The setup

This post is written as the echo of the Autocon3 conference in Prague fades away and right after the GRNOG18 conference (GRNOG – Greek Network Operators Group) in Athens.

This time we ‘ll deal with some hard questions.. We are going to ask and discuss about a lot of “Why”s. Mainly the “why” that drive us. I will be avoiding full names as much as possible, using mostly initials for some of my references, as I want to focus on the questions rather than the actual people referenced (I also want to avoid offending anyone as well).

Last year, exactly one year and a month ago, I wrote and published a blog post to do a recount for Autocon1, the second conference organized by the Network Automation Forum, around Network Automation and the progress about adopting its principles and the tooling and methods available.

Btw, be warned and beware, my alter ego is coming back for this.
– So now you want me here? Why not last year? And you want to ask “why”? Well I got this for you: Why am I here?
Well, last year the blog post wasn’t in question form and for this time I thought it might be helpful and more fun to do it like a discussion again, to lighten up the mood. Google does it with NotebookLM! Besides people are usually bored of monologues..
– I am bored already ..
Hey, that’s not nice!
– I am not real.
Fair.. Instead of acting like a wounded Gollum then, maybe shut up and help?
– Oh, and that’s nice?
You ‘re not real.
– Fair..

Summarizations vs Beginnings

I hate summarizations. They “reduce” what has transpired to a much smaller version, supposedly easier to convey (that’s probably why I end up writing such long emails and blog posts, sorry N.K. ..).
Summarizations always tend to leave out important information, especially things that are difficult to be put into words, like “how did you feel“, “what did all this made you think about“, “where did that lead you“, etc. But let’s start at the beginning, shall we?

Autocon1 in Amsterdam was the second conference, with Autocon0 in Denver being the first. In the talks and discussion during Autocon1, it was made clear, to me at least, that after remarks and evaluations that expressed the opinion that the talks in Autocon0 were too technical (although there were people who disagreed on that judgement), the ones that made the cut for Autocon1 were the ones that kept the technical depth to a moderate level, concentrating on other things in that process, whether on purpose or involuntarily. If we absolutely must “summarize”, I would say Autocon0 was about tools and methods, while Autocon1 was about culture and approaches.

– You mean that you all got together and talked about your feelings?

Be nice.. Not exactly, there’s always technical context, it’s about Network Automation after all, but there was a lot of discussion about what made a team healthy, how we can approach things on an organizational level, how we can approach the maturity of projects like a space mission.. Look, why don’t you just go back and read the blog post about last year’s event? I basically talked about Frustration and Faith.

– Yeah, yeah, “you must have faith Lieutenant Valeris!“…

Yes, “that the universe will unfold as it should”. See, you do remember..

– And how is that working for you? Has it? Unfolded as it should have?

Well, not exactly, but the principle stands if you look at the big picture, I ‘ll tell you more on that later.

– Wow, very hard for you to be wrong in such terms.. Ok, so what were Autocon2 and Autocon3 about then?

Let’s not get lost here (also drop the irony please). I can’t know for sure about Autocon2, as I wasn’t there in person, but for now let’s say that for me at least, this year’s event (Autocon3) was a wonderful experience. If Autocon1 felt like a tribal gathering, Autocon3 felt more like a gathering of mages (I still want that t-shirt Scott!)..

– What made it so good ?

Reuniting with friends and ‘my tribe‘ again I guess, the feeling of understanding and acceptance, a beautiful scenery in the old city of Prague (and the beer!!!). I felt welcome right from the start, as I was getting such messages even before I got there.

Also, this year I brought a colleague and close friend of mine with me, I.Z., from the systems side of things, who has long shared with me the thirst for learning new ways to make our lives better, enriching our operations with automation.

To add to that, a small team from our merry group of the Greek Network Automation group (NetAutoGr) had slipped undetected like network automation ninjas among the conference crowd. This way we got together in another country for the first time, while attending a Network Automation Conference (group t-shirts next time people)! And finally, I was able to meet more people in person, some that I already knew and communicated from afar, and others that I met for the first time but bonded well almost immediately.

I also got great leads either from presentations or from just talking with others in the common room (not the hallway), that will keep me busy in the next weeks or months that follow.

I was able, for three days, to focus on the technical area I like most and let my mind run free in it. It left a great taste that lasted for weeks after that. I couldn’t ask for more from such an event.

– And how did others feel about it?

