Network Automation Forum AutoCon1 2024: insights and summary

The vibrant city of Amsterdam recently hosted AutoCon 1 2024, a premier event for network automation professionals worldwide. The conference, held from May 29 to 31, attracted various industry leaders and experts eager to explore the latest advancements and trends in network automation technology. A joint presentation by CodiLime and Palo Alto Networks was among the standout sessions.

Representing CodiLime, DevOps Engineer Adrian Celebański took the stage alongside Adam Baumeister, Global Solutions Architect at Palo Alto Networks. Their presentation, titled "100 firewalls upgraded in a single night? Delivering large-scale operations with Ansible," captivated the audience with its practical insights and innovative approach to tackling complex network upgrades. The session highlighted a real-world case study involving the automation of firewall upgrades, showcasing CodiLime's expertise and commitment to pushing the boundaries of network automation.

Adrian wasn’t only a speaker, he also actively attended the conference, and after the event, he decided to share his thoughts and insights on AutoCon1 in the form of a short summary.

You can read it below:

AutoCon 1 Summary

Last week I was fortunate to attend the AutoCon 1 conference, held in Amsterdam and organized by Network Automation Forum. As the event’s name suggests, it is heavily focused on the automation side of networking which attracted over 400 professionals gathered around the NetDevOps community. The conference was three days long (Wednesday - Friday) and I was honored to co-host a talk on Thursday, together with my colleague Adam Baumeister from Palo Alto Networks. We presented an interesting case study of a large-scale firewall upgrade project and how we automated every single step of the process. It was pretty practical and down-to-earth but not all of the talks were like that, which is good!

I was as excited to be an attendee as much as a speaker at AutoCon 1. The program looked truly interesting and I was not let down. Presentations varied from each other across multiple fields, resulting in a great mixture of content. There were some more theoretical ones, as well as those more hands-on. Some of them were addressed to beginners in the field (but always with a few takeaways for the veterans), others were pretty advanced. Some of the speakers had a clear networking background, but there was no shortage of software developers exploring network automation too.

I cannot underestimate the value of the vendor area where numerous product companies and service providers had their stands. It was a great opportunity to discover or get to know better some trending products in the network automation field, as well as discuss the challenges that the community faces with amazing experts representing the industry leaders. Thanks to everyone visiting the CodiLime stand for all the meaningful discussions we had there.

Among all the inspiring and insightful speeches I witnessed, I want to mention those which stuck in my memory the most:

1. After the opening words from the founders of Network Automation Forum, Dinesh Dutt opened the conference on Wednesday with a philosophical speech where he tried to answer the question asked by the conference’s organizers - why haven’t we seen full adoption of network automation, yet? He shared some historical context and then his beliefs on what is holding the industry back. A few of his statements might have been controversial for some but I especially agreed with the opinion that a single tool “to rule them all” does not and will never exist.
2. Another Wednesday talk that stood out was the one from Garrett Nowak. His presentation was an excellent starting point for network engineers who have not embraced any kind of automation yet. He proposed some basics that in his opinion everyone should implement in their networks, namely deploying a network source of truth, building parameterized network configuration templates and pushing them with scripts. For each step, an adequate tool was proposed and some code snippets were provided. The key takeaway from this was - just get started! Once you do it and get the gist of automation, you will start seeing endless opportunities to improve.
3. Thursday started with a feisty talk from Steinn Orvar Bjarnarson where he presented the story of developing an MVP (minimum viable product) automation platform. It was a story like many others but I liked how he described all of the ups and downs in the product's life cycle in a truly amusing way. Steinn went quite deep into the solution’s architecture, showing what components they used and how it changed over time. Based on his story, he shared some golden rules to network automation. I think it is really important to understand that automation is sometimes a steep hill but we are learning a lot throughout the process, delivering better and better solutions over time.
4. One of my favorite talks on Thursday was the one about network testing from Rick Donato. He covered the entire spectrum of tools that can be used to test the network leveraging automation. The tools were broken down into three categories: unit testing, integration testing and system testing. For each, Rick provided us with excellent examples, making the presentation very practical. I really like how much emphasis he put on the importance of thorough network testing in order to improve overall network reliability, just like Adam and I did during our speech.
5. The last day of the conference started with a slightly abstract presentation from Peter Boers. He shared some insights about the AI project he is working on, where his team is building a language model for computer networks. The speech did include some theoretical considerations about artificial intelligence in general, as well as some technical details about the model's purpose and the way it is meant to operate. In short, it is supposed to be an AIOps technology to detect problems in the network and address them, resulting in a self-healing and more reliable network. The talk was really fascinating and initiated a heated discussion on whether the fundamental assumptions are even realistic, especially regarding vendor-agnosticity.
6. One of the Friday talks that really grabbed my attention was the one from Robin Gilijamse where he shared an impressive customer case study. It was related to something that many of us went through - the pandemic and a sudden move to a remote working model. Robin had two weeks to enhance his remote access VPN solution capacity by a huge margin, with no impact on user experience. How do we know that? He described the story of how he leveraged public cloud, infrastructure as code, configuration as code, and even serverless computing in order to achieve the goal. One of the golden rules he shared was “don’t be afraid to kill your darlings”, as the solution was meant to be temporary and was finally replaced by a proper SASE product. This was a perfect example of how to handle a real crisis with automation.

Conclusion

There were so many takeaways from this conference that I’m not even able to mention all of them. However, if I was to put them all together and derive a common theme, I would say that it does not matter which automation tools you use, how beautiful your code is or which vendor’s devices are powering your network. What matters is that you actually did it, it does the job intended, it saves you time as an engineer and finally it brings value to the business. Once you get more knowledge and experience, you will certainly look back at your projects and reflect on the things you would do differently. And that is great but do not let perfectionism stop you from even starting the automation journey, it does not have to be flawless!

AutoCon 1 was undoubtedly a top-tier conference dedicated to the entire NetDevOps movement. I would even call it unique in terms of the subject it revolves around. If you are a network or software engineer trying to advance your network, you should really consider attending AutoCon 2!