network automation

ZigBee, named for the waggle dance bees use to communicate, is one of the oldest, and most often used protocols, but how much do you know about it? ZigBee operates…

Having convinced myself in previous posts that my automation projects will never be finished and that I will forever be supporting 101 different device connection paradigms, I thought that in…

As somebody not lucky enough to have a nice clicky interface with which to manage and automate all my equipment, I have to develop my own tools to do so.…

I really want Software Defined Networking (SDN), or something like it, to be the go-to approach for networking, but are we too tied to our idea of what SDN is…

I’ve heard repeatedly from people in this industry that what we need is a single interface to our infrastructure. For status monitoring, perhaps that’s best represented by the ubiquitous “Single…

The Dream of the Data Center For me, it started with OpenStack. I was at a conference a number of years ago listening to Shannon McFarland talking about using OpenStack…

With the popularity of Agile methodologies and the ubiquity of people claiming they were embracing NetOps/DevOps, I could swear we were supposed to have adopted a new silo-busting software-defined paradigm…

When I first began this post, my thinking revolved around the translation problems of a declarative approach to network operation, but having only procedural interfaces to work with. Further thought…

Are configuration templates still needed with an automation framework? Or does the automation policy make them a relic of the past? Traditional Configuration Management: Templates We’ve all been there. We…

Despite all the talk of all our jobs being replaced by automation, my experience is that the majority of enterprises are still very much employing engineers to design, build, and…