The North American Network Operators’ Group (NANOG), an association of engineering, architecture, and operations professionals, has recently announced the agenda for their upcoming NANOG 74 event in Vancouver, Canada. Dubbed a new tech hub, the Canadian city is once again preparing to welcome this renowned IT industry event, which will offer participants a chance to freshen up skills and discover new network applications. The conference, sponsored by TekSavvy, is taking place October 1-3, 2018. Attendees can look forward to three full days of educational and networking opportunities focused on the continuous improvement of data transmission technologies and practices.

The keynote address—Lights Out: Climate Change Risk to Internet Infrastructure presented by Paul Barford, Professor, Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin—will explore how the changes to our coastlines and other pending climate-related issues affect the internet. Following the keynote, a group presentation on Virtualized PE for BGP/MPLS L3-VPN using Open-Source Software will lead to a full day of sessions covering topics that include a look at the economics of optical networks, openstack networking and legal barriers to RPKI adoption.

Further presentations will span a range of topics from BGP Route Security and the Journey to pure IPv6 Campuses, to Automating Device Certifications with Robot Framework, IP INfusion Thousand Eyes and more. Attendees will also have the opportunity to learn about Layer-1 switching fabrics based on SDN and new data architectures for high performance netflow.

NANOG 74 also offers experiences beyond these educational opportunities. One key aspect of this conference will be the culmination of the association’s board and committee election process, which began on August 1, 2018. All NANOG members in good standing are allowed to nominate a candidate, vote and serve on the company’s coveted board and committee positions. NANOG members are typically drawn from the core engineering and product staffs of major North American carriers, content providers, hosting and cloud companies, multi-tenant data centers and interconnection service providers. Membership is available to anyone with an interest in internet operations, engineering or research who wishes to further education and knowledge-sharing within the internet operations community. On Monday, October 1, meeting attendees will have the opportunity to view presentations from this year’s board candidates.

With nearly 60 individual company sponsors supporting the event, turnout is expected to exceed 1,000 attendees. NANOG relies upon the support of its sponsors to produce its tri-annual conferences and ongoing programs, which include NANOG on the Road, one-day educational programs brought to four cities across North America. The association’s current Annual Premium Sponsors are Diamond Sponsors Netflix and NTT Communications, Platinum Sponsors Amazon Web Services, Imperva, Microsoft and Oracle as well as Gold Sponsors Cyxtera, Google and Verisign.This NANOG 74 event in particular is sure to please industry players as they network and learn more about their industry.

NANOG is a non-profit, engineering, educational and operational forum for the coordination of network operations in North America. The association’s Executive Director, Edward McNair, states, “NANOG’s mission to enable the ongoing development of an open and secure internet by providing a platform that inspires, educates and empowers members of the networking community would not be possible without the generous support of our sponsors. Their commitment ensures NANOG meetings continue to be the robust, educational and vibrant forum attendees expect.” He adds, “We look forward to gathering with our industry colleagues in Vancouver to learn and network as we explore changes in the industry that are defining the current state and future progression of the internet.”