

For reference, David is the "father of IWAN".

This session was not what I was expecting. I was expecting design and architecture, but it was all about features in IOS and IOS-XE (eg, FHRPs, talked about routing protocol timers, PfRv3, BFD). I guess I need to pay more attention to the session code (RST == routing; ARC == architecture).

Presented by Muhammad A Imam, Sr Manager Technical Marketing Engineering

Presenters:

• Lewis Hickman, Consulting Systems Engineer
• Jennifer Valentine, Systems Engineer

Presenter: Steven Heinsius, Product Manager, Enterprise Networking Group

I'm hoping the title of this session could also be "7 Ways to not be a TOTAL Wireless Noob" since that's more my level. 😁

Presenters:

• Rick Irons-Mclean, Oil & Gas and Energy Architecture Lead
• Jason Greengrass, IoT Solution Architect

Presenters: Dave Zacks, Distinguished Engineer; Peter Zones, Principle Engineer

History has been: 10x performnce increase at 3x the cost. 40Gb broke that model -> 100Gb PHYs were very expensive; industry needed/wanted an intermediate step.

Presenter: Chuck Stickney, Cisco SE

Handful of OT folks in the room; majority IT.

Convergence Benefits

• Simplification (common protocols)
• Reduced Cost
• Pervasive enablement of features and services

Presenter: Markus Harbek, CCIE, CCDE

Who knows what SDN stands for?

• Still Don't kNow
• Still Does Nothing
• Schnitzel Dinner Night

Presenter: Craig Williams (@security_craig) - Sr Technical Leader / Security Outreach Manager, Cisco TALOS

"I'm from Talos. We love to stop bad guys."

Talos by the numbers:

• 1.1 million incoming malware samples per day
• 1.5 billion Sender Base reputation queries per day

Talos has a serious amount of data. For serious.

Presenter: Konrad Reszka, IoT Vertical Solutions Group Engineering Lead

"Given a chance, how many people in this room would volunteer to be a meteorologist in San Diego? You'd never be wrong!"

Presenter: Jeff Schutt - Cybersecurity Solutions Architect (Jeff works in Adv Services in the IoT team)

Full Title: An IoT Security Model & Architecture for Securing Cyber-Physical and IT-OT Converged Assets

Mix of IT/OT folks in the room.

How to Call REST APIs from a REST Client and Python

Presenter: Matt (didn't catch last name, sorry)

I'm lucky enough to be heading to Cisco Live in San Diego this year to host customers from my area. When I'm not with a customer during the day I plan on attending these sessions:

I attended the Cisco Plus Canada Roadshow in Calgary recently and sat in on a day of presentations related to Cisco's data center/cloud offerings. The sessions where quite good and I ended up taking quite a few notes. I thought I'd blog my notes in order to share what was presented.

The four sessions were:

• Journey to the Cloud
• Cisco UCS
• Data Center Networking
• Powering the Cloud