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Well, after writing a post nearly 8 months ago expressing my interest, I was actually able to attend this year’s AutoCon in Denver! I had a blast, and it was one of the most memorable experiences I’ve had in my professional career. There’s just something special about getting to nerd out with other people who work with the same technology you do.

I’ll try to keep it brief – if you’ve found this post, you’ve likely read 100 other reactionary posts on the socials with a similar sentiment. The network automation community is growing, and it’s pretty obvious when you look at the conference attendance which sold out at 500 seats. I wrote down some thoughts while I was waiting in the airport and wanted to regurgitate them in a slightly more thought-out fashion below:

The planning and execution of the conference was great, with the only exception being the BoF sessions (more below). I was able to check the program schedule throughout the week on the NAF website and there were no major delays. The hotel/caterer managing the breakfast and lunches knew what they were doing, and the meals were delicious and there were no obvious hiccups there. Starbucks coffee was the real downfall for me personally, but that was easily remedied with a quick walk offsite to a nearby coffee house.

It’s hard to not be subjective when giving feedback about the speakers and their content, but overall, I thought the talks and discussions were mostly interesting. There were some great examples of small(er) teams building some new and leveraging some existing solutions to solve their issues. The Kwik Trip team partnered with Nautobot to develop a custom solution for deploying new Meraki gear to their stores. There was a team from Southern California Edison who developed their own custom, inhouse solution for upgrading network gear out in the rugged environment they operate in. That ended up being my favorite talk because we all got to see their progress from a minimum viable product to a more polished version that they still run today. I was hoping the slide deck would have hit the NAF GitHub already, but alas, I’m still not seeing it. Link to slides

I’m happy I was able to attend both events in the evening – the NetBox & Friends mixer and the USNUA event. I’m an introvert and was attending this conference by myself, so it took quite a bit of willpower not to just hang in the hotel room after the main event and avoid these optional social gatherings. Having said that, I did get to meet some pretty cool people and shared some war stories.

Obligatory reference to AI…. *sigh*

AI was a topic amongst multiple speakers, and I thought it worked for some and not for others. I won’t name any one specifically, but there was one talk which highlighted an internally developed application which had natural language processing. Now, on one hand, it was extremely cool that you could interact with this system using normal language and have it spit out relevant information, graphs, data, etc. On the other hand, I found myself questioning the ROI. Like, did they not have a proper monitoring system in place which would alert them to these issues in real-time? How often would people really need to ask these questions? At the end of the day, it felt a little snooty to be showing off an application which was clearly so far out of the realm of possibility for most teams, that it was all lost on me.

There was however a really good talk on AI which explained some OSS projects which could be downloaded today (even on your laptop). Coming from someone who has yet to sign up for any free or paid chatbot products today, I found this to be far more approachable and would like to play around with it soon. Look for Phil Gervasi’s slides when the NAF GitHub is updated because that’s the talk I’m referencing here.

I’ve got plenty of great resources to check out in the coming months, and I look forward to continuing to participate in all the communities that surround the world of network automation. Though we’ll never see vendors converge on an automation standard, we can continue to build our own solutions and share them with the community.

Keep on automating

That time when we all reflect on what we accomplished (or didn’t) this past year. That time when we scramble to spend the last of the budget, or plan out which vendors will get the projects for 2024 and which we’ll try to start winding services down without them noticing so we don’t cause panic and awkward virtual meetings. That time when accounting is pressing us (emails, Teams messages, beacons in the sky, a shady guy showing up at your house…) to get our invoices coded before the office shuts down. I may be exaggerating just a little :).

Maybe it’s that time of the year where the ground starts freezing and that telco circuit we’ve been trying to bring in for that site out in BFE is now completely postponed until spring, and we’re forced to figure out which 5G provider has the best coverage in the area. It could also be that time of the year where we need to stand up a new VPN tunnel with a vendor we haven’t spoken to in 2 years, and they’ve possibly outsourced their IT team who is now on their own holiday and won’t get around to responding until the middle of January.

It could also be that time of the year where we finally have enough of a maintenance window to take down that Nexus and upgrade the firmware. Of course, we could be spending time with our family like the rest of the company, but instead we get to spend some quality time with a case of red bull and the work from home office we setup during the height of the pandemic that’s become an extension of our personal space. If we’ve been good this year, the network gods will allow to upgrade to complete without issue and we’ll fall asleep in that Aeron chair we picked up from that sketchy guy on Craigslist who had an entire garage full of them. Who are we kidding though, the upgrade will stall halfway through, and our anxiety will take over. We’ll start the drive into the office with our spouses angerly cursing us out the door only to get a Zabbix email notification that the switch is now online as we pull into the parking lot.

Whatever time of year it is for you, I hope that you are able to spend some time with the people you love most, and not the constant hum from 3 racks of network gear.

Image generated using Microsoft Copilot.