I wish I were able to work in a large network environment and see for myself why network automation is needed. Sure it’s useful but to what degree? Information highway and highway share one trait: not much flexibility is needed at least that’s the case for small/mid network.
I work for an ISP in a small country and we have to manage more than 100k network devices. Network automation is absolutely a must even on our rather small scale.
At certain points its not “useful”, but mandatory to simply keep functioning. Even small failure and change rates are untenable as device and port counts increase to Very Large numbers. How do you maintain millions of devices? Think on the order of hundreds to thousands if automated remediation workflows for every exception that requires a person in network operations to intervene.
Once you move beyond simple deployment and break/fix theres a huge step function in the change count as well. Networking is far behind on concepts like “continuous deployment” or software updates its not funny. And unlike everyones favorite stateless container of the day networks take coordination to perform intrusive maintenance.
I mostly agree with this sentiment - working for systems integrators over the years, it is very hard to convince me that most corporate customers need network automation solutions, when on average they deploy a new network maybe once every 5 years, and when the deployment is done, it structurally changes very little until the next hardware replacement.
However there are definitely business in the managed service provider, ISP and obviously anyone with a large growing data centre environment where consistency and accuracy in large-scale deployemnts are important.
Most managed service providers and ISP's have developed their own simple "automation" tools for managing customers network. It's easy when the config is mostly the same across all customers.
Exactly, and the change count (add new customer with 50 sites, remove old customer with 100 sites) are big enough to warrant investment of time/money into these tools