While you are there and still under the “influence” it’s hard to notice anything else than the effect that it has on you. There were a lot of people sharing that joy of being reunited again, of belonging and sharing. We picked up on things from last year or conversations than had spun up as a result of Autocon1, whether that was about collaboration and access to resources or new tools and technologies. There were also some people who were there for the first time, and had made a real effort to be there, traveling across the world to be there from the country of origin, like Australia or Nepal (!!!). Some had incredible stories to share. All very inspiring.

– Is that all?

No. There was something more, hard to perceive at first, but as I engaged more and more in conversations, I realized that I had a feeling of hearing the same ideas and plans between them but different people were participating each time. I heard people talking about orchestration, workflows and overlays again and again, but it wasn’t just the ‘buzz’ words.. The approaches and trains of thought were similar.. It was a feeling so strange that I had to verify with everyone that we didn’t have that conversation before.. There were even people already working on similar projects on those!

The Singularity

It felt like there was a common way of thinking, slowly evolving in the background (a singularity, Ethan?) I began giving it a name in my conversations, I called it the “Collective Mind”. To my surprise, a few others were already using that term privately in their own thoughts.

And I know there are efforts already in place that we get a common reference language but also a common reference model for this community. I strongly believe that, while those efforts are made by specific people towards a specific goal and will indeed eventually bear significant fruit, at the same time, by forming this community, “for practitioners by practitioners“, as Chris Grundermann called it in the video probably a few minutes before Autocon3 started, a “hive” is formed in the background where “kindred intellects” act collectively like neurons, each “firing” to provide others with “input“, so that they can in turn fire and provide input to others. In this way, perhaps an Artificial Intelligence is indeed on the way of being formed, enabled by technology in communications, but in this case with its core elements being entirely organic. Although initially perceived perhaps as a shared EI (emotional intelligence – I hate the term), the “collective mind” seems to be forming pathways and directions, quietly turning the ship we all seem to be traveling on. I think we may have actually gone further than forming “common knowledge” (Network Automation Nerds podcast, Eric Chou host, Chris Grundermann guest, 39:46 – 41:36)

– So the beer was that good ?

Very funny.. I guess a lot of people will not take this seriously, thinking about the Borg, the Zerg and other such examples of collective minds, all evil too… I never talked about loss of singular identity, I am actually thinking about collective individual contribution with everyone subconsciously participating in a common ‘organism’.
It wasn’t the beer, although a little bit of good beer can help with communication, that’s true. And it has helped, but mostly in social events happening in the evenings, outside of the conference space (fine, maybe even at the happy hour inside the conference grounds a few times, mostly late in the afternoons). During the conference, the ones building up atmosphere were the participants communicating with each other. There was however another prevailing thought, expressed during the last day of the conference mostly, that gave some people pause.

– Hmm sounds serious.. Clouds in the horizon?

Not necessarily. Just a healthy reaction I think. With the conference participants number increasing every time and this being the 4rth one, it’s only natural to think about what the next step should be. The most prevailing thought I heard was about separate tracks. How do we receive newcomers, whether that refers to the conference or the network automation space, while at the same time keeping it interesting for seasoned and well trained participants? Keeping the balance, where people will still feel as part of the same group while participating at separate tracks, is perhaps hard but not impossible. I guess that is a normal stage in the evolution of a community, and it can be a known issue: How to keep people going in a community, maintaining momentum while also growing together. I didn’t think much of it at that point, but I came back to it later, as I got more input on how some people felt about the conference.

– Later? What happened later?

In the first few days after the conference I was very much still in the same haze, in the same good mood. I was even able to prolong that a bit as I had the chance to meet again with a new found friend, Basem Al-Sabri, in Athens this time. We had a great talk about his journey, creating a career and starting a company around network automation, answering the call for finding solutions in real use cases in our industry, using what works best in each scenario and not necessarily the shiny new thing that everyone talks about. I came back to that moment mentally in the following weeks.

As that week ended as well, I dove head first into work and nurtured the expectation of the next community event, the summer semi annual occurrence of the GRNOG gathering.

Different Day / Different Community – 10 years GRNOG

On the 20th of June the 18th occurrence of the GRNOG conference took place. The Greek Networking Operators Group is exactly what the name implies. Its members are engineers who carry a networking role and who vary a lot in age range and professional experience. It’s a rather small conference, its latest gatherings had a headcount of a little more than a hundred people, while the group itself has almost 500 members.

