Aviatrix Blog 
Aviatrix wants to elevate the work of cloud networking heroes who labor to keep networks secure, effective, and performant. We’re proud to highlight people who have taught themselves the necessary skills, designed and managed successful networks, and have the expertise to share.
Our next hero spotlight is on Allen Tyson, Network Administration Specialist. See our previous hero spotlights here.
Background: Beginning with Wolves
Allen has about 15 years of networking experience, but his career began with a completely different passion.
“For some people, they have always loved technology, gadgets, tinkering and knew they wanted a career in tech at some point,” he said. “That absolutely was not me. Growing up I always loved animals, how they moved, how they interacted, and how they had a family social/structure similar to ours. In fact, wolves were my absolute favorite animal, and all the way through high school, I continued to read about wolves.”
Allen was on track to become a wolf biologist, dreaming of studying under American biologist L. David Mech. As he was figuring out schooling and his career trajectory, Allen came to networking unexpectedly through his day job in customer service at a cable company. At this job, he saw an opening in the Data Center that would work with his schedule and applied, though he knew almost nothing about tech. The manager saw Allen’s resume, great performance reviews, and promise to work hard, and gave him a chance. “Everyone needs to start somewhere,” the manager told him, and gave Allen a probationary period to see how he did.
This Data Center job brought Allen to a career that combined his love for research, learning, and connecting disparate concepts. “Getting exposed to all the operations technology, the cable architecture, talking with people from across the country and learning new things, I found out I had a real passion for technology,” he explained. “That led me down the path I’m on now in the technology space which has opened so many doors and allowed me to meet so many smart people, which in turn has allowed me to continue to appreciably improve my own skills. I still love wolves and follow the research, but technology and meta-learning has also become a passion which I’m grateful for.”
Allen is now a Network Administration Specialist where he architects a Juniper network upon which IoT (Internet of Things) devices are deployed. He’s also a VMwareNSX architect. His favorite part of his role is constantly being exposed to new architecture and learning new skills. “I find myself in these situations where, just like the first time I worked in the Data Center, I’m saying to myself ‘I don’t understand this.’ Then as time passes, you look back and say ‘wow, I remembered when this was foreign to me, and now it’s not’ and it’s that learning loop that motivates me to do it all over again,’” he said.
New Skills and New Opportunities
One of Allen’s proudest accomplishments in his career was doing Japanese translation for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) and had a conversation with the then-President and CEO, Jun Sawada. “When Sawada-san asked in Japanese where I studied and how often I had been to Japan, he was surprised when I said I had learned Japanese on my own and didn’t have any formal training. Even though I still have a lot to learn, that was incredibly motivating and extremely humbling,” he said.
Another significant achievement was becoming an NSX Ninja and sharing the stage at VMware Explore with someone he had admired for years, Chris McCain, the Technologist Director at VMware/Broadcom. “I was selected to go a multi-week training class to become an NSX Ninja (something I never thought would happen) a went from knowing nothing to becoming an NSX architect by the end of class,” Allen said. “This resulted in a total pivot in my career, allowed me to architect my environment, help other Network Engineers looking to pivot to the network virtualization space, do webinars, and ultimately become a vExpert. It was at this point I was asked by Chris McCain to do a session with him. [It was] definitely a humbling moment when someone you’ve looked up to . . . sees what you’ve done and validates it.”
Greatest Challenges: Continuous Learning
Allen named two challenges he’s faced in his career and how he’s approached them:
- Capturing successes, failures, lessons learned, and ideas, and then reusing that data — “I started looking into personal knowledge management tools with internal linking, journaling, and holding myself more accountable to ensure I was appreciably improving and that my data was accessible.”
- Efficiently managing the things he needs to learn — To solve this challenge, Allen went down the “rabbit hole of meta-learning,” which led him to develop an interest in neuroscience. “From a neuroscience perspective, there are documented ways on how large amounts of information can be learned efficiently, that many of the common belief systems behind how we learn have been proven false, and that these strategies can be employed across any vertical,” he said. “I was never someone who read research papers – and the counterevidence if available – before, but I am now.”
The Network is the Cloud: Another Layer of Network
To Allen, the concept of “The Network is the Cloud” means that the cloud is “another layer of network, an entirely new, ever-evolving frontier (which might sound dramatic).”
Allen outlines how network architects and admins need to react to the new reality:
- Leveraging multiple clouds — “It’s important to know not only know your intent (how you want it to look), but also how it gets executed (what made it look the way it does) because you may need to build that some construct in multiple places — and depending what you want to do, leveraging multiple clouds for different pieces of that may be the best choice,” he said.
- Adapting — “It means obtaining new skillsets, in a very different programmatic way, and it also means that you need to accept things they are today and leverage as much as possible.”
- Embracing possibilities — “Cloud means we can build a better network environment; we can leverage multiple clouds and fix some of the things in the cloud space we never could in the physical routing space.”
Outside of Work
Outside of work, Allen loves to read: “everything from tech papers, to fiction/nonfiction, research papers, comics, etc. If I find something interesting, I grab my Boox or Kindle and dive in.”
Allen is also a gamer and cloud-watcher. He enjoys mentoring through Tech Impact, sharing lessons learned through his career and helping save others from his mistakes. “If I can make them like Blade so they have all my strengths and none of my weaknesses, then I feel like every mistake I have ever made — even the big ones — was somehow worth it,” he said.
Curious about other cloud networking heroes like Allen?
- We’ll keep highlighting networking professionals on this blog.
- Learn more about the Cloud Networking Heroes program and apply on The Cloud Network Community.