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.

I will be presenting at the Cisco Connect Canada tour in Edmonton and Calgary on November 3rd and 5th, respectively. My presentation is about that three letter acronym that everyone loves to hate: SDN :-)

I will talk about SDN in general terms and describe what it really means; what we're really doing in the network when we say that it's "software defined". No unicorns or fairy tales here, just engineering.

Next I'll talk about three areas where Cisco is introducing programmability into its data center solutions:

• Application Centric Infrastructure
• Virtual Topology System
• Open NX-OS

Below are the notes I made for myself while researching these topics and preparing for the presentation. At the bottom of this post is a Q&A section with some frequently asked questions.