At each gathering, there are presentations either from the Greek networking space or from attendees from abroad, again either Greek or Foreign nationals that come in person to share their views and stories or connect remotely and present to the live audience. The presentations are also streamed live so the rest of the members not attending locally can watch them in real-time.

The content can also vary and can be about pure networking, networking services, security, etc but in the last few gatherings, a few network automation themed presentations have been delivered. Some of those speakers are well known in the automation community (Greek and International), as my friend and co-conspirator in NetAutoGR N.K., but sometimes there are others who take the stand, less engaged in the community or relatively ‘newcomers‘ in the network automation field.

– Right.. newcomers.. are you the old-timer in this scenario?

I never said I am wise (I am not), but the age part is easier to prove, so perhaps, yes. I have also been practicing automation (without calling it that and outside of a community for the largest part) since 2006, so I guess you can say that.

– And young people can be annoying, right?

Fine, make fun if you want. Yes, young people are sometimes annoying, but they also bring energy and drive, so we need them too, as we need everyone in the community. But I think you did hit a nerve there, so let’s get to it. One of the presentations was about Ansible vs Nornir, which will of course make all of us “old-timers” smile, right? I mean it’s now a well known, almost exhausted topic, it was a popular joke last year in Autocon1, mentioned in so many presentations. Even this year there were jokes about it inside conference presentations (the old “skeleton on a bench, waiting for an ansible playbook to finish” reference). For me, the oldest funny reference I can remember is Silvia Spiva (now Silvia Lee-Guard, at the time Senior Social Media Manager for Cisco Devnet) putting up the question in a live broadcast about ‘how we can solve a problem with Ansible‘ and Dmitry Figol replied without a care in the world “Easy, uninstall Ansible, problem solved..” to which Silvia responded with a “Dmitry.. ” and a sigh.. (Dmitry helped me a lot in understanding Nornir back in the day, as did Nicolas Russo who showed me how to use of ipdb with it, although he never admitted it in public).

– Go on old-timer, tell me about those youngsters..

Yeah, so a young network engineer from a substantial national-level education organization made a presentation at the GRNOG event about Ansible vs Nornir and how their team compared the two and chose one over the other (Nornir of course) along with a technical description of practices and use cases they have applied to migrate from one tool to the other, in other words a big success story. Let me be clear: It’s not hard for a somewhat experienced engineer (or an old-timer like me) to understand the real size of the work behind what they did, how deep and how wide they went, especially since they used the tools for configuring the network, which is inherently potentially dangerous, along with the fact that they had already implemented a pipeline around Ansible .

But the presentation did not do justice to that work, the info was there but the components were not fully showcased, and the reasons why they chose each component were not really discussed. Also a large percentage of the hard work that was done (for example combining data from their SoT with “static files” to create the configs), was not presented at all and a big part of their tooling architecture remained hidden, perhaps purposefully obscured or just for lack of presentation time. I saw tool icons on slides that were never referenced, for example, Gitlab. Why did they choose it and how did they use it? Was it used for code version control? Was it used to hold the “static files” for the configs? Was it used to host and run the “pipeline”? I don’t know and neither will anyone who witnessed it. I posed a question about whether they had thought about providing an easy way, a platform for their engineers to consume the automation they produced, and the response was that they run their scripts from their own workstations with their particular linux distributions for each engineer. So lack of uniformity perhaps, but is the code at least synchronized to a central point and is there version control? Again no info.

– I don’t understand.. From all the presentations that were delivered, why are you talking about this one in particular (except from the being old and grumpy part)?

(…) Mainly because it had a similar subject to a presentation delivered a few days earlier at Autocon3 (the video is linked above) and that provided a big contrast for it, which led to discussion and conclusions drawn, but follow along for now, I will reference it again later. An easy answer is, I had ‘great expectations‘ from something like this.

– The “later”s are silently forming a queue back there..

(…) Back to the team presenting at GRNOG, it was obvious they had put a lot of effort in this, they had significant benefit from those efforts, they had also tried to bring everyone in and up to the required level by getting access to a Nornir course, but had probably ran against a wall trying to get seasoned engineers to contribute or use their scripts. Now that’s something that a platform used for consuming Network Automation could solve easily (unless some of the users are also just old and grumpy too).

