Where’s the community for network automation?

Lots of small projects, lack of community

I’ve been working in the tech industry now for about 7 or 8 years. While that’s not a huge amount of time, I have jumped all over the operations spectrum. Starting in a call center fixing AT&T DSL connections, interned at a small IT outsourcing shop, building “private clouds,” doing the DevOps thing, and now I spend a lot of time playing with routers.

Through out my various positions, I’ve always been able to find free and open source software with amazing communities built around them. It’s been easy to submit patches on GitHub, find advice on Freenode, or keep up with the latest news on Reddit (or hacker news).

Maybe I’m not looking hard enough, but it would appear the community around network automation is scattered through a few different medias. There are a lot of smart people with great aspirations, but there seems to be a lack of communal direction. Everything is spread thin between Twitter, Google+ (yes really), and a few small IRC channels.

You’ve got amazing work being done by Jeremy Schulman to bring network devices (junos at the moment) up to par with a standard Linux box. Meaning he’s got something together for deploying brand new devices, puppet running on junos, and his latest work appears to make using NETCONF as simple as possible.

When you’re trying to work on massive amounts of systems in parallel, I came across Jathan McCollum, who’s got a pretty impressive amount of code exposing the CLI and NETCONF over a variety of different vendors.

Digging a bit deeper into network protocol manipulation, you’re likely to run into Thomas Mangin who makes it fairly trivial to modify BGP routes using software.

To be fair, I’ve only been looking into network automation stuff for the last few months. I know there are plenty of other great projects out there, and people talking about white box networking devices, but we need more collaboration and knowledge share. If you’ve done something cool or exicting with the network, be proud of it and get the word out.