Last Friday, I had the opportunity to attend NetDevOps Days in London. It was the first in-person event dedicated to Network Automation in quite some time. There have been a few prior events that I attended or was involved in organizing, including DevOps for Networking in San Jose way back in 2014, DevOps for Networking as a one-day event attached to Interop in 2016, a multiday Network Automation Summit attached to Interop in 2019, and then a virtual Network Automation Summit attached to Interop in 2020. So this event was well-timed and continues to serve a gap in the market.

The Problem

Over the years, many people that leaped into network automation have moved on from networking because personally they are tired of dealing with an antiquated industry (and immature APIs, tooling, virtual devices, etc.). They are typically taking their skills to the worlds of Cloud, DevOps, and Software. The others continue to fight the good fight as a lone solider (not great, because an army of one helps no one). Most organizations (including services companies / teams) that I’ve seen that create a focus on network automation move on from networking as their core focus because the Total Addressable Market is larger in cloud. We’ve also seen vendors pour money into community and open source, which is eventually questioned to the point that the focus and money dry up (slowly, so that it’s never questioned until it’s gone).

All of this makes it harder for the industry to truly evolve. Over the last 9 years, I am super proud and grateful that we (at Network to Code) continue to drive network automation in every way possible, including community outreach, open source, and having an impact with our customers, from the small to the Fortune 100. And we need more of it—as an industry.

NetDevOps Days

Let’s get back to NetDevOps Days.

It is clear we need more events like NetDevOps Days. The day in London last week was dedicated to network automation. Isn’t that enough said? There were just over 110 attendees, so the turnout was great. As an aside, I do believe London to have one of the stronger presences and meetup communities for network automation. I am still hopeful we can replicate this across other major cities around the world in future events.

At the event, there were presentations from companies like Network to Code, IP Fabric, Itential, and Evolvere, but also a great number of sessions from individuals and practitioners who are implementing network automation day to day. There were several common themes, as you may expect, mentioning tools and technologies such as Python, Ansible, Nautobot, NetBox, Salt, Git, and CI/CD, to name a few. However, there were also a few presentations on building 100% custom tools.

Driving Change

Building custom tools is an area I think we need to focus on as an industry. It doesn’t help the industry if one-off tools are built (open sourcing them helps, but we still need to question them). When I hear about these “custom” tools, I look at them as requirements for reusable tools and frameworks we need as an industry to fill gaps. But I’ll ask, Could they have been an integration or plug-in to existing tools/frameworks? As an industry and the greater community, we need to ensure there are repeatable architectures and designs (could be with commercial and open source tooling). While there may be needs for pure custom due to scale, security, or nonfunctional requirements, when those aren’t the driver, it is showing that we still have a gap in the industry. I look forward to continuing to drive this change.

Let’s Keep It Going

Finally, I’d like to give a shout-out and thanks to Mark Coleman from NetBox Labs, who hosted the event. It was quite the event having NetBox Labs + NetBox and Network to Code + Nautobot together in the same room. We both believe in driving community and making it okay to talk about whatever tools, technology, culture, and process are needed to drive change through network automation. Let’s keep that going.

Until the next one.

-Jason