Navigating Automata Without a Map

 

Navigating Automata Without a Map

David Gee

Ahoy mateys. Network automation is burning on as the hot topic and this talk will go into self-driving, self-healing and auto-remediation in light of current automation trends and tooling. If network engineers are pirates, then bad times are afoot as the map is missing. For the evolving journey of humans handing over the drudgery of repetitious and mundane work to automation, we must find a way of navigating the seas of operational hell. This talk will discuss the problem at large, the mindset and the output of some novel work carried out last year year in the name of becoming a network automation cartographer. You can expect frustration, disbelief and the glowing view of treasure, as the work begins to deliver on its mission. Technically, this is based on a network operating system with a data store (NETCONF & YANG driven), Terraform, a graph database and lots of experimental code. What I can promise is 30 minutes of not Ansible or Python. This talk is a modified version of the Irish Network Operator Group (iNOG) 14 session and was titled "Automation without a map".

Navigating Automata Without a Map (pdf)

Watch the NANOG 81 Playlist