Analysis Of Your Networkfor This Exercise You Will Be Completing A Ne ✓ Solved
Analysis of Your Network For this exercise, you will be completing a network analysis of your professional network (i.e., career related) OR your personal network (e.g., friendship network). You should select only one network to analyze and you do not need to fill all the lines in the table below, but you should try to be as comprehensive as possible to get the best understanding of your network. Let’s get started! Name of contact What role does this person play in your network? (e.g., information, political support, personal development, sense of purpose, work/life balance) Who introduced you to this contact? Marion Career development support Ken Vincent Maintaining a balance between work and the family Me Jeff Decision making at the managerial level Ken Sue Available professional information Jeff Kings A sense of purpose in life Me Warren Guidance in investment ventures Jeff Gladys Project management Warren Tabitha Career development support Sue Frank Career development support Gladys Ken Economic support in events of mega ventures Me Now that you have finished your network list, let’s consider a few questions (see next page).
1. In looking at the people in your network (second column of your network analysis), what role(s) do they tend to play? Which areas need development and which areas need de-layering (i.e., reducing of redundancies)? The role played by the people in my professional network relates to procedures around the workplace but with adequate support from the base. Taking note of the roles they play, it is evident that fruition in the work setups is also dependent on composure from a personal or family basis.
There are areas that need development and include the area of information available and decision making at the managerial levels. By improving these two areas, the overall position of the career will improve and serve a purpose . In the same context, the area of support in career development needs to be de-layered. This is because the people are quite many, and their inputs might conflict on many occasions. 2.
In looking at who introduced you to your contacts (third column of your network analysis), what patterns do you notice? Do you tend to be connector? Can you identify a broker in your network? What changes, if any, should you make in terms of how you connect with people as you build your network? In looking at the third column of the professional network analysis, there is a pattern whereby the people who play a particular role in my professional network also have other people whom they connect me with to help in other areas.
For example, Jeff, who is introduced to me by Ken, goes ahead to introduce Sue and Warren to me. This shows an element of a chain of connections across the professional network . However, I would make changes in the course of building the network whereby I would maintain a balance in all the roles played by different people in my professional network to promote collective development. 3. In our Lecture 8.3 we discuss network analysis, and in particular, network tendencies such as the similarity and proximity principles as well as networking traps.
Does your network show evidence of any of these challenges; why or why not? Draw on the video lecture to substantiate your point. My professional has elements of similarity and proximity because some of the people in my network are those with whom we share experience and are in the field of career, e.g., Marion and Tabitha, who offer me support in my career development. More so, there are others with whom we spend a lot of time together, e.g., Vincent and Kings, and therefore help me in areas of work balance and a sense of purpose. My professional network is not overloaded because not so many people are there to undertake given roles in the network.
There is a characteristic of muscled interconnection and shared activities as in the illustration below. Infrastructure as Code Technical Report Template The report will consist or a technical review, and Steps 2, 3, and 4 lab reports. The technical review part of the report should be eight to 12 pages long, and should cover the following topics: 1. Networking in the Cloud a. Explanation of AWS VPC and associated networking components b.
Discussion on how BallotOnline will take advantage of AWS VPC, regions, and availability zones to secure and assure availability of its infrastructure 2. Cloud Command Line Interfaces a. Explanation and advantages of cloud CLIs b. Discussion how BallotOnline can use CLI in provisioning and maintenance of its cloud deployments 3. Declarative Resource Definitions a.
Explanation and advantages of declarative cloud resource definitions b. Discussion how BallotOnline can use declarative tools such as AWS CloudFormation in provisioning and maintenance of its cloud deployments 4. Cloud APIs a. Explanation and advantages of cloud APIs, definition and purpose b. Discussion how BallotOnline can use cloud APIs such as AWS Python SDK in development, provisioning, and maintenance of its cloud deployments In addition, resubmit all three Project 2 lab reports, with incorporated feedback from Steps 2, 3, and 4 if any.
