Human Infrastructure 403: AutoCon3 Special Edition

Author

Drew Conry-Murray
May 30, 2025

Greetings from Prague!

The Packet Pushers team was on-site at AutoCon3 in Prague this week. We live-blogged the conference sessions, recorded podcasts, and shot some video. This issue will share links of some of the material we produced at the event.

We also got a chance to catch up with friends, meet new ones, hand out stickers, and talk IRL with folks who’ve only heard us in their heads. It’s been a blast! And the automation conversations are ongoing on the Network Automation Forum Slack and the Packet Pushers Community Slack.

Conference sessions took place over three days at AutoCon. Drew and Ethan tried to live-blog as many as possible via LinkedIn. (Now that the event is over, are they dead blogs? Embalmed blogs?) In any case, here’s what we cranked out on site.

Also, please note that each talk was recorded and will find its way to the Network Automation Forum YouTube channel, so you can see full presentations once they’re posted.

Claudia De Luna gave the opening keynote. She noted that the current approach to network automation is to jump into a project, typically operations-focused. This is starting in the middle. Claudia makes the case for design-driven automation, guided by four essential questions:

  1. What problem are we trying to solve?    

  2. How will this product or service help solve the problem?    

  3. Who is going to implement the solution?    

  4. How are we going to support the solution?    

Pick one or both, but the big takeaway is that you can get up and running with Ansible pretty quickly, but as your automation logic gets more complex, Nornir may be better suited.

Shirish talks about how his organization, a network services provider, evolved from scripts to a microservices architecture for network automation. A fascinating case study.

An engaging and insightful perspective from a network engineer that’s new to the field, including the need to acquire domain knowledge while also ramping up on an automation skillset. There’s great pointers here if you’re new to automation and want suggestions.

Robert offers a detailed look at an enterprise getting an automation project off the ground. Key elements include ensuring that they are getting accurate, uniform data before they dive into actual automation, and aligning automation efforts with larger business goals.

Antonio & Alberto focused on their expertise as developers. They wanted network engineers to be the ones that know the network--providing useful information about the network. But devs needed to lead the software development component of network automation, because that’s what they know the best. Network engineers are the users--not the automation makers.

Luke Golan is a network engineer at Megaport. He described a project to automate migrating Megaport’s network, which serves customers all over the world, from an L2 VPN design to EVPN. It’s a great business case about a high-wire act that had to work.

This is a case study about an Italian research network using the Workflow Orchestrator Framework to help automate the research institution’s optical network. While the organization had some initial success with Ansible, Workflow Orchestrator Framework better supported the complex needs of the project.

Naveen discussed open source workflow engine Temporal with many use cases for network automation.

Eduardo's talk was an overview of how Terraform works, followed by several lessons learned. Hard lessons in some cases.

Lee Harper presented on how they're using network automation to help deal with CVEs and vulnerabilities at Terracon, an engineering consultancy. He walks through the journey, starting with the need to inventory the network to actually getting to remediation. Lee also made one of the best jokes at the event. His title is Enterprise Administrator. He said “Enterprise Administrator is what you call a network engineer at an engineering firm.” : )

Javier Antich, author of "Machine Learning for Network and Cloud Engineers," and a Cisco product manager, describes a vision for better event correlation that could help drive the evolution from automation to autonomy. This isn’t a case study; it’s a vision for how the network automation industry might develop and progress.

Christian kicked off his talk with an echo from Claudia de Luna ☾'s keynote. “We live in a world that started with design.” But that design relies heavily on data & the quality of that data. Your automation is going to be as good as the data you feed it.

So…what’s data? Many things. Data is intent. Or config. Or operational information. Or many other things. Data is a mess, but a mess we have to make sense of for it to be useful in a network design. Christian suggests we think about networking in terms of consumable services.

Jason Edelman of Network to Code provided the closing keynote at AutoCon 3. It was part history lesson of network automation, part memoir of Jason's career, and a look into the future (including AI). There’s a lot of compelling ideas here, including his attitude toward AI, and what’s becoming the new baseline for network engineering skillset.

What’s it going to take for you to trust network automation? Or AI? Damien points out that engineers don’t trust a black box. They need to know what’s going on inside. Therefore, when we build automation systems, we have to do more than make it work. We have to add functionality that fosters trust. Move from a system that I would use to a system that we would use. 

LIGHTNING TALKS 🤓

The last hour of AutoCon is reserved for Lightning Talks: 5 speakers get 10 minutes each to download as much as they can into what remains of the cognitive capacity of the audience. Frankly, each talk merited a full session, but Time is a cruel master. Here’s what we captured.

Josh kicked off the Lightning Talks with a speed run through a SONiC network automation project. His client had a network running different SONiC distros, which can mean different protocols and features are supported on different distros, and they wanted config outputs in gNMI and CLI. Josh shares how he made it happen.

This might have been the only wireless-related session at AutoCon. What if you put your own software on a generic AP you buy in bulk? You can deliver WiFi services much more cheaply that way. Henry's added this service to the rXg, using OpenWifi as the OS and to push config to the AP. Lots of automation to deliver this service. Henry shows how he made it happen.

Bart did a speed-run through a use case for BGP Monitoring Protocol (BMP) that helped him deliver more value to an ISP client he works with.

John shares some thoughts on HashiCorp Vault in his lightning talk. Vault is a tool we can use to avoid embedding secrets in our code, syncing it to a repo, and then leaking them accidentally to the world which John describes as, “A gift to a ransomware attacker.”

Urs wrapped up the Lightning Round with an AI-focused talk. The big idea is that through the process of fine-tuning, network engineers can take a general LLM and tweak it to become a tool to help you understand and interact with network data. Urs shared background on how fine-tuning works, the toolset he uses, and suggestions for how to fine-tune a model without breaking the bank.

FOR THE LULZ 🤣

Shared on the Packet Pushers Slack by Kaj

Sponsors play a role in the automation community, and at AutoCon. At AutoCon3, session attendees heard from three Accelerating Sponsors.

Itential shared two announcements at AutoCon:

1. Itential is partnered with AI network operations vendor Selector.
2. Itential has released a Model Context Protocol (MCP) server.

Peter Sprygada, Chief Architect at Itential and Network Automation Forum Advisory Board member, took the stage to make the MCP server announcement.

Itential's MCP server acts as a middleman between an LLM & services you've created on the Itential platform. This means you can talk to your network via natural language instructions via an LLM of your choice. The LLM will relay that via MCP to Itential which will then perform the action.

Network automation platform vendor Gluware made two significant announcements at AutoCon:

1. Gluware Labs with Community Edition
2. Ansible Integration

Gluware’s Mike Haugh and Olivier Huynh Van announced Gluware Labs, which includes a Community Edition of its network automation software (i.e. free to download and use for one year on 20 devices), plus training materials and a Discord community. Gluware Labs also includes an IDE for customizing Gluware applications, an AI Co-Pilot, Git integrations, and more.

They also announced a partnership with Ansible. That includes an Ansible Collection, which is a set of plug-ins and modules to integrate Gluware into your Ansible. That means you can incorporate complex Gluware automations into a playbook.

NetBrain’s Stan Matthews gave a talk about using automation in day-to-day network operations. NetBrain has built mightily upon that legacy of deep topology discovery & presentation.

Stan showed the NetBrain interface, featuring dashboards that illustrated complex L2 & L3 path discovery, hierarchical device organization, and hover context showing information about links, addressing, path between devices, access-lists attached to interfaces, notations made by engineers, and more.

LAST LAUGH

I kept hearing about Kafka during AutoCon3 in Prague.