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 Nickolas Foss, DevOps Engineer. See our previous hero spotlights here.
Background: Phenomenal Teachers and an Early Interest in Tech
Nickolas took an early interest in technology in high school. “Thanks to some phenomenal teachers, I was pushed towards pursuing jobs in a tech-related space,” he said. “My first job ever, right after I turned 16, was as a network engineering intern at my high school: running physical cables, configuring switches, and setting up laptops and machines for the upcoming school year.”
Nickolas went on to do a short stint in Helpdesk before starting on his current career path in cloud networking and operations engineering. “My current position focuses on the configuration of cloud resources, with an emphasis on networking and security across multiple cloud providers,” he said. “My role also includes work across a multitude of platforms, with a focus on centralizing management, security, and networking across a variety of products.”
One of Nickolas’s favorite things about his current role has been his exposure to many different environments, spanning multiple products and even more use cases. “One great example has to do recently on a trip to Black Hat, where I had the chance to speak to a variety of vendors about their products,” he said. “I dove into the technical aspects of the products and how they may apply to my current or future use cases."
One big project he’s proud of was overseeing the design, implementation and maintenance of a new Aviatrix Controller that was used to help provide a segmented networking approach. “It allowed customer data located on-premises to be connected to the cloud, without any overlap in management traffic or data, maintaining a least-access approach to networking,” Nickolas explained.
The Evolution of Networking and the Next Ten Years
Nickolas’s career has spanned six years so far, but he’s already witnessed massive changes. “When I first started my career, cloud networking was not at all mainstream, but even in the last year or so, it has become commonplace,” he said.
In the next ten years, he thinks our approach to network will probably be “unrecognizable” as technology changes. “I think some of the biggest changes we'll see will be around how we implement networking,” he said. “As more applications move to a marketplace deploy model, the idea of the 7 layers of networking topology has already started to fade. With security, all layers need a level of security regardless of the level, as attacks and defense need to span all aspects of the data.”
He also predicts changes in container networking. “As we move more into containerized deployments, the need for networking will change to see more of these segmented and containerized applications that will require a different approach to security and networking in the future.”
Cloud Native Security Fabric: Defense in Depth
Nickolas believes that that the best description of a cloud native security fabric revolves around the idea of “defense in depth.” “Having something like a native security fabric helps to build security into the cloud platform, rather than on top, which really helps to build into that layered security approach,” he said. “It makes security internal to the cloud, rather than just encompassing it. When combining these varieties of tools, it helps to build that defense in depth approach that's so favored among the security community currently, and for good reason.”
AI in Security: Securing Access to Data
Like all networking and security professionals, Nickolas has adapted with the rise of AI: handling the challenges of securing data and educating people about the importance of data security. "AI security is extremely hard to do, as it requires two things,” he said:
Network security – “Keeping any backend access to the data as limited as possible, making sure that any information that is given to the AI is kept between the user and the agent.”
Teaching users what they should and should not give AI – “One of the biggest issues with AI comes from data loss. It is important to ensure that data given to an AI is not private information. This is where networking security is very important, as these AI models rely heavily on the data they are given to build their models. Securing the data from end point to end point will always be a vital aspect, especially as more and more private or important data is fed to them.”
Outside of Work
Outside of work, Nickolas pursues adventure. “I am a native Coloradan and like to spend a lot of my free time in the most predictable way, going outdoors, hiking, camping, and off-roading,” he said. “When you spend a lot of time indoors working with technology for a job, it's a breath of fresh air (literally and figuratively) to spend some time away from the tech and out in nature.”
Curious about other cloud networking heroes like Nickolas?
We’ll keep highlighting networking professionals on this blog.
Learn more about the Cloud Networking Heroes program and apply on The Cloud Network Community.
