Around 8 years ago, I started working with some tools that focused on software engineering collaboration and automation for operations. At the time, CFEngine and Puppet were the main tools promoting this new way of doing operations and sharing within operations and software development. In 2009 Chef was born and I was fortunate enough to join Opscode as the 9th employee as an evangelist preaching this disruptive form of collaboration and automation. At the time a majority of IT infrastructure was managed by what I called the “Bob” of the world. Bob’s scripts, Bob’s directories and Bob 'til death do us part. Trying to explain to Bob the benefits of collaboration and software engineering principles was a hard fought battle. One of the compelling events that helped propel these ideas (what we now call Devops) was cloud computing in the form of IaaS for compute resources. Fast forward to 2014 and these infrastructure automation and collaboration battles still exist but the battles are far less bloody. A new war is emerging in the network operations and engineering space. The same argument for network operations adopting these principles is the same as system ops; however, now the new compelling events are network virtualization and Software Defined Networks in cloud infrastructures. Cloud engineers and network operations are dealing with the complexities of managing a new breed of software based network gear like Arista, Cumulus and Insieme along with virtualized network infrastructure like Openvswitch, Openflow, OpenDaylight Nuage and NSX. Configuration tools are starting to get more sophisticated around these virtualized networks doing things like automated VLAN to Port mapping and basic system hardening. CFEngine, Puppet & Chef have introduced primitives supporting platforms like Cisco, Juniper, Arista and Cumulus Networks. Help us start the discussion of what Devops and the network is going to look like over the next 5 years.
