The Network Automation Journey

What should you learn? Python? Should you skip Ansible for Python? I discuss all of this in this episode.

Yeah, I think network automation is now just part of being a network administrator.

In this episode I talk about the concept of a tenant as it relates to network automation (and networking in general).

You're slammed, tickets piling up, deadlines slipping, you're barely keeping your head above water. And some Youtubers are telling you that you should automate? In this economy? I talk about the genuine issue of finding the time to learn, let alone implement, network automation in these trying times.

What would a replacement for Ansible look like? What do we want in a network automation platform that would replace Ansible?

In this episode I talk about the lack of commit/confirm in many of the NOS modules.

It's easy to be overwhelmed and see all these network automation tools and wonder... what is even the goal? The tools are there to help us achieve our goals, they're not the goal themselves and I talk about how you can pick which tools makes the most sense for you. Especially as it's easy to see all these new tools and methods and think that

In this episode I talk about my preference for generating a new config and replacing the entirety of the old config, every time, much like the Genesis Torpedo from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Adding things is easy, removing stuff is hard. It can be done, but it's just easier to wipe away what was there in lieu of "it's new matrix."

I don't like YANG for configuring devices (and I'm going to tell you allll about it).

More meetings, more committees, more reviews isn't going to deliver more reliable network changes. While a formalized process and policies for network changes is important, you hit a point of very diminishing returns: Doubling your meetings or committees or reviews isn't going to halve your error rate. It just adds friction to the process.

Today's topic is how automation has made choosing things like routing protocols very different than they were maybe 10 years ago.

In this episode I warn people about issues that have cropped up with the network automation modules/collections/roles that got broken with the new versions of Ansible (Ansible Community 12/Ansible-core 2.19)

In this longer episode, I share my thoughts on the term "Software Defined Networking" (SDN) and why it should be retired as a term.

In this episode, I talk of my love for YAML as a tool for network automation.

Here I talk about declarative vs imperative approaches to network automation.

In this episode I talk about my thoughts on using OpenConfig versus managing the device in a more native way.

In this episode I talk about the pitfall of throwing too many new things at once to someone who's just learning network automation. Keeping it simple and using a layered approach is what I've found to be the best way to introduce network automation to new people.

In the software development world, they have a concept called "test driven development", whereby code is tested (unit tests, integration tests) before committing to the main branch and before deployment. We can take that concept and use it in the networking world, and to some extent we are, but there's more to go. The tools haven't quite caught up with the concepts, however, and...

What place does AI or Machine Learning have in network automation today, or even network operations in general? Writing Python scripts, playbooks, etc. Not much more. At least for now.

In this episode, I talk about what CI/CD is for networking automation as well as the general idea for what is in the developer world. And more importantly, I talk about how most organizations probably don't need full CI/CD, they can get a lot of benefits from network automation by adopting three practices (that are part of CI/CD, but alone aren't CI/CD): Configuration generation Automated config d...

There's marketing terms, and then there's words that accurately describe a new way of doing things. Cloud computing was one of these terms, and now "Network as Code", "Network Automation", or the older "Software Defined Networking", while they can be used a marketing fluff, they do represent a different way of doing things.

In this episode I talk about the two main categories of APIs you're likely to run into as a network administrator: REST APIs and RPCs (XML-RPC, JSON-RPC, gRPC, etc.) and why a device might have one or another.

How is network automation and packing parachute similar? They're both intimidating, and they both involve a learning curve. On the other side of the learning curve/hump, it's pretty nice.

In this episode, I share my thoughts on what constitutes a network controller. Back in the early 2010s, it was thought to be the way devices had their forwarding tables configured. Now it's how a devices configuration state is configured.

What was automation like in the past? Well, it was mostly non-existent in most of the networking world. But we did do automation in the server world, but it was quite different than it is today.