There were also minor mistakes in the slides, but I don’t really want to cut into those. I will comment however that the lack of info about the tools and methods available for choice, made it hard to provide a basis for discussion and comparison, as what seems to be hard with one tool can perhaps be solved with the use of another. Why stop the comparison at Ansible and Nornir? Why not justify all your choices? For example, with Nautobot you can use the Golden Config app which can help you do all those things about the configs, integrating data and rendering configs, as well as running backups, config compliance tasks and remediation plans. Nautobot uses jobs, so you know.. automation from within your SoT platform, providing the capability to correlate models and objects internally that would otherwise require multiple external endpoint requests and lookups (using a REST API for example or even an external sdk). And if you want to extend those capabilities, you can also develop your own apps from scratch or on top of existing ones, such as Dwayne Camacho‘s freshly baked app, Nautobot Auto Provisioner, inspired be the 100DaysofNautobot Challenge.

In fact, right after that, my friend N.K. gave an incredibly fluid and amazingly inspiring presentation about using Nautobot along with NUTS, the Network Unit Testing System, to spin up a “digital twin” topology using Containerlab (launched from within Nautobot!), building a framework for configuration validation. I expected the crowd to go wild, but although there was a great deal of applause, that didn’t exactly happen. Which surprised me, not only because even just the successful integration of all those components in one platform and using them in a live presentation is a very hard task to accomplish, or because the essence of the presentation was right at the edge of what is currently being discussed as one of the biggest targets with Network Automation (using a network digital twin for testing). But also because I knew that this content had been a full blown, very successful and extremely well received workshop during Autocon3, as I also knew what was working under the hood, in part Nornir and the Golden Config app, doing some of the tasks described earlier but this time performed live with the job logs being shown on screen..

I realized both from this but also from subsequent conversations, that this is a totally different community and despite its long course in the “pure” networking space, in the network automation space it is still in its early stages of maturity.

To be fair, I have to admit that I am still a little biased with Nautobot, having chosen it myself for our own SoT implementation years ago (especially for such reasons, well detailed in previous posts), but if we were talking about different features or capabilities I would probably reference a different tool, as in this point in time (years later), each tool has its own virtues. The point I am trying to make here is that judging from the content of the first presentation, there was probably a loose relationship of the team in this case with the international community for Network Automation. Which can be OK but in my opinion it’s is a course that requires correction. Another good thing being in close relationship with the international network automation community can help with, is that you can get to be very humble very fast.

– You don’t really sound pissed though, which seems surprising for your old age and composure, you almost seem to like the young man, I mean .. the engineer..

Yeah of course! They did a great deal of work, although they underplayed it by a great deal with their presentation (you really can’t blame them for ‘bragging‘ there, it wasn’t at all like that), and proceeded with sharing it, providing an example among their peers for others to follow. Which can be a great community value. They also mentioned going to Autocon this year and confirming that others had migrated to Nornir as well. Hats off there as well.

– But… (there’s always a but there..)

I talked to the engineer later on, mentioned that we had both been in Autocon3 this year but hadn’t spoken during the event. His comment was that he didn’t like the presentations there, as it was “too much of the same thing again and again“. I was a bit confused at that point, and asked if he had been there last year to which he said ‘no’. I didn’t understand the comparison or the comment very well at that point, so I responded that the presentations did not have the same style or direction last year and politely removed myself. After some thought, I guess he probably meant that what presentations he saw, he made them out to be about the same kind of thing (that didn’t help my confusion at that point either, as they clearly weren’t). This confusion was the starting point for what followed.

Later on, during one of the final breaks before the event was over, I was having a beer with some of our fellow NetAutoGr members in the external space, facing the water. So I mentioned what had transpired earlier and N.K. responded “well, I also didn’t like some of the presentations either except ‘this’ and ‘that’ and ‘that’ .. ” (a few were eventually mentioned and I know for a fact that he didn’t watch all of them so if you were a presenter, don’t see too much in this, stick to the subject and follow along, post conference surveys and blogs are done for a reason, read those). I said “well I didn’t like some either and I did enjoy others, but we don’t really go to these conferences for the presentations, do we?”.

– We don’t??

No, we don’t. For people that haven’t been to many conferences as large as Cisco Live for example, this can be confusing. But in such a large conference, it becomes crystal clear very soon. You get over very fast the fact that you can’t possibly watch every presentation (even from the recordings that are published in the course of the year), nor every presentation is of the same interest or benefit to you. The real benefit comes from the interactions and meetings in between the presentations and perhaps in some degree labs and workshops (you can always find those later). Conferences are fora (plural for forum, not a spelling error) and the presentations are openings, opportunities for discussion and substantial communication with your peers. That communication, which stays alive and helps the community evolve, continues after the conferences, in the online spaces created especially for those reasons.

