Podcast: State of Networking (Early 2021)
In January, Jason Edelman kindly invited me for a chat about the state of (software defined) networking and network automation in particular. The recording was recently published on Network Collective.
In January, Jason Edelman kindly invited me for a chat about the state of (software defined) networking and network automation in particular. The recording was recently published on Network Collective.
Great podcast!
Wow, this podcast brought forward a lot of points about the State of Networking in 2021. I think is called out challenges impacting Network “Engineers” over the last 10 – 15 years, where a declining number of actual engineers are leaving the ranks. The adoption of Ansible and Python as long-term solutions simply perpetuates the script-kiddie nature of raw pasting Google-born solutions, with little understanding of the why’s begin the configurations one is implementing. It is hard for Jason to fully appreciate the mindset and discipline challenges within the ranks of so-called engineers today. He is part of the quick and easy evangelist helping maintain this culture. Fully-automatic machine guns don’t create a psychopathic killer, but they make one’s devastation more widespread and significant. So is the reach of automation. Engineers who don’t know how to implement and optimize BGP manually or write clean and scalable code can cause more damage that’s harder to unwind than ever before. Add to that Automation platforms that are often no faster than transforming configurations than an Excel workbook and then pasting them into SSH CLI sessions. We’ll never get widespread adoption for automation if it is not a force-multiplier. The evangelism for Python because it is easy perpetuates the no-plan culture. Engineers need to get back to putting in the hard work instead of firefighting. Move slower to build stable networks, built on best-practices instead of an endless world of fire fighting. Learn performant programming languages that can fully realize the high core/thread count computers we have today. What’s the worst that can happen – an engineer learn how APIs, OpenSSL, and sockets work?