A lot can change in just six months. Back at AutoCon1 in Amsterdam, it seemed like we were all still amazed that an event like AutoCon even existed. Fast forward to last week in Denver for AutoCon2, and the landscape feels both familiar and refreshingly new. Network Automation is having a big moment, analysts are predicting double digit year on year growth, and it seems like everyone is busy with their part of the puzzle.
It was impossible to walk through the conference venue without being pulled into deep conversations with NetBox Labs partners, customers, and community members excited by all the recent progress in the ecosystem and we came away energized by the excitement and feedback we heard.
Taking the Stage at AutoCon2
I had the privilege of presenting right after Anna Claiborne’s opening keynote on Wednesday morning and the energy at the event was palpable so I took the opportunity to ask the crowd to help me tick off a bucket list item, and without much cajoling the room participated in a wave!
In my presentation, I covered how we’ve delivered on our promises to ship NetBox Branching and Change Management, witnessed huge adoption of the NetBox Cloud Free Plan, and launched Diode to simplify data ingestion into NetBox. But perhaps most exciting was sharing the incredible progress made by our community members, partners, and customers.
So. Much. Automation.
I also took the opportunity to share our latest product announcements, NetBox Discovery and NetBox Assurance. You can read more about those in our announcement blog, and if you’re interested in learning more head on over to the product pages to register your interest. NetBox Discovery accelerates getting your network into NetBox, and NetBox Assurance enables you to identify, understand, and fix operational drift in your network.
A Growing Community and Evolving Conversations
Gathering with over 550 network automation enthusiasts in Denver—marking a 25% growth since the last event—was invigorating to say the least. Having attended AutoCon1, but missed AutoCon0, I was eager to see how the U.S. edition would unfold, and it exceeded all expectations.
One of the most striking shifts at AutoCon2 was how the conversation had moved along in some key areas. Not too long ago, we were still stuck in debates over whether there could ever be a “single source of truth” or if the network itself should be considered that source. The consensus now firmly acknowledges what we’ve witnessed with our more advanced users for some time:
1. If you want to automate, the network should not be the source of truth
2. There is no single source of truth, and in fact there is often what we call “shared authority” among various systems
At the heart of this progress is a shared hunger for learning in the network automation community, and in her opening keynote Anna Claiborne from Zayo Group presented the findings from some of her research in which I was pleased to see NetBox nestled alongside Python and Ansible as a tool that the networking community most wants to learn more about.
Image from the AutoCon2 Opening Keynote by Anna Claiborne, SVP Network Tools and Automation at Zayo Group
Want to learn more about NetBox? Check out NetBox Zero to Hero, and our ebook Navigating Network Automation with NetBox
Action Over Semantics: Building Together
While it’s great to see the conversation evolving at such a pace, there was one development that I’ll be watching closely. In his inimitable style Dinesh Dutt, CEO of NetBox Labs partner Stardust Systems, creators of the ever popular SuzieQ, made an impassioned plea for more attention to be placed on defining terminology to help people learn about network automation faster.
While the desire for clear terminology is a laudable goal, in practice I think our time is better spent on sharing successful implementations and letting the terminology flow from there. I saw this first hand in my time as Marketing Chairperson for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation where the unwritten rule was “working code over standards”. This approach helped the cloud native movement to innovate much faster than previous efforts to foster innovation around certain technologies. Why? Because implementations can be objectively tested, something that is far harder to achieve with definitions which can be endlessly debated. Music theory was derived to describe existing music, not the other way round… (and for what it’s worth, I’m perfectly happy for us to refer to NetBox as a datastore instead of the source of truth 😉)
Will the Autonomicon fare better than previous attempts to learn by defining? Maybe, but our belief in “working code over standards” was the driving force behind the workshop we hosted on Tuesday morning: Network Automation Zero to Hero. We deliberately focussed on “learning by doing” by drawing from the network automation reference architecture we’ve derived from successful network automation implementations across the NetBox community. Over 50 participants collaborated to build a full closed-loop network automation stack with NetBox, Slurpit, Netpicker, Icinga, Ansible and of course, ContainerLab.
A huge thank you to my workshop co-hosts: Otto Coster, Dave Kempe, Pieter van Os and Wim Gerrits
Was it flawless? Of course not. But innovation rarely is on the first try. And the best part? We’re open-sourcing this work soon so that everyone can try it out, learn from it, fork it, change it, and debate the working code.
