From Network Engineer to Network Automation Engineer

Welcome to The Route to Networking podcast. Today we've got a very special guest, Federico Olivieri. Federico started off in the NetOps industry working in Italy in his hometown and has since worked at some of the biggest names in UK such as Sky, Paddy Power and Ticketmaster. He's now currently working for Network to Code as a network automation engineer and living in the Netherlands. So we're going to learn about Federico's career why he loves network automation and what his plans are for the future. How are you doing, Federico?

Hi, good morning, James. Good morning, everybody. It's great to be here.

Man, thank you for coming on. I appreciate it. First question is always how I like to get started, Federico. How did you get started in the networking space?

Oh yeah, well, it's a quite funny way. So I was basically, I was 18, 20 years or something like that. I was wasting my time just hanging around with friends and something. At some point, my father say, well, it's good to you, you might as well. So I look around and see what was the things I liked the most and technologies was one of the one and my hometown is a small one, medium one I would say in Italy. There were not many opportunities to work around IT apart for one of the most famous service providers that coincidentally is in my hometown in Italy. I was looking for people in a NetOps team. So I said, "That's great. Let's jump on it." And that's basically how I started, just to make my father happy and just hang around and waste my time with friends in the sunny beaches in Italy. And yeah, that's how I started. I remember that time I just was following procedures from A to Z written down by the company. Not really know what I was doing, no difference between for me between a private or public IP address. I couldn't understand the difference. So yeah, that's how I started basically.

Were you passionate about computers growing up when you were a kid or anything like that?

Yeah, I was kind of passionate. I remember when I was like 10 years old, something like that. I have a gift from my grandparents. They bought my first PC. At that time it was tremendously expensive. I mean, it was crazy. So it was like a big gift from all the parents. And basically, I remember like stuck around Windows 95, and it was something like that. Just exploring those things, what was a defragmented disk things like that. So it was like it became like an hobby for me at the time. And then I seen you then just for about getting a job and start. Yeah, And that's when I realized, okay, that's the right way to approach this work and to make a career. So I started to get down the books and the certification and more experience. I was acquiring more certification I was doing and more different roles. I was looking with more responsibility, with more work, more challenging positions.

In the build up to obviously tell you, I've noticed you're Juniper and Cisco certified, right? What kind of compelled you to do both? rather than just focus down in one.

Because, okay, when I started the beginning in networking world, it was again, it was like Cisco was the main one, like it was covering at least 90 percent of the marketplace in networking. But then suddenly there was Juniper came in, Arista came in, all the fiber brands, they came in. I realized that it wasn't like Cisco only environment anywhere. So I thought it was good to jump on the other most common vendor as well. Obviously all the knowledge acquired with Cisco was good because obviously OSPF. It's the same as a standard protocol like BGP, wherever you go in whatever brand you use. But yeah, having knowledge, especially in security about the other brands that might be slightly different from brand to brand, it was a great things. And end up to be like a win-win to be honest because more companies they are embracing different vendors today.

Yeah, of course. One thing just on that, I was going to speak to you about the cert, so you've kind of helped. You've done me a favor there. It's a lot of people we have on here. They're not really that fussed about certs or they're not necessarily anti-certs, but I don't see the value as such. So it'd be good to hear from you. Why do you hold so much value in certifications?

I mean, if you think about how the IT world is, I like to think in this way. Okay. If you think about the router and the Linux terminal. In the Linux terminal, you open your Bash terminal, you're just blinking things that, A, you don't really know what to do. Not because it's so flexible, so huge environment. While in the networking, you are lucky enough that you have a long series of books and courses and training that they can put you in the right track. So going with the certification, first of all, it makes you.. be acquainted with the environment you are on. It's not like you're dropping a wild jungle, you need to try to survive. Like, is that before me when I open the first Linux terminal? And also they give you the basic knowledge that you can apply, like I would say to every vendor about protocols and things like that. So they help you to move around on the products like router forward. So whenever you log in, you know what to do, you know what to expect as well as they give you knowledge, like a proper knowledge. If I'm not mistaken, I have a friend from Greece that during his university course, basically they covered the CCNA. So one of the exam was based on the CCNA and that exam could be used to validate, to claim the CCNA certification. So you understand that if university they bring.. these into the courses means they give you not just vendor specific knowledge but a broad knowledge where you can use to do your work.

