Heavy Networking > Ep. 528 | July 10, 2020
Heavy Networking 528: If Automation Is So Great, Why Aren’t More Networks Automated? (Sponsored)
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Ethan
Banks
Drew
Conry-Murray
Greg
Ferro
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The tech industry talks a lot about automation, but widespread adoption is slow. On today’s Heavy Networking episode, sponsored by Cisco, we discuss reasons why automation isn’t more pervasive, particularly in networking, and look at issues such as source of truth, getting state information, the need for orchestration, and user trust.
We also examine technology and organizational challenges, process issues, and the lack of investment in tooling and training that may be holding back adoption.
Our guests are Omar Sultan, Leader, Product Management at Cisco; and Kevin Corbin, Sr. Solutions Engineer at HashiCorp.
We discuss:
- The evolution of automation tooling from servers to the network
- The critical need to invest in training and education
- Crossing a trust threshold with automation
- What enterprises can learn from home automation
- How to get from where you are to where you want to be
- More
Show Links:
Cisco Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) – Cisco
NSO (Network Services Orchestrator) – Cisco DevNet
Network Automation Delivery Model – Cisco
The Zen of Orchestration and Automation – Cisco Live
HashiCorp Learn – HashiCorp
Unlocking the Cloud Operating Model – HashiCorp
IP Addresses Are Cattle – Medium
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I find it remarkable that even after years of so much pitching on automation/aiops/devops/iac/self-driving etc. and relatively low penetration of automation in, at least, dynamic infrastructure environments we rarely see (or discuss) any value from NOT doing automation. As if we won’t get a job in AWS if we dare to talk about it 🙂
These tweets give an interesting perspective imho
“If you’re in a stage where you need a high degree of agility (as opposed to just keeping the lights on, and reduce operational costs), then excessive automation is often net harmful.
You don’t have to automate everything just because everyone else thinks it’s the “best practice”!
Automation is a mechanism to improve efficiency, NOT quality. That’s why we consider handmade as higher quality than machine-made.”
“Rules make it harder to enact change. Automation is essentially a set of rules.”
As always with any technology, the dependencies are what matter the most. The environments that have the worst handle on their dependencies are the same ones that would benefit the most from automation. The other big issue is many people working in tech are more concerned about maintaining their job security than doing what is right.
I guess my point is that there are also tradeoffs in the “manual vs automation” discussion but we hear nothing in favor of manual (exploratory testing, reaction to unforeseen events, flexibility to customize) when it comes to networks.
Imho the lack of real life experience and the specific agenda of conferences and bloggers plays a big role in making “all things automation” a boring buzzword