A few days after I published the blog post describing why it might make sense to attend the Building Network Automation Solutions course even when you’re already using a $vendor network management system/platform, I got a surprising email from one of my friends working for a major networking vendor:

I can tell you that there are many many customers that I would rather not buy our platform as they expect a magic blue pill. There's no platform that's going to magically understand you're network. Magically standardize all your configurations and make deliver you ice cream with sprinkles while it does your job for you.

I'm hoping the course will include basic automation principles: single source of truth…

Absolutely. Elisa Jasinska will spend a lot of time talking about exactly that problem during the first live session (in her own words: Data duplication is how rockets explode).

… aim to push consistency throughout the environment…

I’ll continuously nag about consistency, and I’m positive David Barroso will have a few words to say about that during his presentation.

… and focus on testing…

Absolutely. We’ll dedicate a whole section of the course to data validation, unit tests, running Ansible in check mode etc.

…to help people understand how to use whatever tool they are going to adopt. For me, the operational discipline should be there regardless of what tools they are implementing.

Couldn’t agree more – I’ve been talking about these same topics in Network Automation 101 webinar (part of recommended reading for the online course) and I’m really glad to see other people agreeing with me.

Interested? You can still register.