Yeah, yeah. So more the actual science and how it all works as well. Yeah. The exact guess, I can't remember enough to my head, but one of the points he made, which you kind of touched on there as well, is this one good habit, just doing the certs, but it kind of helps you as you're doing a cert, then tie it in so when you're doing something in real life, like, oh, that's how that works. And that's slightly different to, you have people that just smash out certs for fun and demand higher salaries, that kind of stuff. You're not saying that, you're saying each step when you get to this level, do a cert and it will support that.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. What I changed my way to see certification in the last years, because I was at some point where I was studying for certain certification that were too vendor specific. So say, okay, I'm going to be an expert on this firewall, but what if I'm not going to use this firewall for, I mean, in my other company. So there was no match point of that. So at that point changed the way I started to look for the certification. So I look mainly for those certification that can give me at least the 70% of basic knowledge that can be reapplied. And this is not just for networking, but can be for or whatever other kind of certification or for coding or DevOps things. So my suggestion when someone asked me for that, just to look for a more broad certification possible instead for vendor specific ones.

Yeah, okay. That makes sense. It's not enough for the NetOps engineers, someone that just said that to them and he just had to get a job. Talk to your career center, what's happened for you, Federico.

Yeah, so after that I moved in Florence in Italy, because I had my first role as an engineer. So I wasn't part of the team, I was just myself. It was a smaller company, but it was more challenging because I was looking at a bigger portion of network and I was myself just another network engineer. We were looking at a completely different part of the network. So it was kind of by myself, like dropping this famous jungle where I have to survive and find a way to get along. And then the team grown and I am like a team leader of three plus me four people. And then I decided that for different reasons that I needed to do a bigger step. So London was the most suitable candidate and was amazing experience. And that was like dropping this environment where there is a lot of resources around in terms of people just sitting in the office where you have 10 people surround you with so high knowledge and skills you can just daily learn from them. And then this was Sky. I mean, I'm talking about all the companies I worked through in London. Yeah, it was a common thing across all the different companies. And then I decided to the CCNP track at the Cisco Academy because I thought it would be a bigger value. So it was in London. There was like evening class for Cisco CCNP. And it was great because apart learning the CCNP stuff, I had the chance to meet people, which just did today some of them are my friends and touch with from which we have like a big discussion about networks every time or on the change of opinions and ideas or we up to dates where one guy keep each other updated with news about our working environment, let's say. And plus one of the good things, the guy was teaching us at that time, it was very good in teaching us a methodology in how to approach networking, which is very, very important. Something I realized later is very, sometimes it's more important to have a methodology, how to approach something than have a proper technical skill. Because the skills you can learn on the books, everywhere the methodology is something is difficult to learn. Most of the time you learn by mistake, by someone help you to avoid that, that's great.

Yeah, of course. You're a part of it, you go into London events and you speak at those events, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just not that really, isn't it? Like that must really help. Even though a lot of the stuff I've been saying on the events and it's just people's hobbies and projects, but even things like that is probably something that you would only get in a major city, like what rich and the guys are doing, you probably wouldn't get in a small town in Italy, so it would probably be a lot harder, right?

Yeah, no, that's true. That's true. Yeah, that's for sure. I mean, the beauty of the IT in general. It is a very open sector. Everyone is very willing to learn from other people, willing to share. So more people you have around you, more opportunities, more things you're going to learn, more things you're going to touch with.

On the career path you've chosen, you've now really kind of niched into the network automation space. What happened? Why did you decide you wanted to go down that route?

