We’ve been working on automation in HEAnet for many years – our point-to-point service has been automated for well over a decade – but recently things have started to change. Automation is becoming both easier and more necessary. We’ve learned some interesting lessons, and we think they might be useful for our clients as well as ourselves.

What’s changed is tooling. On the one hand, the tools for automation have become more sophisticated and simultaneously easier to deploy (which is an unusual combination.) Many of these tools (such as version control and continuous integration/continuous deployment) come from the area of software development and are now finding uses for themselves in networking. Others (like Ansible) sit atop those software development tools to perform more specialised tasks.

More information to follow....