Why haven’t we seen full adoption of network automation, yet?
I’m glad you asked Network Automation Forum 🙂
I should probably start by letting you know a few things about my background, and why it occurs to me that the discussions related to network automation probably haven’t included comments from my perspective (which of course drives my thought processes). My background, while with extensive hands-on IT experience, has largely been influenced by managing IT Operations and managing IT personnel.
I have seen “network automation” unfold over the course of my career starting with network automation with Perl, Expect, and bash scripts to today's more modern options. I’ve watched these efforts in the workplace and I hear a lot about it at home!
With that in mind, let me answer the question.
Network Automation is just a piece of the engine
I tend to look at IT methodologies/approaches as items in a carpenters tool belt. There tend to be lots of them, and some are used far more frequently than others, but the carpenter uses the “right tool for the job”. Carpenters tend to use “old reliable” because it works well for most of the jobs and they are comfortable with it. New tools are interesting, but need to be proven in action and require training, effort, and funding before possibly becoming the “go to” tool or making a meaningful impact.
What is it this time?
Can someone please articulate what network automation actually is in today's environment? I have heard numerous versions, sometimes competing. What is the intent of network automation and what is its' role supposed to be? Is it DevOps? What IS DevOps?
Ambiguity slows down forward progress and tends to get in the way of answering the key questions.
We are asking the wrong questions
The following are questions that I would like to see asked for every new approach/methodology (AKA - the latest “gizmo”):
What is it?
Why do we need it (this is a personal favorite - what problem are we solving?)
How do I roll it out and support it?
We always need automation, but we seem to have missed some of the basic steps of introducing it to the user community.
This includes network engineers, Ops folks, funding sources, and corporate management among others.
Over the next few weeks we will be chatting in more depth on these and some other topics - looking forward to chatting with you and exchanging ideas and opinions.
It probably won't hurt to have a management perspective added to the discussion!
