AutoCon 3: Key Insights and Takeaways from the Future of Network Automation

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Autcon is the leading international conference dedicated to network automation, orchestration, and observability. It is organized by the Network Automation Forum (NAF) and the first edition - Autocon 0 - was held in 2023 in the United States. It is a crucial gathering point for experienced network automation engineers, novices that are just beginning their automation journey and vendors of network automation platforms and tools. Besides the series of talks that present best practices, case studies and lessons learned from real-world automation deployments, Autocon also provides workshops for attendees interested in getting some hands-on experience. This year's workshops covered topics like SoT, Orchestration, Observability, AI, Ansible, Nornir, NAPALM, Jinja, Python, gRPC, data modeling, low-code, and more.

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At Technofy we jumped at the opportunity to attend this year's conference, held in the beautiful city of Prague, and to meet colleagues, clients, partners and network automation comrades. AutoCon 3 had a great selection of talks that included really insightful and thought provoking presentations, mixed with interesting case studies and even a few entry-level ones.   

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Three Important highlights from AutoCon 3

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Everyone starts the same way. And yes, it's okay to suck in the beginning. 

It is a pattern that was clearly visible - not only was it mentioned in several talks, but you could also hear it in casual conversations with fellow attendees: everyone starts the same way. We start the idea of automating a small task, just barely dipping our toes. We look for options and very often the first choice is Ansible. And it's great, for a while. Then, as our eyes open to the prospects of automating more and more things, there comes a point when Ansible no longer does it very well. Long execution time and sifting through huge wall-of-text outputs in order to debug failing playbooks are just some of the issues. So naturally we move to something else. It could be homegrown Python scripts, perhaps living on network engineers laptops instead of on an SCM. But these are just the first steps of an iterative process of improvement. The point is - implementing network automation within your organization is a marathon, not a sprint.

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AI is here to stay

AI was a prominent and impactful topic at Autocon 3, reflecting its rapidly growing importance in network automation. We saw AI being a part of several insightful talks, like Urs Baumann's Teaching “old” LLMs new tricks, focused on using LLMs for network automation cases. Javier Antich's Network Event Correlation: Stories to Keep You Awake provided an interesting take on using AI for network event correlation, especially in comparison with the traditional methods of doing it. 

In addition, several vendors have AI-enabled solutions at Autocon 3. Itential presented an orchestration and governance layer built on the Model Context Protocol (MCP) which allows the integration of AI systems (LLMs, agents) with the Itential platform. Another presence in Autocon 3, Gluware, provides AI-driven network automation through their Gluware.ai and Gluware Co-Pilot for network operators. NetBrain, another one of Autcon's Accelerating Sponsors, provides AI-assisted network troubleshooting within their intent-based automation platform.

The conclusion is clear - within the network automation world AI is here to stay. The practical implementations of it are already here, augmenting network engineer's capabilities. The question is do you use AI within your network automation, and how?

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AutoCon is an awesome place for networking

With its diverse mix of participants, ranging from engineers, architects and developers to vendors and consultants, AutoCon is an excellent place for networking! The schedule at AutoCon 3 was perfectly timed to allow for time for making new connections during breaks in-between talks and during lunch breaks. In addition to that, the Birds of a Feather meetings provided the perfect opportunity to meet people that are in the same proverbial boat as you. You're interested in Data Modeling because this is what you've been working on recently within your organization? Great - join the Network Automation Schemas and Data Modeling BoF session, hosted by Claudia de Luna. You're trying to decide on whether you should choose a vendor-based solution for your automation effort or an open source one? Head to the Vendor vs Open source vs Mix table, hosted by Ivana Duvnjak. Other BoF sessions this year included topics like Observability automation, Leveraging AI/ML and Getting Started with Network Automation.

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Finally, the vendor's booths at AutoCon 3 completed the networking experience. In most cases you could speak not just to sales people, but also with the engineers and developers behind the products. You could easily hop from Netbox Labs' booth to Network to Code's booth (the company behind Nautobot, a Netbox fork) and then arrive at OpsMills' booth (creator of Infrahub) in your Source of Truth solution research. 

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AutoCon 3 was a tremendously valuable event for everyone in the relatively new field of network automation. We'd like to thank Network Automation Forum for the insightful and interesting talks, practical workshops and excellent networking opportunities. See you at Autocon 4!

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