For example Suhaib Saeed also gave a short presentation about Ansible vs Nornir in Autocon3, it was the presentation following the keynote and although one can argue that newcomers to the network automation conference may have found the content informative, to “old-timers” like me, this was more received as a celebration, a performance given by a very well formed and experienced Network Automation Engineer, who could have chosen a totally different level of a subject to present if he wanted to but this was chosen obviously on purpose both by him and the conference organizers. Like using a skilled performer with a known song to please the crowd and perhaps ease a migration to a different tune, I mean .. subject. You know.. to have fun!! Performance art!

– You are mentioning arts more and more often lately.. How did YOUR discussion go ?

So all this sparked a great conversation about the value of communities and how liberating it can be to be able to be one’s true self among others, no filters, the pure joy of being seen, heard and understood and provide the same for others, most of the time in a favorite context (Sure, automation. Why not?). Which in my opinion lays the “infrastructure” for some high level and high speed intercommunication of ideas, directions and mind blowing solutions to be deployed on, also leading to the forming of the “Collective Mind” I was talking about earlier..

– So admitting, again, that you were drinking beer, again, through all that..

Yes yes there was beer … Then that great conversation was officially moved to the grounds of the Peñarrubia Lounge, where the celebration for the 10 years of GRNOG took place, and the beers were quickly replaced with cocktails. Which also helped the conversation to move along. The main discussion was about origin stories for everyone involved. It helped a lot to understand how everyone had their own point of view and points of reference, their own origin.

I had a marvelous time but my mind wasn’t at ease, as it was still taking everything in and a big question was being formed in the back of my head, because of one thing my friend said that kept bothering me.

– What, what?? Spit it out already!!

As we were discussing whether some of the practices presented were common or less common and whether this or that component should have been used etc, he told me “Well, you know, for you network automation is more of a hobby“.

-A hobby?!!

Relax, I immediately understood what he meant, there was no disrespect (nor could there ever be between us, acceptance remember?). Keep in mind, this is a very experienced Network Automation Engineer. I asked whether he meant that what I had been doing in the past years in my environment was perhaps not always absolutely necessary to accomplish the tasks at hand at every moment. And yes, that was indeed what he was getting at, and he was both right and wrong at the same time. A short answer is it depends on what the focus is and what cost lies behind each choice. I know it’s cryptic but if you know you know and we need to focus on the discussion.

I had faced this question many times before, again and again, both inside my head and spoken out loud in conflicts within my team, but I will not get into that either. The fact remains that this notion touches a much bigger question in the Network Automation Field, which withstands the test of time:

– You don’t expect me to ask that question, I am hoping..

Oh what good are you.. here it is:

Why are we really doing/practicing/pursuing/developing/deploying Network Automation?

– This doesn’t sound new to me.. Hasn’t this question been tackled with before?

Of course, and it’s a burning one, but it’s often seen as a beginning to a selling point for Network Automation. Network Automation is not always the only choice but it’s often the best choice. There’s the usual discussion with problems and answers, pros and cons and then you decide of course that you should use Network Automation (sold!). And then there’s even a whole other discussion about whether a particular way of doing things (e.g. like using a group of scripts) is truly Network Automation or something different, like just making your daily life easier as an engineer, not an organized practice. In Autocon3 Claudia De Luna talked about Design First (requirements) in her keynote, Christian Adell also talked about Design-Driven Automation in his own presentation. Slim Hamouda, who also attended Autocon3, has been putting up some interesting takes on all that on his LinkedIn timeline. All that is great, but that’s not what I am talking about at all.

– No? What are you talking about?

Let me rephrase that.. Why are WE doing network automation?

– Did you expect someone else to do it? I am not following..

Obviously. You need to go deeper. Let’s go back. Back to the point where for the first time you came to a dilemma. You discover a new way, a new path less traveled, leading to innovation and creativity, which may prove to be rewarding in the end but may bring conflict and strain in your relationship with your current environment. You have already sensed the tension around you, you know you will face culture issues, so you may need to form alliances and teams within teams, pursue approval from your leadership etc. Sounds familiar?