Highlights from AutoCon2 presentations and conversations
The conference was a treasure trove of insights, but a few themes stood out:
- AI-Driven Network Observability: Jeremy Schulman of Major League Baseball showcased how AI can transform operational data into actionable insights, emphasizing the critical role of network intent for helping the AI to make sense of what’s out in the network. His demonstration of MLB’s ChatOps “NetworkBot” was great food for thought —a seamless integration of Selector.ai, NetBox, IP Fabric and Slack. Make sure to watch it when the video is released.
- The Rise of Kubernetes in Network Automation: At AutoCon1 Wim Hendrickx of Nokia announced Kubenet and it seems like since then Kubernetes has been getting much more attention from the network automation community. Kubernetes and the general cloud native ecosystem are a good fit as we move towards systems that automatically reconcile our customer’s intent with our sources of truth and our sources of truth with our networks, but for those of you who are new to Kubernetes, I recommend learning the underlying concepts before diving into the technical specifics.
- Shifting Focus from Operators to Customers: I co-hosted the Intent Management and Source of Truth for the Network BoF during the Thursday lunchtime where an interesting conversation emerged around focussing our automation efforts around services instead of low-level design. The neat thing about this approach is that our customers (or users if you prefer) care about the services we provide to them, and shouldn’t care or know about the low level network design. This is an area of focus at NetBox Labs and you can expect to hear more from us about it real soon.
- Cattle not Pets – Unsurprisingly the concept of “cattle not pets” has persisted from the DevOps movement that started in the early 2010’s, through the cloud native movement and now into network automation. The reasoning is simple, we can only automate what we can abstract, and homogeneity and normalization in our infrastructure and in our data aids abstraction and supports ecosystem growth. Network devices have proved harder to abstract than servers because of their hardware peculiarities and their criticality in our infrastructure, but in the late 2000s it was common to find people saying that server virtualisation would never catch on and… well.
- Certification is dead, long live certification – One particularly divisive topic was the idea that certification has been used by some vendors to preserve the “hard to automate” status quo. That may be true but in my view certification got caught in the cross-fire a bit here. Certification is both good and necessary if we want network automation to cross the fabled chasm. How else will we make sure that there are enough trained people to implement the patterns that the network automation community is inventing as we speak?
- Shared authority – We’ve seen many times in the NetBox community that there is no single source of truth and one of the concepts that is starting to gain traction is “shared authority”. I had several enlightening conversations around this topic in which NetBox might be authoritative for some data, while separate systems are authoritative for other data. The trick is making sure that wherever the data gets edited, operators can still see what’s going on across the network management stack, and we’ll have more to share on this in the coming weeks.
The NetBox and Friends Social
At AutoCon 1 we ran a little social on the Tuesday evening before the conference began which was well attended so this time we decided to go much bigger with many of our partners. Attendance was capped at 150 but we had over 200 registrants and it was great to see almost half of the conference attendees take over Benders Bar and Grill and spend the evening meeting new people, sharing ideas and for some brave souls, taking the party late into the evening.
A huge thanks to Arista, Blue Ally, Gluware, IPFabric, Itential, Juniper, Kentik, Myriad360, Netpicker, Nokia, RedHat, Slurpit, Sol1, Stardust Systems, and WWT for being part of the event and I’m looking forward to seeing what we will come up with for AutoCon 3.
Looking Ahead: The Road to AutoCon 3
As I reflect on the progress we’ve all made, I can’t help but feel excited about what’s on the horizon. I wonder what we’ll be celebrating at AutoCon3 in May 2025? By then, we’ll have launched NetBox Discovery in Q4 2024, and NetBox Assurance in early 2025. We’ll have shared much more about our work on “shared authority” sources of truth (or datastores if you prefer…), our work on network services, more “running code over standards” releases for you to get your hands on, and much more.
What will you have achieved by May 2025? I can’t wait to find out.
See you at AutoCon3!
Want to keep up-to-date on NetBox Labs news? Join our mailing list: https://netboxlabs.com/newsletter/
What to join the live discussion about the topics above and many more? Join the NetDev Slack: https://netdev.chat/