Well, the first thing, the first answer is because I'm lazy, basically. And network automation is going to help you in that case. I mean, if you don't want to do the same stuff, again, network automation is the right solution. Now, but jokes aside, There was a time of my career that up to the CCNP where I was at Paddy Power, I say, okay, now what's next? So CCIE or automation, because at that time automation was getting gripped. So it was something, it was around. I started to study for CCIE and then I realized that basically it could have been a bit frustrating go through the CCIE because all the knowledge acquired along my journey in London all the studies I've done, unfortunately, had a little chance to apply them because you can do a lot of networking configuration, protocol, MPLS, quality of service, all those fancy stuff if you are in a certain role in a certain company. And most of the time, you need just few people to cover that role. So the rest of the people, they're more like NetOps. So do the firewall rule or update this OSPF. So it's not very dynamic environment. While network automation, it is a lot dynamic because it's like a brand new area. A lot of things you're gonna touch, you're gonna touch software development, you touch DevOps, infrastructure. So it's just an array of different fields. So I post my CCIE study, I start to look around Python and say, okay, I'll take a month two months and see at the end of these two months what make me more happy. Like do coding or go for CCIE. And no doubt at the end of it, I was super excited about what I could do with Python. I just build things from scratch and implement basic stuff and say, okay, that's for sure the way I want to.

Yeah, yeah. And third, this thing, I think network automation is way bigger than a lot of people assume. When I first heard about it, I just assumed it was using Python to automate parts of the network. But if you were to break it down percentage-wise, how much of network is involved? How much software is involved? How much systems, infrastructure, et cetera?

Okay, so coding in software development is 40%. Then you still need 10% of networking because obviously… If you need to automate BGP, just make an example, you must know how BGP works. You must do some BGP configuration and test environment to test it, right? So you still need the 10% of networking skills to just build what is necessary. And then the other 50% is depends by the project, but it's split by infrastructure because you have to deploy your stuff somewhere, DevOps. So we're talking about Kubernetes Docker, Cloud, things like that. And yeah, that's it basically.

It's a good point though, because we have customers say, they'll be looking for someone like yourself say like, we have the networking background moved into more of a code role. Yeah, never necessarily ask the question why, but it does make complete sense. It's like, you know, if you wanted to get someone to build a robot on how to make a ham sandwich, they need to know how to make a ham sandwich first. So it's a really interesting point. So you mentioned earlier about There's two of you, the biggest amount, but also what you think everybody else should know.

Yeah. So again, the biggest things I learned is methodology. So I see the difference, for example, between myself and my wife, that she went through the proper, the full university course where I didn't do any university course. And so when she approached her first job, she had a proper methodology and she tackled the issues properly because that's what she learned during university the colleagues and university to meet the detail. So despite the methodology, networking, network automation, coding, whatever, it's different from what they maybe they teach university or whatever, but still they have the people that attend university, they realize they have a track, let's say. So that's the most important things. Like I was saying, you learn by mistakes, frustration, most of the time wasting your time doing the same. But then you might be lucky to find someone that can help you. Like I was saying, this course I attended along the map. Otherwise you find some resources, good resources out there. They can teach you the methodology. Most of the time though, the problem is on the engineer side where maybe we are more focused on learning the tech bits. So we don't even realize that the book is straight to teach us a method. So what I'm saying is that it's not just about technology, but just about all the context around it.

Yeah, yeah, OK, that makes sense. And now you're living in Amsterdam?

Leiden in the Netherlands.

Leiden, sorry, OK. And working for Network to Code. For those that are listening, I think a lot of you would know who Network to Code are, but those that don't, can you just do a quick introduction to Network to Code?

Yeah, Network to Code is the leading company, worldwide leading company in network automation. It's one of the first. I met my where Network Automation was just a small company with 10 people, they were doing just training the world and then basically quickly ramp up and became one of the biggest, I would say the main network automation consultancy company. So we are engaged with the biggest name, I think about it, worldwide basically. So we have the six in network automation and the good things is that at Network to Code, there are those that consider the most finest mind, the most knowledgeable people are around to text. So if you need like the maximum expert in Kubernetes, you know where to find if you need the maximum expert in Ansible, there is one there. So it's a great place where to be for sure.

'Cause I remember years ago, I was at an event, Anet Connect's office, it was like a meetup. And the event Jason was there speaking and it was just training. And a few days later, like, yeah, it started to gain some real rapid growth. And it was perfect timing really, wasn't it, as more and more people were buying into this whole idea of network automation. So, what's something that, you know, as a business or you individually, what are you currently working on or researching that's really exciting you at the moment?