– Well sort of.. You mentioned some of those things as topics discussed in your recount of Autocon1, right?

Forget about Network Automation for a minute. We are talking about a fundamental and existential choice, sometimes made at an early stage in one’s development. You have to choose about whether to channel your energy in a creative manner, challenging what’s considered normal even by your own standards or stay in the same path as everyone else around you, the path that you feel it presents no challenge for you at all, as it is considered the ‘normal’ one, although you know that it’s not ‘normal’ for you. What do you choose and more importantly WHY do you choose it?

-Oh! THAT why.. WHY are we doing this…

YES! THAT why! The one that drives you! Where you realize that you absolutely have to do this, you need to choose this path, you simply have no other choice. The actual deeper reasons may vary for each one. Sometimes you get to understand exactly what those were, perhaps at a later time. And if it does happen, it doesn’t happen at the same point and time for everyone. For me it was a winding path that came to a crossroads sometime around 2006. And I now realize that if I hadn’t not followed that path, if I hadn’t made that choice, I would be lost, traveling without a soul, surrendering to self-destructive sequences.
Eventually I went back to chatting with my friend, and after going back and forth for a while we concluded that we are both kind of romantics about our craft and that we are doing it “for the art of it” (internal joke).

– Ok, let me get this straight.. So you are saying you decided to plunge into Network Automation & Programmability and your “creative path”, sometimes dragging your environment and perhaps members of your team along with you, basically as a way for self-treating against your self-destructive tendencies (btw, shame on you for dragging your friend along with you)

Omg you are thick.. No! Of course I am not saying that! Every decision, every choice that affects your environment should always be carefully weighed and planned out. You need to put design first and provide rollback capabilities and.. It’s all been already said and written, go back to the links I have shared with you. The Network Automation practice should be structured and the community has already provided a lot of guidance in that direction.

What I meant and focused on before is that everyone has deeper reasons behind what is driving them on such a path. Their own personal fuel. And that these reasons should be sought out by each one for themselves, as it will most probably provide for peace of mind, stress-relief and a clearer vision.

Think about it. How come so many people who got into CS and Networking to avoid contact with other people, end up being part of huge communities? Why does Chris Grundermann make psychological and sociological references in his posts? How come Jeff Doyle was a double psychology and philosophy major in college and how has that helped in his career? Why does Phil Gervasi, who used to be an English teacher, urges everyone to ‘please be a teacher’? Why are all those things relevant to Networking and Network Automation?

For some people who are in this situation, perhaps more people than you think, the path for salvation goes through self acceptance and surrendering to their creative mind.

– So you think that Network Automation and Programmability is actually a path to creativity?

It can be! Why not? There’s certainly conception, there’s composition and even harmony. We also often talk about design and some also talk about the “art” of it.. But remember that I am talking about the drive, the fuel. Not the way you structure your approach.

– OK, that sounds a little better (although still cuckoo), and I think I understand a bit more about what you are getting at.

Better late then never.. In the process of writing this post, I have been randomly running into things that end up seeming relevant. Just this morning I was walking my dog and wanted to listen a bit about the latest changes coming with Grafana v12, but chose a distraction instead by watching a video about one of my favorite guitarists, Joe Satriani.

So funnily enough, in the video Joe talks about a similar dilemma he faced at some point where he realized he was being two people at the same time, one being the one that needs to be creative and follow his dream leading to the publishing of his first LP, while the other tries to stay on planet earth (pun intended) and do a normal daily musician’s job. He goes on to say how he also had a big problem with playing on stage and dealing with a lot of people. Again, this time on purpose, being two people at once, one trying to work a normal gig to ‘keep the lights on ‘ and the other following his dream, offered him stress-relief through his creative side. Finally he suggests that sometimes even just following or copying what others do, instead of desperately trying to be original, helps you to provide practice and experience in order to be more successful in reaching your own goals. There’s definitely more to it, watch the video (below).

In another recent occurrence I came across a different video, where the writer James Patterson, author of 61 #1 New York Time best-sellers, recounts he was also two people at once, as he kept working in advertising for years while writing those books, letting his passion free and providing stress-relief, a common point of reference that can explain so much for so many people. In both cases, these people went through parallel courses, being two people at once in order to follow their dream, not unlike many of us, trying to push for change and follow our vision, while the environment resists with inertia and tries to keep us at our current state, up until the moment we reach critical velocity.

