NSE8 – Blog 14 – SD-WAN

This week has been all SD-WAN. And I by all SD-WAN I mean SD-WAN plus a bunch of other shit that relates to SD-WAN. The pre-release notes aren’t incredibly specific, but here are the topics they list:

• SD-WAN Architecture
  • Application performance
  • Multi-datacenter
  • Redundant connectivity
  • Work from anywhere
• SASE
  • Prepping for SPA
  • SD-WAN On-Ramp
  • Secure Private Access
• Routing
  • SD-WAN Routing
• VPN
  • SD-WAN

Based on this list, I worked up the following sub-topics to cover within my Phase 3 section:

Unfortunately it’s the end of day 8 and I do believe I’ve covered 80-90% of this. I do work with SD-WAN a lot in my day-to-day work environment but I’m a bit thrown off by the difference between my initial estimate and the current time worked. I had a similar feeling after finishing VPNs and Overlays. Things are just going a lot quicker than they did for my Phase 1 (Routing). Given that I went so in-depth for routing and covered many topics that I had not gone deep on before (OSPF, VRFs, Multicast, etc.), this makes some sense – but it’s still a weird feeling to almost be finished with what is supposed to be a 50 hour topic is closer to 20-25 hours. I don’t have a real solution for this at the moment other than telling myself I’ll come back to both VPNs and SD-WAN during my review phase but it doesn’t stop the worry that I may be missing chunks of content or simply not spending enough hours in the lab on these subtopics. The one thing I can do now is hope that there is updated topic documentation that gets released when (or before) the July 15th update – when NSE8 is official released.