1 2 Explore Infrastructure as Code Start Here In Project 1, as a BallotOnline network engineer, you carried out a technical investigation of networking issues crucial to the company’s cloud deployment. Now, management has tasked you with addressing another important component of cloud computing—automation and consistency of deployment and administrative tasks. You will use Amazon Web Services' cloud environment for your investigations. In this project, you have been appointed the company’s first cloud engineer—a position devoted to cloud deployment. To start, you will continue network investigation, further exploring networking capabilities in the cloud, and becoming familiar with AWS VPC—virtual private cloud, which is a private virtual network into which AWS customers deploy their cloud resources.
You will learn about networking components associated with AWS VPC, and their default instances and the nondefault ones which require setup by the customer. Next, you will become acquainted with the basic infrastructure as code (IaC) capability with command-line interface (CLI). It is a command language that allows you to write scripts that you can invoke to automatically provision and maintain your cloud infrastructure. You will then complete a lab exercise in which you will provision an AWS VPC with some of the related components using AWC CLI commands. Then, you will explore a notation for describing detailed configurations of AWS resources, like EC2 instances, called CloudFormation (CF).
You will learn about CF templates and complete the lab exercise designing a simple cloud configuration in the CF Template Designer tool. Next, you will explore the ultimate programmatic interfaces to the cloud—the cloud APIs. You will explore and install the Python AWS SDK, and then analyze and run a provided Python script provisioning a tagged EC2 instance. The final submission of this project will be a technical report discussing a cloud network configuration for BallotOnline, as well as the IaC topics and exploring the ways IaC can be used by BallotOnline in its cloud deployments. Step 1: Virtual Networks in the Cloud In Project 1, you became familiar with software-defined networking, a way of programmatically specifying network configurations.
In this step, you will continue to explore networking in the cloud, learning how virtual networks are created on demand and the associated virtual networking elements. You will then propose the virtual network/subnetwork configuration for BallotOnline voting application. You will use Amazon Web Services' networking offering as a learning environment and become familiar with the AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) concept and related components. It is also important to understand the geographical layout of AWS networking, as related to AWS regions and availability zones . In the next step, you will take a closer look at the command line interface with a lab exercise.
Step 2: Interfacing With the Cloud—Command-Line Interfaces Provisioning cloud resources using the cloud provider’s internet portal is great for learning, setting up demos, etc. But it does not allow for automation of tasks, which is necessary for cloud engineers responsible for creating and maintaining corporate cloud deployment. Automation of tasks is crucial for ensuring continuity, repeatability, and consistency of administrative activities. Cloud resources are created and maintained by software implementing virtualization, SDN, etc., and this enables programmatic interfaces to their capabilities, making the infrastructure as code (IaC) paradigm a reality. As the BallotOnline cloud engineer, you will be responsible for automating cloud administration tasks.
In this step, you will explore the most basic IaC tool—the scripting framework. With it, you can define lists of commands to be executed automatically on demand. Most cloud providers offer scripting interfaces for their cloud offerings. In this step, you will become familiar with the AWS command-line interface (CLI). You will complete the Lab 1 AWS CLI , in which you will first create an AWS Cloud9 development environment and then use AWS CLI in it to provision a virtual private cloud (VPC) and attach a tag to it.
Then, you will create an internet gateway, tag it, and attach the gateway to your VPC. You will verify all the steps by inspecting provisioned resources in the AWS console. You will create a lab report as per the lab guide, describing the steps you’ve taken with all the screenshots requested in the guide. You will also describe how using scripting framework like AWS CLI can help BallotOnline in administering its cloud deployment. Step 3: Interfacing With the Cloud—Declarative Resource Definitions An alternative to executing scripting command commands with options is to describe the desired effect of their execution—the desired configuration of resources.
This is called declarative programming . Most cloud vendors make declarative frameworks available in their cloud offerings. The description of desired configuration is done by defining templates using some declarative notations. The most popular are YAML (“Yaml Ain't Markup Languageâ€) and JSON (JavaScript Object Notation). JSON is a simple notation using nested key-value pairs to describe hierarchical structures of named attributes.