So if you want to understand better how you can perhaps find balance in doing your everyday job and routine while also trying to develop a new practice/discipline/craft/art at the same time with Network Automation, I suggest that this time you try watching Joe while he talks and plays a bit below.

– Hey, wait a minute.. This is a sales video! He does talk about everything you said but in the end it’s about selling picks and strings and straps, etc.

Yes, of course, there’s always the practical angle. What have we been talking about? There’s a lot of basic psychology at work here, even spirituality sometimes among practitioners. Remember ‘network automation evangelists‘? There’s definitely faith involved here, just not of the religious type.

But there’s also the down to earth side, where some of us need to keep their day job, where projects need funding, where conferences need sponsors/vendors and where the world needs to keep turning. You don’t get to ride into the sunset with the love for Network Automation alone. You still need to be practical and fight your everyday battles, create alliances and also find a way to acknowledge positive initiatives, even when they sometimes come with a price tag. Visions are nice and necessary, but they also need to be viable and sustainable. How you connect to that and keep it going, what’s your compromise, is up to you. But it’s a common issue. It doesn’t make things less true or less magical.

– So what do we do now?

You need to be where people are

So many people have said this before, I am not being original here, I just believe in this with all my heart. Create conferences. Be with your peers. Find that stress relief. And listen to each other, even just on podcasts or slack/discord channels when it’s not possible to do it in person. Let’s expand that “collective mind“. We have gone so far already. Jason Edelman gave a great recount of the course we have made all these years in the closing Keynote for Autocon3. I was particularly moved by the reference to Nick Russo:

– But how do we deal with the fact that some themes seem to be repeating themselves? That some don’t always find enough technical interest or originality to what is being presented or shared? How do we keep everyone engaged?

I see a parallel course for the stages where the community finds itself when compared to the stages teams find themselves (check Claudia De Luna’s presentation from last year’s Autocon1). Let’s go back in thinking about the stages we find ourselves at and map them to approaches.

If we are at stage 1 and we get back to the “Start now”, “Jump or I ‘ll push you”, “Get the low hanging fruit first!” approaches, with this kind of demonstration of practices and applications we talked about before, we already established that it’s good, it works. A relatively small team of engineers gets together, learns and applies basic principles of network automation to make their lives easier, sometimes with leadership support. However is that still enough for everyone? Is everyone still at that stage in their mission? Or should we be trying to provide the ones around us with a different narrative?

John Howard, who by the way also presented at Autocon3, at a very recent open post Autcon3 chat he co-hosted with Bart Dorlandt, made a reference to a similar question, “should we keep our presentations in the same theme, like “Look what I did!” or should we strive for more to engage the community by showing how to approach things in a structured and strategic way in order to help people more?” (no recording there so just recounting from memory here, forgive me if I missed something crucial).

John is right. The first approaches are a good way to start. And providing support for those in the community is important because there will always be newcomers in the field, people who are now walking in the path we came from. However, we also need to be aware and expose some of the more structural approaches that try to build everything correctly from scratch and get what we can from those as well, while we also help guide others. While the first approaches will bring some success, some convincing power and ammunition to help us for the long-term approach, we do need to invest on the long-term approach itself as well. So at stage 2, start at the beginning, requirements, holistic approach, guidance (let’s go get that middle Eric!).

At the same time, in some cases, a deeper technical and detailed approach on some issues and areas will help both in keeping the experts among the community engaged and challenged and the rest to have something to look forward to but it will also provide an horizon for business applications (that’s where our bread is, what can we really do for business benefit). Some teams or individuals will find themselves at that level of focus (stage 3), where specialization and deep technical knowledge plays a great role and requires either full focus or even summoning external teams of experts to fill that spot and help the local company team in specific tasks and projects. There’s even perhaps some space there for knowledge transfer and hopefully for siphoning some of that knowledge back to the community (and thus also create a larger market, Ken).

At the end, some will hopefully find a new vocation in teaching others and passing on what they have learned. If that happens to be you and you are struggling to find something to challenge you, just remember you are not alone. “You are not the only one cursed with knowledge“.

As a final but crucial point, I think we need to accommodate for all those stages to happen at the same time, in how we receive members of the community, either during conferences or in between events, in the various chat channels, podcasts and social media, but most of all in our community narrative.

– Do you think that it’s possible for a network engineer to follow all that?

