Hank Preston

Distinguished Architect

Learn with Cisco

Hank started his career in network engineering like many, by cracking open a CCNA book and learning all about subnetting, the OSI model, and CLI interfaces. He fell in love with the deceptive simplicity and elegance of network communication and TCP/IP and dove in head first. His journey was one that included many network designs (and debates about designs), miles of copper/fiber cables, late night change windows, and even later night troubleshooting calls (it’s always the network… even when it isn’t :-). Along the way he picked up certifications in routing/switching, wireless, and security, culminating with earning CCIE #38336 in February 2013 and later becoming the first Cisco DevNet Expert #20220001. After spending a couple of years exploring the world of “Cloud”, “DevOps” and “Applications”, the talk of SDN, automation and programmability caught his ears, and he decided it was past time to return to networking full time. Hank's day job is putting NetDevOps theory into practice as the Principal Engineer for Learning and Certifications at Cisco. Helping engineer and operate the platform used by engineers around the world to learn the skills to be better engineers when they operate their own platforms. It's kinda circular and meta.

Articles

DEVELOPER

Hank Preston

Dear Hank… Help Me with RESTCONF URL Creation

4 min read

Got a network automation question? Ask Hank. Here, a network engineer wants to understand how the URLs for RESTCONF are constructed from the YANG models, and how to use the feature for updating IP addresses.

DEVELOPER

Hank Preston

Tune in to the “Creators” Channel at DevNet Create

2 min read

October 13th, DevNet Create 2020 goes virtual, and goes global with three regional programs featuring use cases, showing code, and innovations relevant to your region.

DEVELOPER

Hank Preston

Part 2: NetDevOps Goes Beyond Infrastructure as Code

5 min read

Network configuration pipelines can be a complex maze of forks and paths that require special timing, and keys. The current network configuration pipeline needs to go, and be completely replaced in NetDevOps.

DEVELOPER

Hank Preston

Part 1: Embrace NetDevOps, Say Goodbye to a “Culture of Fear”

4 min read

NetDevOps is one of many new terms coming into the IT lexicon as “DevOps” has become widely adopted and lauded as a positive and valuable approach to software development. As the IT industry looks to expand DevOps to other areas, NetDevOps has emerged along with other new terms such as “ChatOps”, “SecDevOps” and even “NoOps”. […]

DEVELOPER

Hank Preston

Using CLI as Training Wheels with NETCONF/YANG

6 min read

Introducing an entirely new era of networking

DEVELOPER

Hank Preston

Mid Season Check-in with NetDevOps Live!

3 min read

NetDevOps Live! episodes in April were fantastic, looking at Ansible, GitLab, Batfish and HashiCorp. Get ready for May's amazing line-up, with shows on Postman, NetBox, and ELK!

DEVELOPER

Hank Preston

Announcing NetDevOps Live! Season 3

3 min read

Take a look at what we've got in store for Season 3 of NetDevOps Live! — powerful tooling available that every NetDevOps engineer can use in their tool chest: Batfish, Postman, HashiCorp, Ansible Network Automation, NetBox and more!