Bryan Ashley got his start in technology by working at an IT help desk. From there, he started getting involved with networking teams and getting involved with more projects. He’s worked as a network architect and engineer for Nokia, Microsoft Azure, and other organizations before becoming a principal solutions architect at Aviatrix. Here are his thoughts on his career, and what it means to be a modern-day network engineer. 

What was it like being an engineer for Azure?

I was part of Azure’s worldwide networking team. We were a team of six that covered North America and South America, and we were sort of an entity between the product group and the customers.

Our real role was to be the escalation point for the field when it came to networking, architecture and design. As customers were looking to leverage Azure for their workloads, be it their first start into the cloud, or when they ran into some particular challenge as it related to networking, we would come in and help guide them, provide best practices, talk through some advanced networking architectures or advanced networking services and be the experts there. 

In turn, because we had so much access and conversations with customers, we would have a unique view of how our customers were using those applications or services and the challenges they were facing. We could take our legacy knowledge as well as our conversations with the customers and provide feedback to the product groups on how to make our products better, and what new features that customers were looking for.

How did your IT help desk skills come into play when it came to communicating and helping out customers?

There's a term that recruiters use that I have heard over the years called a purple squirrel. It's essentially a candidate that has a good mix of both a technical background and the social awareness to be able to sit and talk to business owners and business drivers and communicate the importance of network architecture and cloud architecture. My IT job was huge in helping me establish that social awareness, and being able to effectively communicate complex network ideas to folks who are more on the business side and not necessarily as technically driven.

And what hard skills do you find that you implement the most when it comes to being a network engineer?

Right now things are beginning to change. If had you asked me that question a few years ago, it would have been relatively simple: Start at an entry-level position, work your way up into operations, where you start to learn the ins and outs of things, and then eventually move into the architectural phase, where you take the operational knowledge and move that forward into building out architectures.

Now with the cloud, things become a little different, because networking that has been the same in terms of technology has now been completely upended. I had the advantage of being multilingual, where I was able to help people who are used to the on-prem worlds and translate that language into cloud, as well as a lot of their requirements and things, even though the way that they accomplish something is different in the cloud. 

Being able to have sort of that legacy knowledge coupled with the way we do things now allows you to have an easy way to sort of help your customers along the journey. 

How will the role of network engineer continue to evolve?

The pace of cloud is unlike anything that we've seen before in the on-prem world, and a lot of the appeal of the cloud is its virtually unlimited scale. Spinning up a worldwide data center used to take months and years, and now it takes minutes and hours. That's going to continue to accelerate, but there's always going to be a component of the on-prem world. 

Then again, I think that legacy part is probably going to get reduced a little bit in size and complexity. So the focus is probably going to be more on connectivity to the cloud with the complicated or integral networking components being cloud-related. Over time, working with legacy networks is going to be less of a needed skill set. As of right now, as organizations are still going along their journey to the cloud and transitioning from legacy on-prem environments to cloud-first environments, it still has value.

What soft skills are critical for a network engineer?

General communication and being able to tailor your message to the right audience is really important. Part of that is listening well. A lot of times when you talk to customers, you have to read between the lines — for instance, the way that people describe their business requirements in an on-prem world may be very different than the way they describe them in the cloud world because it's a different model. 

Where we used to have centralized workloads and applications in a few data centers, now we have the ability to push those across the globe. And so the requirements, while the customer may still present them in the same way, are now different. 

There's also sort of a written component. You know, I think it's hard to take something as nebulous as the cloud, no pun intended, and put down something sometimes as simple as a network topology. But you have to be able to take those ideas and individually put them into something that can be understood both by a technical networking, on-prem networking person, and also app developers and business people who are going to leverage this networking framework that you have put together.

How did you develop those soft skills?

One of the things that have helped me is describing what I do to someone who has no frame of reference for my industry. If you can describe it to them in a way that they will genuinely understand, then that's a powerful skill that'll serve you well.

So how has your job evolved with the cloud transformation?

There are nuances and different approaches to cloud networking that you have to learn. With the cloud, it's a bit of a reboot, and everything changes from the architectures to the components to the names of the components to the way things work, and they just don't behave like they used to. 

What’s pivotal is your drive and your willingness to learn something new. With cloud networking, because it is such a reboot, that's going to be a required skill for a while. This needs to mature more, so it’s down to figuring out how to connect to the old and the new. 

The learning curve is becoming a little bit steeper, and much steeper in some cases, and you need to be okay with it, because it's going to happen and you may have to change from being a networking guy to doing a bit of scripting and automation.

What is your favorite part about being a network engineer?

The moment I fell in love with networking was I was just a young kid answering phone calls for the help desk, and one of the networking engineers let me help him after I bugged him enough. 

He let me help out with a project, which was replacing some access switches in a closet for one floor of the building that we were working on. I didn't touch any of the configurations. My only job was to create a spreadsheet that showed which cable goes into which port, unplug them all, put the new switches in, and plug the same cable back into the same port. 

It was tedious. But it made me feel like I was actually going to be a network engineer. At some point during the middle of the night, which was this change window, something hit me: If I didn't plug the right cable into the right port, everybody on this floor wouldn't be able to do their job.

It didn't matter if they were in sales, it didn't matter if they were an executive, it didn't matter if they were in support or finance. None of that mattered. It just mattered that I plugged the right cable into the right port. And so for me, networking was sort of this behind-the-scenes underground thing that ran businesses, where everybody needed it even if they didn't know that they did. 

And if they did, they thought it was magic — a lot of people still think it's magic. But it can be as simple as plugging the right cable into the right port. And that has never changed. It's still the case today. It's even more the case today with the cloud and everything else. 

And you know, people think it's even more magic because now it's moved from inside their building to the cloud, but it's still networking. It's still fundamental. It's still a very logical way of connecting systems together. That is crucial to any and every organization on the planet. And to me, that's always been really cool.

Do you have any advice for an aspiring network engineer?

Find a community. The thing about clouds and multi-cloud and such is that they're all so new and they're all still changing so much. If you can find a community that shares knowledge about the cloud or organizations and their journey to clouds, it’s a huge benefit because there's a lot of people who are still learning lessons on how to get there. A lot of offerings are still maturing and people are still trying to figure out how to do this whole thing. So the more that you can surround yourself with, the more you benefit.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.