Yeah, let's say I'm on my career, it's this time of my career where I has slightly slowed down about the tech bits with the customer especially. Before it was like myself working in a team or most of the time, I was just by myself, worth alone, just doing my work. My manager came to me and said, I need to fix this or I need to implement this one. So I was head down and doing not need to do today with everyone. Now with the customer, working with customer, obviously there is all series of things like a bit of project management, a little bit of agile methodology that you need to drive. It's good because at the end of the day, you deliver a product that has to work in an environment where other people are working. So it's kind of change that you must make sure to know all of it, right? Because if you don't know the people that are going to use it, you cannot build a proper tool for them to be used. You might build something super fancy, but it's complicated for them to understand. So they are not going to use it. So there is no point to develop it and deliver it. So it's still my mind start to change it to see So that's where I'm learning the most at the moment. Plus, like I was saying, having those great people around me whenever I need help, I just raise my hand and someone give me an option and I say, "Whoa, okay." I have like three days of things to learn just to understand what they suggest me.

That's a good thing about working in an environment like that, right? Yeah with some really good people. One thing, have you been involved in a lot of environments, you know, Paddy Power, Ticketmaster, Sky, the customers you support now? What's been the biggest network outage you've personally experienced?

Yeah, I remember it was the first time actually my manager gave me a proper task, say, okay, I want to trust you. So I want to give you this kind of important project. Basically, we have these border gateway routers with this access list. They were very messy access list to block traffic from internet. The people was keeping adding routes and routes. At some point, the routers, they were struggling to cope with all the rules and the access list. We have to think about a huge company with a lot of traffic coming in the CPU went up a lot. So we said, okay, we need to clean up. So that's fine. This is basic CCNA stuff, right? So access list, remove the shit out of access list, that's it. So I was like, preparing my plan and I said, "Okay, I need to remove this one. This has to be moved up, blah, blah, blah, blah." I said, "Okay, let's do this." Change window time. I played the rules. It was perfect. Everything was fine. At the same time point we have on this Slack channel where the outage were reported, right? By whatever people realize, experience a problem. It was 10 in the morning. And after five minutes, someone.. say we have a problem with the payment system. Okay, payment system is database software. After two minutes, we cannot reach the payment system. Say, OK, again, this database behind an application shouldn't be my problem. We cannot reach the payment system from the internet. That's probably my problem, because probably I must have access to this. Short version was that basically I shadowed the access list rule that was permitting the payment system in and in five minute outage they calculated 10,000 pounds of lost revenue. Luckily, it was Tuesday morning, something like that. There was not much, because I started to think about what it would have been like on Friday, where everyone is on the bar and yeah, I says it. Damn, that was my first project that my manager gave me and I messed up. But that made me realize that–

It's important.

That's actually what, that's one of the things because I started to say, okay, well, can be a better way to test the changes before to production or to do a test after the changes apply so that's why I started to look at Ansible and The next maintenance, similar maintenance work we have done through an Ansible playbook and the whole team was using that one which was great. As well as I realized that I needed again a method. I couldn't just apply what I learned on the book because there was a lot of things around that the topic. So that's where I realized that I had to approach in a different way to certain things.

Yeah, okay. You found a club with it on the earlier. I wanted to talk about the network outage when you were talking about, so you've obviously been a part of loads of on a lot of environments and a lot of different customers as well. So I have one the other day actually, and the podcast hasn't been released yet. When I asked the chap about his biggest network outage, my laptop just went and I couldn't hear him. All the internet was working and you can tell he was fine. He's at worse and network outages or issues and this and I was sweating. It was not the most a regular experience in my life. Yeah, we need to rerecord that part of that. One thing I'd be keen to, I think the listeners will be keen to understand, like if they're working now as an network engineer and they're keen to move into the automation space, they want to be doing what you're doing in two, three, five years time. What would be like some simple steps they could take?

