- A network automation event in Denver this week attracted 550 network engineers
- The event was attended by both telecom engineers as well as their peers from different enterprises
- The organizers of the event presented the results of a survey, which showed what types of things being automated
A lot of network automation vendors would like to connect with network engineers across different verticals, not just telecom, but also enterprises. And it turns out there is a robust network automation event called AutoCon, which happened in Denver this week.
Scott Robohn, one of the co-founders of the Network Automation Forum (NAF), which hosts AutoCon, said, “We have not targeted any specific vertical. It’s been a pretty broad representation.”
Robohn, as well as NAF’s other co-founder Chris Grundemann, have been network engineers for a few decades, and they managed to create this event a couple of years ago, mainly through word-of-mouth and a website with a design that resonates with their audience, along with “some simple, straightforward marketing on LinkedIn,” said Robohn.
This week’s show was AutoCon’s third event, and it attracted an audience of about 550 network engineers and other people with similar job titles.
Robohn is actually a telecom veteran, having worked at DriveNets and Juniper Networks in the past. And Grundemann has some telco experience as well, with Time Warner Telecom and Cable Labs on his resume.
But the event is not strictly telecom focused, and in fact, one of the most popular sessions on Wednesday was a presentation by two employees of the convenience store QuikTrip, who talked about how they had automated network processes across the chain. The audience had lots of questions for the QuikTrip guys.
One thing that many presenters seemed to agree on is that Cisco held back network automation with its Command Line Interface (CLI) used to configure, monitor and maintain Cisco devices, such as routers and switches.
Anna Claiborne, SVP of Network Tools and Automation with Zayo Group, said during her presentation that "Google was the first to break free of the tyranny of the CLI."
The most common thing to automate is backups
At this week’s event, Grundemann presented the results of his 2024 network automation survey, which shows that there’s a wide spread of progress on the automation journey, with the majority of organizations falling in the middle between zero automation and 100% automation.
The survey was based on answers from 106 respondents from 25 different types of organizations, including service providers, public cloud operators and enterprise network operators.
Perhaps more interesting than the fact that people are in the middle of their automation journeys, is the types of things that network engineers are currently automating.
Of the 106 respondents, 68 said they automated backups; 33 used automation for firmware and software upgrades; 29 for service provisioning; 28 for distributed denial of service (DDoS) responses; and 27 for firewall rules.
When asked what types of automation tools they used in their networks (and they could select all that applied) 91 respondents said they used open source applications without paid support; while 86 respondents said they used homebrew scripts written in-house. Only 43 people said they used proprietary commercial applications, but this was an increase in percentage from 2023.
In terms of obstacles to more network automation, respondents cited skills challenges, technical challenges and organizational challenges as the top three. (See chart in the featured image.)
The respondents said their companies are spending more money and allocating more staff to network automation in 2024 than they did in 2023.
Read Fierce Network Research's recent report on network automation and artificial intelligence here.