I don’t want to scare you by saying that there’s no such thing as a network engineer (it’s a practice, a discipline, we are not born with it, there’s no “network engineer birth mark” or “network engineer DNA”). I would rather say that when we speak about network engineers in general, we all have a particular image in mind about what exactly such a person is about, how they think, what their skills are, what their background is. But each of us actually means something different! And strangely enough, if you take a closer look, you will probably find that there are not two “network engineers” exactly alike in those aspects. We reference this, as if it’s a constant in Physics but in reality it’s just as fluid as any human being. Networking is a space. It encompasses a great deal of areas and activities and a lot of people with totally different paths at some point find themselves in it. If we come to terms with that, meeting each other can be a fascinating and full-filing experience. In my opinion that’s how true and organic communities are formed.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Minutes ago I was listening to the Network Automation Nerds podcast again, with Eric Chou and Scott Robohn as hosts and the episode NAN095: Certification Deep Dive with Francois Caen, that came out on Jul2, which was recorded little after Autcon3 and before Cisco Live US 2025. Let’s skip for now what Francois Caen is bringing to that discussion (you can listen and enjoy on your own) and let’s see what Scott says at (29:32 – 31:04), especially the bold part, I promise you we haven’t exchanged a single word on this:

“I’m going to stretch that a little further and say, you know, this focus over the last two and a half years for me on network automation has caused me to think a lot about what it means to be a well-rounded engineer, not qualified by network automation, electrical, mechanical, etcetera. I do think there’s a set of dynamics where we really cling to a specific identity. And, you know, my partner, NAF Chris Gruneman has written about this really openly. I think we shouldn’t be afraid of acquiring new skills. And I think we should be very comfortable thinking outside swim lanes. You know, I can still be at heart a network engineer, but understand computer science and software engineering concepts and integrate them into what I’m doing to do network development and network operations. But I can also learn more about security. I can learn more about what’s happening on the power generation and distribution front, especially if I’m in a data center, right. I’m developing this view and that really kind of crystallized for me in Prague last week that we shouldn’t be afraid to layer on new skills. It doesn’t change who you are. It only expands what you can do. It’s not for everybody and not everybody loves to learn. I’m one of those people. I loved every high school class. I loved every college class and my kids have told me how weird I am, right? I know we’re not all wired this way, but I like to give people hope in that where that, you know, you can still be a network engineer, but develop really good scripting and even software development skills in doing your network engineering job. And that’s just one small slice of that.“

Now how’s that for the “collective mind“?

– You are right, I don’t believe you, you have obviously made all of this up after all the posts and blogs came out.

Fine. Believe what you want. I still have stuff to read and listen from the last few weeks blog posts, episodes and even whole slack channels to subscribe to. I bet if I go ahead with those too, I will find even more common points. But let’s go on.

To keep you engaged and closer to those events we talked about, during the BoF sessions at Autocon3, I sat in a discussion for data models, which in fact proved how a lot of us have totally different backgrounds, affecting our perspective. How we interact with other people we meet along the way can certainly enhance our perspective and perhaps we can offer the same thing back to them, leading to exciting and inspiring origin stories. Separating people from the networking space into ‘us‘ and ‘them‘ (progressive/traditional, you pick who is who) is a delusional stance that comes from a social defense mechanism. It doesn’t help anyone, it’s not based on reality and it can only give everyone grief, unless you take a really long and hard look and try to approach everyone as a person.

– So Peace and Flowers all around then? And if that doesn’t work?

Then, to use another popular cultural reference, ‘I choose violence’! If you need to go to ‘war‘, if you really can’t avoid conflict, then it is what it is! Size it all up, gather your courage, pack your gear and head out for it. But remember these three things:

• In a ‘war‘, in a conflict situation, there are always casualties.
• It’s easy to picture what you stand to gain from the conflict, but you don’t always expect what you may loose in it.
• It’s possible you may find yourself in a more difficult position after the conflict and may have to spend a lot more time, resources and good will to get back to where you were.

– Spoken like a true old-timer..

Like I said, wisdom doesn’t come with age. All we learn, if we are lucky, is to exercise “All things in moderation, including moderation” (Socrates).

I have to leave you now, as I am preparing for a presentation on how to migrate from Nagios to Grafana with Prometheus for Service Level Monitoring, first thing in the morning..

– You have to prepare for a presentation in the morning? So why are you here talking to me?

Stress-relief my friend. Stress-relief.