Okay, first of all, you.. you will need to understand what are the most common tools required by the industry. Unfortunately, they end up being Ansible and Python is what all the companies that they work with start with, despite there is so many much more tools around more interesting that in my opinion can be used. But yeah, so the first things is to.. learn what are those tools. Just pick a few of them. Again, Python and Ansible would be enough because if you never work with those, it's going to be a challenge. So you have to put your mind in your mindset, that has to change. You have to complete it. It's like if you start to speak another language, it's going to take time. When I try to learn the proper English. It took me six months on the books, between books, a video, YouTube, and things like that. And it was similar with Python and Ansible because it's like from networking to coding, it's a completely different language. So if you have to learn, you have to practice, you struggle to understand, but then your mind in the background is start slowly to learn and you'd see after a few months, everything will be much bigger. So a few things because sometimes that everyday work on that even a little bit now or something like that, but just consistency is good because it helps your brain to get into the grip of the new tools.

And practice, right?

And practice, yeah. If you don't have a project that works, try a new lab or think about what could be automated apply. Think about all the tasks you repeat. You will just copy and paste can be replaced by Python or Ansible. So think about all those use cases and it just play with those in your lab and then go knock to your manager and say, look what I have nice here. We can do the same stuff saving three hours of work with this piece of work and developers started on Sunday and say, oh, it's good. And maybe they start to think about to embrace automation. Yeah, yeah,

I think that is a big thing about even the skills that we look for. I'll touch on this in the podcast before. Customers are more and more so now looking at network engineers who've moved into the role like you like I mentioned or even if they have to have done Python. Loads of customers won't even look at CVs or interview candidates if they haven't done some form of scripting or haven't been at least trying to upskill. On that note, how can you? How do you personally envisage the network industry developing over the next five, 10 years?

There is a bit of misunderstanding I would say around the network automation role is something I also brought in the last convention in Frankfurt. The companies they look, most of the time they look for network automation engineer while they want network engineer with automation skills. So network automation He has to be understood as a… When a company wants to embrace network automation, it's to think about a bit of a specific team within a company. Like you have a sysadmin, there's database team, you have DevOps, you must have your network automation, okay? Because it's such a broad topic that you cannot ask a network engineer to do network automation. You might ask a network engineer to.. simplify some of their task applying some basic code but you cannot ask a network engineer to be fully dedicated to network automation because you're going to do one, so you're going to do the other one. That's the reason why at the beginning we had sysadmin that was looking after databases and all the things. And now you have database team, you have cloud team, you have infrastructure team. So it's become more specific. And so that's the first things. Companies that start to think that if they want to embrace automation, they must have their own team, which means dedicate resources, dedicate budget training and invest on the team. Then obviously, like network automation engineer has understanding of networking is good. The network engineer has understanding of automation so they can work better together. I again like an infrastructure engineer, sysadmin, all types of sysadmin must have understanding of cloud and database, right? Because still interact with those pieces so

Sorry, just to kind of paraphrase, as you're saying, at the moment there's expectation for the network engineers to do the automation, but as the industry develops, there will be network automation specific teams, their network engineering specific teams.

Correct. Yeah, okay, I'm with you. I see many job adverts around to say network automation engineer, and then you look at the spec. They want a network engineer. And even before Network to Code, in interviews, they were looking for network automation engineer. And when I was speaking with them, I said, oh, I need you to do like 50% of network operation. They say, I cannot do that because otherwise I cannot make, I cannot do automation. And they were struggling to understand why. And then when I tried to explain them all these things, someone was actually surprising a big, big financial company. It was quite interesting in that topic. He wanted to talk with me again to learn a little bit more. While the other day I was saying, "This guy is talking crap. We always done networking this way in the past 20 or while from now on. I should just dedicate a new team. We'll sort it out." So I see there is a lot of… I mean, it's going to take some time to do this change, but it's going to happen at some point for sure.

Yeah, yeah, okay, okay. It's a, yeah, again, like a touch on that. It's gone from three years ago, if you're an engineer with Python, like customers would be really happy and that's the best skills out there. And now it's like, they need this, they need that, they need this, and networking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I would say 70 to 80, 70 people can now speak to looking for a job. One of the big things for them is network automation or network DevOps. And they want to move more into– kind of that area. Because you've been with Network to Code for some time now, it seems like you're really enjoying it. What does the future hold for you, do you think? Where do you see yourself personally in our five years or so?

