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.

In this episode, I talk of my love for YAML as a tool for network automation.

Here I talk about declarative vs imperative approaches to network automation.

In this episode I talk about my thoughts on using OpenConfig versus managing the device in a more native way.

In this episode I talk about the pitfall of throwing too many new things at once to someone who's just learning network automation. Keeping it simple and using a layered approach is what I've found to be the best way to introduce network automation to new people.

In the software development world, they have a concept called "test driven development", whereby code is tested (unit tests, integration tests) before committing to the main branch and before deployment.

We can take that concept and use it in the networking world, and to some extent we are, but there's more to go. The tools haven't quite caught up with the concepts, however, and I discuss this on this episode.