Speakers
Description
Network Automation has been around long enough that it progressed through different stages. In the early days network engineers were happy that we could write templates, merge them with variables and push the result out to the devices.
By now, we can see that we need a place where to store those variables in a sensible way, through documentation systems (or DCIMs). But with this we enter a new stage of automation, which brings increased complexity and additional knowledge requirements to the people designing the automation and documentation systems. We need to understand our data and our models better than ever before, and make our decisions based on how we model the world, without being constrained by the limits of our documentation systems.
This is not a "here is the solution" talk. This is more the beginning of a longer conversation we want to start in the networking community, showing where we, the network people, need to figure out for ourselves what is still lacking in our automation skill and toolsets and how to progress from here.
And maybe a glimpse on an early draft of a potential solution.
