From May 28 to 30, 2025, Monika Antoniak and I represented CodiLime at the AutoCon3 
conference in Prague, Czech Republic. This biannual event is organized by the Network Automation Forum (NAF) and is intended for individuals interested in the broad topic of network automation. Below, I share a few insights from the event.
The importance of design
Many of the talks at AutoCon3 touched on fundamental issues related to network automation, including what to pay attention to in order to meet your goals and achieve real improvements instead of getting lost.
Claudia de Luna (Start at the Beginning: Automating Network Design) pointed out that tools are always secondary to specific problems to be solved. Therefore, it is necessary to think about the nature of particular problems, understand what is at the heart of them, and only then proceed to select the appropriate tools or modify/create new ones. Also, she recommended focusing on the proper design of systems for network automation, including not only the technology, but also the matter of available resources and how to provide support for such solutions.
Following the system design issue, Christian Adell Querol (The Why, What, and How about Design-Driven Automation) discussed a high-level system design, in which the network is modeled as a collection of modular services, which underneath correspond to operations performed with appropriate parameters. According to Christian, this simplifies interaction with the user.
Similarly, Jaakko Rautanen (Mastering Network Operations: The Power of Abstraction) presented a solution in which abstractions of individual network components are an essential part of a design. It should be mentioned that the issues of modeling and abstraction were discussed further in many other talks at the conference and Q&A sessions following them.
Another noteworthy presentation was given by Damien Garros (Building Trustworthy Network Automation, From Principles to Practice), in which he discussed a number of characteristics of a trustworthy network automation system, such as idempotency, transactivity, declarativeness as well as support for dry-run and version control mechanisms.
Toolset - when to use what and how
During AutoCon3, some speakers also raised the issue of suitable tools to use for network automation. In this context, there were quite a few insights into popular solutions that are usually used even more extensively, i.e,. for automated deployment of infrastructure, such as Ansible or Terraform.
As for Ansible, Matteo Colantonio (From Clicks to Code: Optical Network Automation Journey at GARR) highlighted some of Ansible's shortcomings. He argued that while Ansible will be an effective tool for automating simple procedures, for complex workflows, direct use of a programming language (e.g., Python) would be more suitable, helping to optimize performance and giving greater flexibility.
Similar observations were shared by Antonio Balmaseda & Alberto Villegas Erce (Coding for infrastructure is just coding, on how we moved from a script-based model to an object-oriented architecture), who compared Ansible with a native Python-based solution that leverages the well-known Model-View-Controller architecture.
Yet another talk on Ansible was given by Suhaib Saeed (Clash of the Titans: Nornir Vs Ansible) in which he made a brief comparison between Ansible and Nornir, another Python-based automation tool. Continuing with the tools theme, Eduardo Pozo (An Epic Journey: Automating networks with Terraform) offered attendees a concise introduction to Terraform. He pointed out what to pay special attention to in terms of using Terraform to automate networks and discussed a set of related best practices.
AI and the future
As you might have guessed, there were also plenty of questions and considerations about the future. This was addressed by Jason Edelman (From the CLI to APIs and IDEs: A Tale of the Network Engineer), who predicted an increasing adoption of open-source and AI solutions within the network automation ecosystem. In particular, he mentioned solutions based on GenAI and so-called AI agents. In practice, this could mean using AI to build jobs and playbooks (e.g., for configuration deployment or change validation), generate and run tests and entire test environments, or dynamically modify created workloads based on collected telemetry data. AI topics were also covered in other talks. For example, one of the sponsors' speeches presented an overview of a network orchestration system that implements the MCP standard for sharing data with various AI models.
In turn, Urs Baumann (Teaching “old” LLMs new tricks) shared his experience with fine-tuning LLMs for network use-cases. While discussing the future, it was interesting to hear Javier Antich's (Network Event Correlation: Stories to Keep You Awake) slightly more theoretical talk, in which he spoke about various methods for network event correlation. He presented this idea in the context of autonomous networks. Even though this concept was conceived many years ago, it still resonates within the network engineering community as an unfulfilled expectation. This is because it is about sensitive issues like trust, reliability, and security.
Conclusion
The Prague edition of the AutoCon conference was the first NAF event in which I had the opportunity to participate. My personal feelings are that a relatively large number of speeches addressed general issues (which, of course, doesn't mean they weren't important) while only some of the talks focused on details, e.g., related to specific implementations.
At the end of the conference, the organizers admitted that they are considering introducing parallel thematic tracks in the future, which would allow for deeper discussions of selected issues. However, they also declared they want to avoid making the AutoCon conference a meeting place mainly for experts, as this would create too high a barrier to entry for beginners.
It should be noted, however, that AutoCon is still a relatively new initiative, and its future status may evolve. Regardless of whether it retains its educational character or becomes more technological or even business-oriented, it is already a valuable series and a forum for the exchange of ideas for those interested in network automation.