You’ve seen examples of it as output from AWS CLI commands in the previous step. As before, you will use Amazon AWS as the exploration environment. Its declarative IaC feature is the CloudFormation (CF) framework. You will complete Lab 2 AWS CloudFormation in which you will become familiar with CF templates, and then use CF Template Designer to define a stack containing a VPC with an internet gateway (similar to the previous step), tag them, attach the gateway to the VPC, and provision the stack. You will create a lab report as per the lab guide, describing the steps you’ve taken with all the screen shots requested in the guide.
You will also describe how using declarative IaC features can help BallotOnline in administering its cloud deployment. Step 4: Interfacing With the Cloud—Cloud APIs The fact that cloud offering features are software-defined finds its ultimate reflection in rich cloud API libraries most cloud providers offer, so that customers can interact with their cloud deployments directly from the code of their software products. Cloud API libraries are available for popular programming languages and are often referred to as software development kits (SDKs). You will complete Lab 3 Cloud API in which you will become familiar with AWS SDK for the Python programming language. You will explore and install the Python SDK in your Cloud9 environment.
Next, you will take a look at a Python script create_instance.py that provisions an EC2 instance and tags it. You will run the script and verify that the instance has been provisioned successfully. You will create a lab report as per the lab guide, describing the steps you’ve taken with all the screenshots requested in the guide. You will also describe how using cloud APIs can help BallotOnline in administering its cloud deployment. Step 5: Submit Your Final Report As your final Project 2 submission, you will write a technical report about AWS VPCs and infrastructure as code tools.
It will include technical review of the topics covered in the project, along with recommendations for how BallotOnline can take advantage of these. Follow the Infrastructure as Code Technical Report Template to cover all the topics required. Make sure you provide captions to clearly identify sections of your report. The technical review part of the report should be eight to 12 pages long. Analysis of Your Network For this exercise, you will be completing a network analysis of your professional network (i.e., career related) OR your personal network (e.g., friendship network).
You should select only one network to analyze and you do not need to fill all the lines in the table below, but you should try to be as comprehensive as possible to get the best understanding of your network. Let’s get started! Name of contact What role does this person play in your network? (e.g., information, political support, personal development, sense of purpose, work/life balance) Who introduced you to this contact? Now that you have finished your network list, let’s consider a few questions (see next page). 1.
In looking at the people in your network (second column of your network analysis), what role(s) do they tend to play? Which areas need development and which areas need de-layering (i.e., reducing of redundancies)? 2. In looking at who introduced you to your contacts (third column of your network analysis), what patterns do you notice? Do you tend to be connector?
Can you identify a broker in your network? What changes, if any, should you make in terms of how you connect with people as you build your network? 3. In our Video Lecture 8.3 we discuss network analysis, and in particular, network tendencies such as the similarity and proximity principles as well as networking traps. Does your network show evidence of any of these challenges; why or why not? Draw on the video lecture to substantiate your point.
Paper for above instructions
Analysis of My Professional NetworkIntroduction
The professional network plays a critical role in career advancement and personal development. With various connections serving different functions, having a systematic understanding of these relationships can lead to a more effective networking strategy. In this analysis, I will evaluate my professional network by examining the roles different individuals play, identifying redundancy or gaps in my network, and noting any trends in how I was introduced to these contacts. The findings from this exercise will assist in refining my network strategy moving forward.
Description of My Network
1. Marion: Career development support. Introduced by me.
2. Vincent: Maintaining a balance between work and family. Introduced by Ken.
3. Jeff: Decision-making at the managerial level. Introduced by Ken.
4. Sue: Available professional information. Introduced by Jeff.
5. Kings: A sense of purpose in life. Introduced by me.
6. Warren: Guidance on investment ventures. Introduced by Jeff.
7. Gladys: Project management support. Introduced by Warren.
8. Tabitha: Career development support. Introduced by Sue.
9. Frank: Career development support. Introduced by Gladys.
10. Ken: Economic support in mega ventures. Introduced by me.
Role Analysis
The roles played by my professional contacts can be categorized as supportive, informative, and decision-making. The majority of those in my network, like Marion, Tabitha, and Frank, offer substantial career development support, reflecting a mentorship-like relationship (Bian, 2015). This focus on career development signifies the importance I place on professional growth. On the other hand, Vincent and Kings aid in achieving work-life balance, which is also a critical issue in modern professional settings (Burke & Major, 2019).
