The world of network engineering has been rapidly changing as a more developer-focused, developer-centric model of deploying equipment becomes necessary with cloud adoption in the infrastructure. One project aimed at trying to support network engineers in this ever-changing landscape is the “Network Collective” podcast.

“The thing that is different is the way network engineers need to interact with their environment,” said Jordan Martin (pictured, left), co-founder of Network Collective. “Five to 10 years ago, you could still operate in an environment where you still did a lot of static routing, for example. Now, with the cloud, with workloads moving around, there is no way to run a multicloud enterprise network without some serious dynamic routing chops.”

Martin and Eyvonne Sharp (pictured, right), co-founder of the podcast, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Cisco Live event in Orlando, Florida. They discussed ways network engineers need to adapt to a future with cloud.

Adaptability, understanding, simplification within networks

Because the technology around networking continues to change rapidly, network engineers are trying their best to adapt. This will take better understanding of the cloud and technologies driving the innovations — which usually come from developers — and simplification of networks, Martin and Sharp pointed out.

“We’ve got networking in third-party services that we don’t necessarily have access to, we don’t have full control over,” Martin explained. “And it’s a completely different nomenclature we have to relearn all the terms. … The challenge is not only understanding what needs to be done in all these different environments, but also understanding just the terminology.”

So how can networking engineers continue to adapt? Network engineers have been historically trained to go slowly and deliberately when planning and implementing changes, and the changes have often been very complex, according to Sharp.

“There are times for complexity … and we’re working … as the entire industry to maybe back some of that out,” she said.

As developers continue to push cloud because it makes everything faster for a business, “slow” doesn’t work. “We need to start thinking differently,” Sharp said. “We need to think about how to make modular changes and to be able to allow our workloads to move and shift in ways that don’t provide a lot of risk.”

But networking engineers are just as important now as ever before, according to Martin and Sharp. “If you look at what’s going on, we have more connected devices than we’ve ever had before, and that’s not gonna stop. And all of those connected devices need networks,” Sharp concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cisco Live event.

Photo: SiliconANGLE