It’s been a busy few months here at Network to Code. We were at both Interop in Las Vegas in late May, and more recently were just at Cisco Live in San Diego. In the same period, we also brought on a few new hires as well as several new clients. In this post, we’ll reflect a bit on Interop, and in another post, we’ll review Cisco Live.

Interop ‘19

It was a milestone event for us at Interop. We had the whole company out there, and while everyone didn’t actively present, everyone played a part in preparing, reviewing, and helping with presentations and demos in some way or another. Being that the majority of our team is remote, it was a prime location and time to bring everyone together and get some face time with each other.

For those that didn’t attend or aren’t aware, Network to Code worked in partnership with the Interop team to put on the two-day Networking Summit this year. The theme for the summit was Automated Network Operations, which translated into an action-packed agenda on network automation related topics.

These were the titles of all of the sessions:

• State of the Industry
• Live Demos: Network Automation Use Cases
• Principles of Network Automation
• Highlighting Network Automation Bright Spots with NRE Labs
• The New Network Engineer’s CLI: Network APIs, Data Structures & Data Models
• Practices to Improve the Performance, Scale and Efficiency of Your Ansible Playbooks
• Move Fast and Don’t Break Things: Pre-Deployment Validation with Batfish
• A Practical Look at NetDevOps
• Network Automation Transformation Phase 0: Source of Truth
• Going Beyond Vendor Zero Touch Provisioning
• Network Automation: A Journey, Not a Destination
• Self-service Network Automation Using Slack
• Network Automation Journey at Roblox, How to Build a Network Automation Stack From The Ground Up
• Just Enough Network Automation to Get You Started
• Automation for Bureaucracies
• Engineering Panel Finale: A Tale of Different Network Automation Perspectives

Sound amazing? Well, indeed it was!

Note: you can download the slides for the sessions here and here.

Note: we were able to get these on video too. Stay tuned for those!

The sessions were presented by a combination of Network to Code Network Automation Engineers/Developers including Jere Julian, Daryn Johnson, Ken Celenza, John Anderson, Jason Belk, and Peter Allocca; vendors/engineers including Matt Oswalt-Juniper, Hank Preston-Cisco, Nick Russo-Cisco, Samir Parikh-Intentionnet, Ajay Chenampara-RedHat, and finally end users and consultants including Matt Davy, Jeremy Stretch, Damien Garros, Kirk Byers, Jeremy Schulman, and Claudia de Luna.

Key Takeaways

It’s Still Early

Having been focused in this space for over 5 years now, it’s still eye-opening to see that it is still so early in the industry for the adoption of network automation. There is so much opportunity for organizations and network engineers to truly transform how Network Operations is performed while growing and enhancing ones career. In fact, I kicked off the event sharing slides I presented in 2014 joking that much hasn’t changed. However, the reality is change is upon us. We have better tooling, vendors are more engaged and are thinking about operations, and there are several orgs that are well on their journey already (you can see that just from Interop).

It’s All About Source of Truth

Nearly all of the sessions touched on Source of Truth. Many of these sessions were talking and referencing NetBox, an open source IP address management (IPAM) and data center infrastructure management (DCIM) tool that is meant to store the intent of the network. Luckily, Jeremy Stretch, the creator and lead maintainer of NetBox, and John Anderson, another maintainer, were the ones delivering the Network Automation Transformation Phase 0: Source of Truth session. If you don’t have a data strategy or haven’t checked out NetBox already, you should.

Production Grade Network Automation Takes Time

It’s easy to get started. It’s easy to lab up some scripts/automation, but to truly have network-wide automation along with the right culture and internal processes, it takes investment of time, skills, people, and money. Engineers need time to automate! It doesn’t happen over night. I don’t mean to give an engineer 20-30% of their time to “dabble” in automation. Companies that do that aren’t serious or haven’t fully committed to re-defining their operational models. In order to spear head a true network operations transformation, there needs to be a defined plan with having some people fully dedicated to the automation realm.