Mitja Robas started his PowerShell for Networking Engineers presentation with a brief introduction to PowerShell and a few simple hands-on examples. Enjoy the videos ;)

Neil Anderson collected career advice from 111 IT industry gurus (just getting all of them to respond must have been monumental effort). Well worth reading ;)

One of my readers sent me a lengthy email describing his NSX-versus-ACI views. He started with [slightly reworded]:

What I want to do is to create customer templates to speed up deployment of application environments, as it takes too long at the moment to set up a new application environment.

That’s what we all want. How you get there is the interesting part.

The first half of 2017 is almost gone, so it’s time to check how far I got with the plans I made in January.

Delivered:

• Total refresh of Networking in Private and Public Clouds;
• Right-sizing the network;
• Open Networking (and single-SKU data center networks);
• Two additional network automation use cases;
• Ansible deep dive material (delivered)

A while ago I sent out an email to my SDN and network automation mailing list (join here) asking whether anyone uses Open Daylight in anything close to a production environment (because I haven’t ever seen one).

Among many responses saying “not here” I got a polite email from VP of Marketing working for a company that sells OpenDaylight-related services listing tons of customer deployments (no surprise there).

OpenConfig sounds like a great idea, but unfortunately only a few vendors support it, and it doesn’t run on all their platforms, and you need the latest-and-greatest software release. Not exactly a set of conditions that would encourage widespread adoption.

Things might change with the OpenConfig data models supported in NAPALM. Imagine you could parse router configurations or show printouts into OpenConfig data structures, or use OpenConfig to configure Cisco IOS routers running a decade old software.

The work of editing transcripts of my two switches presentation is (very slowly) moving forward. In the fourth part of the Optimize Your Data Center Infrastructure series I’m talking about reducing the number of uplinks.

I’m getting plenty of emails from not-so-very-young networking engineers trying to make career transitions. I got this one from a CCIE in his mid-40s:

Would you think the SDN and Data Center paths would be suitable for a long standing engineer?

Absolutely. It's just networking, although it's sometimes disguised a bit.

This article was initially sent to my Network Automation mailing list.

The spring craziness is still in full swing – we’ll have three webinars this week (a first) and I was so busy I didn’t even have time to write about them. Let’s fix that.

Data Center Updates on Monday is the second part of server virtualization, virtual machines and containers update to Data Center 3.0 webinar. We covered virtual machines in the last session (April 25^th), this time we’ll talk about containers.

David Barroso (now at Fastly) will talk about NAPALM in Ansible on Tuesday.

Do you have the feeling that you should know more about network automation, but don't know where to start? I was facing that same problem in 2015, and then started exploring Ansible (plus YAML, Jinja2, Git, Puppet…), creating small playbooks, and finally came to a point where I said "now I know that you can have a small solution solving an actual problem ready in a few weeks even if you know absolutely nothing today".