WHY NAF? WHY NOW?
If you’re reading this post, I’m sure you’ve seen this pretty clearly on front page of the NAF website:
We’ve been talking about Network Automation for a long time: 15 years or longer. Yet, it’s just not taking off like we thought it would. NAF aims to answer the question: Why is this?
The simplest answer to “Why NAF?” is this: Chris and I both see huge potential in network automation and want to help get things unstuck. The best way I can address this is by sharing my network automation journey, why we’re posing this question, and the formation of the NAF.
I’ve been interested in the benefits of automation since college. As an undergrad studying Industrial Engineering (IE), I received a great introduction to general engineering and process design fundamentals, human factors in the interaction of humans with machine systems, and particular focus on advances in manufacturing automation.
Several college projects introduced me to networking and I was quickly bitten by the networking bug. Post-college, I stepped right into the commercial take-off of the Internet, and I sought out networking projects and then networking roles. I learned how to screen scrape CLI output and process that output with grep and sed and even - dare I admit this - SPREADSHEETS. Baby steps in network automation for sure.
I eventually ran into Jeremy Schulman, a friend and fellow member of the NAF Advisory Board. I had the joy and privilege of working with Jeremy at Juniper Networks, where Juniper was doing some interesting work in making JUNOS more compatible with automation constructs. Jeremy was getting very interested in the value of network automation and made a career out of it. I can’t claim any contribution here; I was lucky enough to be close by, hear the passion with which he spoke about network automation, and watch him create a career out of it. This all convinced me that network automation was critical to network operations and I needed to understand it better.
Here in 2023, Chris and I have been working independently on networking projects and problems for a long time. In that time, we never ran into each other, and I finally became aware of him through his survey on the state of network automation; once I saw that, I knew I had to talk with him about it. You can see Chris’s excellent readout of that survey at NANOG 88 here.
Note from Chris: “I’ll be writing more about my personal history with network automation and the motivations behind my work helping to make NAF and AutoCon a reality, soon. Watch this space, as they say.”
Chris and I finally connected, had just a brief conversation, agreed pretty quickly that things are not moving as fast as we thought they should, and we basically said: hey, do you want to do something about it? We didn’t need to ask permission. So we “just did it,” and hence, the NAF was born.
Back to the questions: Why NAF? We see great potential in network automation to both (1) make networks better and (2) make the lives of network engineers better. There’s definitely friction in the adoption of network automation, so we want to create community to determine why this is and accelerate the use of network automation.
There are specific things that we think the NAF community can accomplish, including but not limited to:
Put laser focus on network automation as a discipline and growing set of tools and tech
Help each other by sharing our stories and what works
Address concerns about the impact of automation in networking
Enable each other to learn new skills to thrive in the next generation of network automation
Address business case issues for network automation
Develop best practices
Learn from our tech siblings in Cloud Architecture and Engineering, use what makes sense from that arena, and adapt where networking is different
Investigate and encourage development of emerging tools (including AI, the relative abundance of and easy access to cloud compute, multi-cloud networking, and more)
And Why now? Simply, Because It’s Time. There is no time like the present. In one sense, there is a degree to which things are stuck in network automation. However, there are many organizations that are doing great work and developing new tools and methods - we all need to hear about them and learn from them. These developments show promise to create an inflection point in the utility of network automation. Bringing people together to see what’s happening can only help accelerate the adoption of network automation.
Finally, why YOU? Well, this only works as a community effort. And if you’ve read this far, we know you’re interested in helping too. We’ve been so encouraged at the response from the community over the last 6-8 weeks. We’re looking forward to an incredible event - AutoCon 0 - and we hope you can be there.
Do you want to present your ideas that can help others? Submit them here: https://networkautomation.forum/call-for-speakers
Are you in a position to give back to the community through sponsorship? Please indicate your interest here: https://networkautomation.forum/call-for-sponsors
(THANK YOU to our growing list of sponsors so far!)
Ready to attend? Register for AutoCon 0 here: https://networkautomation.forum/eventinfo/#register
And don’t forget to sign up for NAF updates: https://networkautomation.forum/home/#list
Join us in this!
We don’t have all the good ideas - no one person does. But together, we can accelerate what’s happening in network automation. That’s what NAF is for. Let’s get it started now.
