Like our country, Singapore’s network engineering community is small and conservative. This was the main reason we established the Singapore Network Operators Group (SGNOG) to promote interaction between, and develop the skill of local network operators.
The objective of SGNOG is to provide a platform for network operators and vendors to share knowledge, ideas and best practices, and in doing so foster better collaboration among the community. It is a challenging objective to meet due to the reserved nature of our community but we’ve had our successes, which include our SGNOG conferences and workshops.
Join us for SGNOG 5, 5 September 2017
Establishing SGNOG conferences among greatest achievements
Since 2011, we have organized four SGNOG conferences, which have attracted up to 100 attendees each time. These conferences have been useful to initiate discussion and collaboration. Personally, seeing people networking during the breaks and social events that we organized as part of these conferences has been the greatest achievement of SGNOG, and is a key aspect of NOGs.
Another important component of our conferences has been the training workshops. Although we did not offer these at the start – choosing to focus on getting our conference right first – these workshops have been well received by the community and have always been well attended, pointing to the demand for professional development in the community.
Join us at SGNOG 5
After a year hiatus, we are holding SGNOG 5 at the Biomedical Sciences Institute on 5 September 2017.
The full-day conference will include several technical presentations, including:
- Scaling data centre bandwidth with 400G and 800G Ethernet, by Huang YuJian, Arista
- MANRS – Improving global routing security and resilience, by Aftab Siddiqui, MANRS
- Managing distributed global networks, by Jimmy Lim, Cloudflare
- DNS security, DNSSEC and root zone DNSSEC KSK rollover, by Champika Wijayatunga, ICANN
It will also provide ample opportunity for attendees to network with speakers and other industry representatives.
Presentation submissions are open until the 11 August, so if you have an interesting idea to share, or a topic you would like to present, please get in touch. The final program will be published later this month.
Register by the 15 August to take advantage of our special rate too. We look forward to seeing you there.
Collaborating with other NOGs
We’ve learnt a lot since establishing our NOG six years ago. One important lesson has been the importance of collaborating with other regional NOGs. We have a good relationship with NOGs in Hong Kong, Indonesia and Malaysia and that has allowed us to share ideas and discuss our challenges.
The number one challenge many NOGs face is being able to attract speakers, especially from the incumbents – we are trying our best to reach out in various channels to encourage participation of NOG events.
Another challenge is attracting new people to the group. To address this, we are working on new initiatives to create more awareness and interest among younger generations by inviting graduating students from various tertiary institutions to attend our events and listen to industry speakers sharing real life technology and trends. By doing this, we hope to increase their knowledge of the technology and creativity that goes on within a network operator environment, and ultimately ignite the passion to further their career as future leading network engineers.
Cheeyong Tay is a manager of the deployment and support team at Facebook and a program committee member of SGNOG.
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