Networking is a hereditary thing for me. My mum worked for France Telecom – the national service provider – and my brother studied networks at university and started his career as a network consultant.
It was incidentally his fault I ended up doing networking. He once left me a heavy training book and recommended I took a look.
The book was “Cisco Certified Network Associate”.
Despite the fact most of the book was incomprehensible to me (what the hell is “Frame-Relay” 🫠), I stuck with it and ended up not only taking the exam but enjoying a successful career as a network architect, passing over a dozen of network certifications (including the CCIE) and enjoying successful stints at Cisco and VMware.
Eventually though, I started to explore other areas of tech (like cloud and automation) as I found that the networking industry had gone stale…
There were, however, some exceptions: including a particular project that caught my eye:
Cilium caught my attention but I was having too much fun with network automation to pursue it.
But then, I would see blog posts like this and announcements like that…
Kubernetes was becoming ubiquitous and Cilium, by all accounts, was becoming the most powerful networking platform for cloud-native applications.
And I was impressed by what I saw when I tested it.
I got thinking: networking has been in my genes. It’s been my past and my present.
Shouldn’t I be part of its future?
Still, while I was writing posts about eBPF and Cilium back in February, I didn’t think that I’d be joining Isovalent and that I would be working with some of the inventors and maintainers of eBPF and the team behind Cilium.
I also didn’t suspect I would, for the first time in my career, move away from a customer-facing role into technical marketing. I shouldn’t be so surprised though: in the past few years, I have found great joy in creating content – videos, blogs, books, presentations, white papers, etc… – and I’ve received enough positive feedback that I think I’m pretty good at it.
And it’s not just getting back into networking that excites me but also eBPF. For most of my contacts in the industry, it might not have come across your radar yet but it could have an impact broader than network virtualization. It has so many use cases, it’s like… a Swiss Army knife.
And if you’re not convinced by me, well listen to Mr SDN himself:
But you shouldn’t join a company just for its products.
You join a company because of people and the prospect of working with super smart folks.
You join a company because their leaders inspire you.
Most importantly, you join a company because they value terrible puns like I do :
I’ll be writing most of my content on Isovalent.com in the coming months but I am sure that I will keep writing some content here when appropriate.
Thanks for reading.
nicovibert.com 
2 thoughts on “Why I joined Isovalent”