We at Juniper have been working diligently to launch new ways for Network Engineers to learn about Network Reliability Engineering (NRE). At NXTWORK 2018 in Las Vegas, we announced new training and new websites to help others take the first step in their NRE journey.
NRE Labs
One of those websites is NRE Labs. This site is intended to provide Network Engineers with bite-sized exercises that teach engineers fundamental concepts about things like JSON, YAML and APIs. We also have introductory lessons on tools such as JSNAPY and NAPALM. Further, we help you utilize this new knowledge by teaching people how to automate network engineering workflows by breaking them down into smaller, more fundamental blocks of logic. Creating tools to solve these smaller pieces means network engineers can then string these tools together to automate the overall workflow. You can even combine them in other ways to automate more workflows!
Each of these lessons are designed to only take a few minutes to complete. It can take anywhere from two to 10 minutes, depending on how advanced the lessons are. Whether you’re on public transit or on your lunch break, you can fill the gap by learning something that’s both simple and useful. Each user will have their own virtual environment for each lab so they can play around with the tools and concepts they’ve just learned. The best part? No registration wall! Just go to the NRE Labs website, click on a lesson, and go! No email subscriptions and no collection of personal information. How awesome is that?!
Get Involved
The easiest way to get started is to join the NRE Labs channel on the Juniper EngNet Slack space. Once you’re in, join the #nre_labs channel.
You can also follow the open-source project and community on Twitter, @NRELabs.
If you’re thinking of joining a growing number of contributors to help produce even more labs, head over here to get started: Build and Run Antidote Locally. Don’t forget to read our contribute guide first though: Contributing to Antidote.
What’s Next
Every Friday, we’ll be conducting introductory training for new contributors. We’ll be covering things like how to build a dev environment, the release cadence, how to design new lessons and much more. If you’d like to attend, just send a direct message to @NRELabs or send a message on the #nre_labs Slack channel. We’ll send an invite for the weekly Google Hangout. In the coming months, we’ll also have recorded training sessions on YouTube.
It goes without saying we’re very excited about this project, and from the initial responses we’re getting, so are many network engineers! Take the first step and join us. Put your lab coat on, experiment, and learn new stuff.
