As the majority of networking engineers knows, from 5th to 9th of February took place the Cisco Live ‘24 in Amsterdam and, for the very first time, i was there 😍.
Cisco Live is one of the biggest networking events in the world and it takes place in Amsterdam (February), Las Vegas (June) and Melbourne (December). Over there you can expand your knowledge, expand your connections, meet many many technical sponsor and get inspiration from the innovation proposed.
During the week you can learn a ton of techincal content that span all the Cisco macro-topics (Enterprise, Security, Datacenter, Collaboration, Wireless, Serce Provider) through a multitude of techincal session divided by complexity level (levels 1000,2000 and 3000) and all of them allow you to gain CE credits in order to recertify you active certification.
As a novice to Cisco Live i was very very curious and i followed many technical session, maybe a too much 😓, so at the end of the week i was so tired. Here you can find all the session i followed:
The best thing i ran during Cisco Live was the labs, over there you can find 2 different types of labs:
- Walk-in labs, where you are guided into a specific scenario and you need to deploy or troubleshoot a specific technology. For me it was Cisco SD-Access Troubleshooting (LABENS-2302). This kind of labs was very very funny but it didn’t give you any CE.
- CTF (Capture The Flag) labs, where you can paly some guided labs and they gives you some CE and special credits that allow you to climb the CTF leaderboard! At the end of the week the top 3 CTF leader win some prizes 🎉
I also had the opportunity to take an exam for free. Into the Cisco Live pavillion there is a quiet area where you can test yourself like any other Pearson Vue testing center. Before you begin the exam, some Cisco operator verify your credentials, exam registration and then you can put your gadgets (smartphone, smartwatch ….) into a plastic box that you can take with you and put under the exam desk. The exam room is very large, around 100 workstations, but very silent and you can feeling good during the exam.
It was a challenging week but the whole experience was amazing, and quoting Mr. Lukas Krattiger in my Linkedin post “one down, many more to come!”
