Sometimes, I wonder if there’s a talent crisis coming. Networking and security devices are no longer simply Layer 2 through 4.
It used to be that you could throw up a few Cisco PIX rules and a Layer 4 load balancer and you’d have both site security and scaling that ran the world’s busiest web sites. If a problem cropped up, it would usually be pretty evident if the problem was network-related or application-related. Sure, in those groups there is some fingerpointing, but network problems look a lot different than application problems, for the most part.
Or at least, they did.
Now, everything is an application proxy. Networking and security devices no longer only look at the IP address and port. Load balancers and WAN accelerators parse HTTP, cache CIFS, tweak TCP parameters, and more. Security devices are no longer glorified ACLs, and they’re even moving beyond Regex engines, and dealing with protocol compliance and other thorny issues.
Every network provider is moving up the stack. You can’t just be a router jockey any more to troubleshoot infrastructures just as you can’t be a developer without knowing some of the basics of load balancing. With everything is melding together with fuzzier and fuzzier edges in terms of networking and applications, there needs to be cross-disciplined aware people in all facets of the stack, otherwise troubleshooting will be pure blamestorming.
Everyone from vendor sales engineering organizations to 2nd level support are adjusting to the new playing field. Cisco is dealing with this on multiple fronts, as virtually all of their high-priority products operate beyond the Layer 2/3 realm, which has traditionally been their core competency.
Anecdotally, I’m seeing both success and challenges in this conversion in terms of mindsets, skills, and perception. It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out, but I’m convinced that multi-disciplined knowledge is going to be key to being a successful engineer going forward.
This is such an excellent post and I believe you are spot on. The previous and I believe perceived segregation between all layers and equipment needed to operate an Enterprise level Web Application are definitely ending. In my case I never saw them as different in the sense of levels of responsibility. There are many times I was called out to troubleshoot ColdFusion and JRun-Java applications and it would have been impossible to be successful without a high level of knowledge of everything needed in successfully servicing client requests. This means everything needed to successfully receive client-browser requests, process then and return them to the client, including interaction with non web servers such as Database, LDAP, Mail servers – great piece here.