Network Automation: past, present, and future

Moderator Scott Lowe, VM Ware Panelists David Barroso, Fastly Kirk Byers, Twin Bridges Technology Jathan McCollum, Dropbox Jathan McCollum is a Network Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, helping to build and control their rapidly growing production network. Jathan is an expert programmer, tinkerer, troubleshooter, and debugger committed to fixing the state of how engineers interact with the network at all levels. Jathan's passion for building resilient, highly-scalable and open source systems is infectious. Jathan is the lead developer of two open source projects: Trigger, a network automation toolkit, and Network Source of Truth, a network inventory and IPAM database. He also loves pizza. - GitHub: https://github.com/jathanism - Twitter:   / jathanism   Jeremy Stretch, DigitalOcean Jeremy Stretch is a network engineer at DigitalOcean, where he currently holds the title of Senior Network Developer. He is the lead maintainer of the open source IPAM/DCIM application NetBox, and has previously maintained a blog at packetlife.net. Speakers Mircea Ulinic, CloudFlare, Inc. Mircea works as network systems engineer for Cloudflare, spending most of his time writing code for network automation. Sometimes he talks about the technologies he's working with, and how automation helps to maintain reliable, stable and self-resilient one of the biggest global networks. Previously, he was involved in research and later worked for EPFL in Switzerland and an European service provider based in France. Besides networking, he has a strong passion for radio communications (especially mobile networks), mathematics and physics. Abstract Moderator - Scott Lowe - Engineering Architect at VMWare Speaker: Mircea Ulinic - Cloudflare, Network Systems Engineer, NAPALM maintainer, OpenConfig representative Panelists: David Barroso - Fastly, Network Systems Engineer, NAPALM co-creator Jathan McCollum - Dropbox, NetDevOps, Network Engineer, NSoT maintainer Jeremy Stretch - Digital Ocean, Network engineer, Netbox creator and maintainer Kirk Byers - Twin Bridges Technology, Python and Network Automation instructor During this panel, we will meet various network automation professionals. Each will provide a brief overview of their career path, highlighting any specific education choices or job opportunities which led them to where they are now. Network automation is not just a concept anymore, it is a reality: network DevOps is a must-have skill of the 21st century. While there's a continuous demand, many network engineers are still afraid to step into this world, or often the expectations are not properly set. In this panel, we will share our experience. Kirk Byers has a long experience of training thousands of network engineers, and will provide advice on how to make the first steps and share best practices. Jason Edelman has looked into various environments and can share best practices on how prepare your environment (both human and network) to be ready for automation. David Barroso will be speaking about NAPALM, a widely adopted library to manage network devices cross-platform: the importance of vendor-agnostic methodologies and how they are able to help. In the end we will visit the future perspectives. Jathan McCollum and Jeremy Stretch will be speaking about the importance of IPAMs in network automation and how to use tools such as NSoT or NetBox as sources of truth to leverage automation. Mircea Ulinic will present methodologies and requirements for event-driven network automation and orchestration, in particular using Salt.