You're slammed, tickets piling up, deadlines slipping, you're barely keeping your head above water.

And some Youtubers are telling you that you should automate?

In this economy?

I talk about the genuine issue of finding the time to learn, let alone implement, network automation in these trying times.

What would a replacement for Ansible look like? What do we want in a network automation platform that would replace Ansible?

In this episode I talk about the lack of commit/confirm in many of the NOS modules.

It's easy to be overwhelmed and see all these network automation tools and wonder... what is even the goal?

The tools are there to help us achieve our goals, they're not the goal themselves and I talk about how you can pick which tools makes the most sense for you.

Especially as it's easy to see all these new tools and methods and think that

In this episode I talk about my preference for generating a new config and replacing the entirety of the old config, every time, much like the Genesis Torpedo from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

Adding things is easy, removing stuff is hard. It can be done, but it's just easier to wipe away what was there in lieu of "it's new matrix."

I don't like YANG for configuring devices (and I'm going to tell you allll about it).

More meetings, more committees, more reviews isn't going to deliver more reliable network changes. While a formalized process and policies for network changes is important, you hit a point of very diminishing returns: Doubling your meetings or committees or reviews isn't going to halve your error rate. It just adds friction to the process.

Today's topic is how automation has made choosing things like routing protocols very different than they were maybe 10 years ago.

In this episode I warn people about issues that have cropped up with the network automation modules/collections/roles that got broken with the new versions of Ansible (Ansible Community 12/Ansible-core 2.19)

In this longer episode, I share my thoughts on the term "Software Defined Networking" (SDN) and why it should be retired as a term.