Last Friday was my last day at Extreme Networks and am bit nostalgic about the time I spent there. I worked with some great set of people especially my immediate team.

I joined Extreme as an Openstack developer and with zero background in networking. However I did a lots of reading and hands on networking this year and have become pretty comfortable with different aspects of it. One of the great books that helped me along the way was Illustrated Networks. Also having a plethora of opensource networking tools like wireshark, tcpdump, OpenVswitch really helped me in learning.

I was fortunate enough to work on SDN and contribute to the OVSDB Opendaylight project. Extreme has based it’s SDN controller on Opendaylight and I think it is a great choice. I hadn’t worked on Java for almost 10 years and got a chance to refresh my knowledge about it after such a long time. I really enjoyed learning about OSGi and using Karaf.

Technically the best part about my stay at Extreme was that we got Openstack integrated with Opendaylight for networking using vlans for implementing tenant networks rather than pre-packaged vxlan or gre-tunnels