Well, okay. Network to Code is a great place for it to be. And yeah, I don't see, at the moment, I can't see any better company to work with. So for sure, I see myself again in this company. I would like to be more focused on the technical bits. Again, there is a lot of human interaction I was talking before, which is good to have, but I realized since I joined Network to Code, there is tons of things to learn that I didn't even know. They were there. So it makes me so excited that I would love to see myself like full-time dedicated learning and apply those bits if you think about coding. You can be the piece of software with the basic logic, but you can have the same code with a more complex or reliable structure code. So it's a more senior way to do your work. So that's the way I'm looking for. And while I'm just doing this, I look for an area of improvement around network automation work. Sometimes I see Maybe there are not some tools needed. For example, they're missing some library that can be useful for data parsing or IP related things. So I say, "Okay, nobody developed this library. Let me do it open source." So like I was saying at the beginning, so brown fields, there are a lot of things that need to be built and developed. Ultimately share with the community.

Yeah, yeah. OK. We sense and you sound in the Netherlands, or are you moving around.

Well, that's good things that work remotely that can be working well as long as I have internet connection. Yeah, very true. We're in Europe. It's a very place where to be, despite what is happening right now. But every country has a different culture, different mindset. It's like you jump in a completely different world whenever you move. And yeah, we would really love to keep moving and explore as much as we can around it.

I personally never lived abroad so I really respect that. That's a wrap on the main part of the podcast. The last part here is the quickfire round. She's got a handful of questions here. It's called quickfire. You can go in as much or as little as you wish. What was your first job? NetOps. Oh no, sorry, the first ever, sorry.

The first ever I was working a pizzeria, I was making pizza. Something remain, something remain because every Friday I'm gonna make pizza and my wife is very strict about the way I'm gonna make it because it's to be done properly blah blah blah so it's something to keep chasing me.

It has a lifelong skill to be fair. In fact I'm not gonna cook so I envy you. When you think of success who would spring to mind?

Something to make you happy, make a job that makes you happy. Perfect.

If you could describe yourself using three adjectives, what would they be?

Okay, stubborn, curious, lazy, like I would say.

You're curiously lazy. What was your favourite subject when you were at school?

The easiest ones, so I believe gym class or something like that. The easiest.

Gym class, yeah.

Again, I was lazy. I didn't bother to study much, so whatever.

Yeah, I love it. What's the nerdiest piece of technology you've built?

Yeah, okay. A few years ago, I developed Ansible module called git_acp, which was one of the, in my opinion, most obvious missing piece in the DevOps pipeline. And since then I published that, it reached 100,000 downloads. So potentially 100,000 people downloaded that piece of work they're using right now. So that was very, make me happy say, okay, I made something that useful.

What is it doing

It's basically is commit, it does git commit and git push via Ansible. So Ansible you can pull, you have a module where you can pull from git, but you cannot save your work and push it back. So it was missing that bit. And everyone was doing with shell commands. I say, okay, I needed it for my projects, so I put things together and then I just publish it. And so I didn't expect that, but it looked like people were looking for that.

Interesting. That's pretty cool. It must be quite fulfilling to do something like that as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's great. It's working fine because I see. No issues people raise doesn't raise issues or things like that. So if there would be some bugs, I was expecting people to raise if issues things like that.

That's everything today, Federico, I really appreciate your time. One thing that would be great to understand if anybody had any questions or if they wanted to reach out, what would be the best place to reach you?

Yeah, sure. I'm on LinkedIn and then I have a Medium. I have post my blogs, whatever ideas or experiences shared there. And sometimes again, in Network to Code blog, I post something there, but yeah, if one chat with me, you can reach me on LinkedIn in the screen.

Perfect, I'll leave them in the show notes as well. So if anyone wants to have a read of the blog, they can go from there and we'll catch up soon.

Thank you very much. Thank you.