However, two critical areas require development: information access and decision-making capacity at the managerial level. Information on market trends and career pathways is crucial; thus, enriching this aspect with additional contacts who specialize in these areas will benefit my professional growth considerably (Eagle et al., 2014). Moreover, improving decision-making at managerial levels suggests that I might benefit from connecting with individuals in higher management roles or leadership development circles (Higgins & Kram, 2001).
Conversely, I must consider de-layering the career development support dimension of my network. With too many individuals offering similar types of advice, conflicting inputs could emerge (Higgins et al., 2007). I could limit this redundancy by evaluating who provides the most impactful insights and potentially stepping back from reaching out to some contacts in this capacity.
Introductions and Connectivity Patterns
As seen in the introductions noted, there is a clear pattern of interconnectedness in my networking framework (Burt, 2004). Ken, who serves as both an economic supporter and the introducer of Vincent and Jeff, functions as a pivotal connector. This connectivity allows for collective advancements in different areas of my career. It also indicates that I maintain linkages between my contacts, helping bolster resources in multiple capacities.
A broker is typically a mediator in the professional network, and in this case, Jeff acts as one by introducing me to Sue and Warren. This is crucial because it signifies that I should nurture my connections with Jeff, encouraging him to facilitate more introductions (Burt, 1992). Also, my self-introduction of various contacts indicates that I take the role of a connector myself, which can be instrumental in fostering deeper relationships (Powell et al., 1996).
To enhance the effectiveness of future connections, I will prioritize the quality of introductions over quantity. This could involve being intentional about reaching out to fewer individuals and focusing more on developing substantial and meaningful interactions.
Similarity and Proximity Principles & Networking Traps
The principles of similarity and proximity are evident in my network, which shows that those with shared experiences or backgrounds tend to gravitate towards each other (McPherson et al., 2001). For instance, Marion and Tabitha share proximity in their career development roles, as do Vincent and Kings in promoting work-life balance.
One potential challenge is the homophily trap, where similar types of individuals populate my network. This can lead to echo chambers, where contrasting viewpoints are overlooked (Kearns, 2017). Therefore, I must actively seek diversity in my professional connections. Engaging with individuals from different industries, backgrounds, or career stages may introduce fresh perspectives and ideas, challenging my assumptions and biases.
Moreover, managing the balance between personal, social, and professional networks poses another challenge. While it is essential to maintain personal relationships, it is equally vital to ensure they do not hinder professional opportunities. Therefore, future endeavors should include strategizing ways to integrate both aspects effectively.
Conclusion
This analysis provided valuable insights into the current state of my professional network. A clear understanding of the roles different individuals play, the need to develop certain areas, and patterns of connectivity will guide my networking strategies moving forward. Essential gaps in information access and managerial decision-making must be addressed, and it is prudent to streamline support in career development to avoid redundancy. Furthermore, by expanding beyond common connections and cultivating a diverse array of relationships, my network can be a powerful tool for both personal and career development.
References
Bian, Y. (2015). Network Analysis: The Role of Social Capital in Personal Development. In Social Networks and Health Outcomes. Springer.
Burke, R.J., & Major, D.A. (2019). Work-Life Balance: A Review and Future Directions for the Field. Journal of Management.
Burt, R.S. (1992). Structural Holes: The Social Structure of Competition. Harvard University Press.
Burt, R.S. (2004). Buffering against the Educational Costs of Social Capital: Theoretical Implications for the Housing Market. Sociological Theory.
Eagle, N., Macy, M., & Claxton, R. (2014). Network Diversity and Economic Resilience. In Social Networks.
Higgins, C.A., & Kram, K.E. (2001). Reconceptualizing Mentoring at Work: An Interactive Developmental Approach. The Academy of Management Review.
Higgins, C.A., Kram, K.E., & Noe, R.A. (2007). Transitional Relationships: A New Perspective on Professional Relationships for Career Development. Journal of Career Development.
Kearns, A. (2017). Overcoming Homophily in Personal Networks: The Role of Personal Interaction. Social Networks.
McPherson, M., Smith-Lovin, L., & Cook, J.M. (2001). Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks. Annual Review of Sociology.