AutoCon 0 has left an indelible mark in the field of Network automation. The aim with which they stepped in was to tackle network discrepancy by uniting engineers, architects, developers, and industry experts from enterprises, service providers, consultants, and vendors. The goal was to dive deep into the domain of network automation. And it happened. The network automation trends and breakthroughs seen were new to the eyes of many, here’s how!
AutoCon 0, the transformative convergence of mind happened in Denver, on November 13th and 14th of 2023. Several companies conducted presentations, showcasing their approaches to providing and addressing Network Automation solutions.
Journey of Day 1
The day started with the inauguration of the event. A cascade of insights was delivered during the inauguration itself by the speaker Kaon Thana from the New York Times. He addressed the intricacies and solutions of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) within the Classic Enterprise Network.
As a compact team of network engineers at The New York Times, they oversee various connectivity services, including a production data centre, printing plant, corporate WAN, campus wired/wifi network, and multi-cloud connectivity between AWS, GCP, and Azure. He also talked about the challenges encountered during their journey in adopting automation practices in the brownfield and presented real-world solutions (with examples) that they employed to navigate those hurdles.
Following Thana’s insights, Alex Ray from ESnet addressed that Network Orchestration plays a crucial role in shaping next-generation networks, empowering operators to provide more consistent and reliable services. Leveraging the collaboratively developed Workflow Orchestrator and other commercial and open-source tools, ESnet has successfully orchestrated and automated network configuration deployment across significant portions of the ESnet6 network.
The audience was treated to a journey through ESnet’s automation revolution. The team introduced us to The Workflow Orchestrator and gave a comprehensive overview of the goals set for orchestration and automation in the ESnet6 project. The presentation outlined the technology and processes employed to achieve those goals and concluded with a live demonstration of ESnet’s orchestration tooling in action. The session wrapped up with a reflective discussion on the lessons learned during the development of this tooling, allowing time for Q&A.
Day 2
The second day of AutoCon 2 was information-packed. Numerous renowned speakers delved into various facets of network automation such as Streamlined Troubleshooting via API Scripting, The Automation of a World-Class Technology Conference: Unveiling the Inner Workings of CiscoLive, Design-Driven Network Assurance, Mini-Track on Observability, Going from Zero to Automated within a Year, Network Source of Truth, and a Reexamination of Infrastructure as Code.
We, the team at Slurp’it, were present at the event with a dedicated booth, engaging attendees in discussions about our advanced Network Discovery solution. This groundbreaking offering holds immense promise, aligning seamlessly with this year’s focal point on the Intended Source of Truth alongside Netbox or Nautobot.
Additionally, we had the pleasure of connecting with a few fellow industry players, including IP Fabric, Kentik, and Forward Networks.