Network Automagic episode 007

Scott Lowe (Cisco/Isovalent, former Pulumi DevRel) joins Steinn and Urs to break down Pulumi — the infrastructure-as-code tool that lets engineers ditch HCL for real programming languages. The conversation covers what makes Pulumi tick, how it bridges Terraform providers, the honest state of the company, and why network automation remains fundamentally harder than cloud or server automation. Scott and Urs dig into the idempotency trap of mixing imperative code with declarative engines, rollback pitfalls, and provider quality across vendors. Scott closes with a controversial opinion: network engineers who stop caring at the server boundary are setting themselves up to get left behind.