Chris, What do you mean by “If you have enable on a production network”? -mel “nouning verbs weirds them” On Sep 22, 2025, at 9:58 AM, Chris Grundemann via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote: Tl;dr: If you have enable on a production network, we need YOU to respond (no automation experience required): https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/StateOfNetworkAutomation_2025 The 2025 State of Network Automation Survey closes in two short weeks! *Deadline to respond is noon MDT (GMT-0600) on Monday, 6 September.* This survey is for anyone who operates a network; meaning you have edit ('enable') access to switches, routers, firewalls, or optical transport equipment on a production network, or you lead a team that does. All experience levels welcome! Even if you have zero automation experience, your response is valuable. Those with more advanced automation will see additional questions. All responses are anonymous, and only aggregate data will be published by the Network Automation Forum. If you already took this year's survey - please consider sharing the survey link with others to help ensure the widest possible reach. Thanks! ~Chris PS - We have had an amazing response, with almost 400 respondents (382 as of right now); after you complete the survey you will instantly see how all those others responded. And the more responses we get, the more useful and powerful the final results will be for all of us. PPS - The NANOG PC has scheduled the survey results readout for NANOG 95 on Tuesday after lunch: https://nanog.org/events/nanog-95/agenda/ On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 3:39 PM Chris Grundemann <cgrundemann@gmail.com> wrote: Hey all! It's that time of year again... Survey time. The 2025 State of Network Automation Survey is open!!! No automation experience required - please share with everyone who has edit access on a production network, regardless of how automated that network might be. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/StateOfNetworkAutomation_2025 For consistency, and ability to track trends, most of the questions are word-for-word repeats from prior years surveys. This year I deleted a few questions that don't seem relevant anymore, and I made a few questions optional, rather than required, in hopes of MANY more responses -- I also built in some logic, so that *folks who have ZERO network automation experience / deployment can still answer the survey easily*, in hopes of more accurate data collection. There are also some new questions, all suggested by the Network Automation Forum community. Finally, you will notice that we (now with NAF backing) moved off of the free Google form to a much sleeker SurveyMonkey survey. w00t Again - we invite anyone and everyone with enable on a production network to complete the survey, and we hope that everyone here will share the survey in other foraa as well - mailing lists, newsletters, social media, discord, slack, reddit, etc, etc. Survey results have been submitted as a talk for NANOG 95 in October. And will be available publically one way or another before the end of the year. Thanks! ~Chris -- @ChrisGrundemann http://chrisgrundemann.com _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/message/DQWEQSG3...

Chris- The same general trends have held true for 2 decades by now. - Current tooling usually gets written with current languages and frameworks. - Older tooling stays around until it's required to be replaced. - Everyone automates some things , nobody automates everything. If I am a network operator thinking of automating more of my infrastructure, I want to know more about what ideas work, what ones don't, and WHY they worked or didn't, so I can make informed choices about doing what might work for me. Knowing what % of the limited respondents use Golang doesn't help me decide it Golang is something I should consider for my use cases. Respectfully, it feels like these surveys are just vehicles for market research and an opportunity to get on stage at NANOG and other events. ( And note for the PC members on the list : It seems quite odd to accept a presentation to present survey results when the survey itself is still ongoing. How did you review the survey results to decide if they were meaningful and valuable for the community if those results aren't even in yet? ) On Mon, Sep 22, 2025 at 12:58 PM Chris Grundemann via NANOG < nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:

Tl;dr: If you have enable on a production network, we need YOU to respond (no automation experience required): https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/StateOfNetworkAutomation_2025

The 2025 State of Network Automation Survey closes in two short weeks! *Deadline to respond is noon MDT (GMT-0600) on Monday, 6 September.*

This survey is for anyone who operates a network; meaning you have edit ('enable') access to switches, routers, firewalls, or optical transport equipment on a production network, or you lead a team that does.

All experience levels welcome! Even if you have zero automation experience, your response is valuable. Those with more advanced automation will see additional questions.

All responses are anonymous, and only aggregate data will be published by the Network Automation Forum.

If you already took this year's survey - please consider sharing the survey link with others to help ensure the widest possible reach.

Thanks! ~Chris

PS - We have had an amazing response, with almost 400 respondents (382 as of right now); after you complete the survey you will instantly see how all those others responded. And the more responses we get, the more useful and powerful the final results will be for all of us.

PPS - The NANOG PC has scheduled the survey results readout for NANOG 95 on Tuesday after lunch: https://nanog.org/events/nanog-95/agenda/

On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 3:39 PM Chris Grundemann <cgrundemann@gmail.com> wrote:

...

Hey all! It's that time of year again... Survey time.

The 2025 State of Network Automation Survey is open!!!

No automation experience required - please share with everyone who has edit access on a production network, regardless of how automated that network might be.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/StateOfNetworkAutomation_2025

For consistency, and ability to track trends, most of the questions are word-for-word repeats from prior years surveys. This year I deleted a few questions that don't seem relevant anymore, and I made a few questions optional, rather than required, in hopes of MANY more responses -- I also built in some logic, so that *folks who have ZERO network automation experience / deployment can still answer the survey easily*, in hopes of more accurate data collection.

There are also some new questions, all suggested by the Network Automation Forum community.

Finally, you will notice that we (now with NAF backing) moved off of the free Google form to a much sleeker SurveyMonkey survey. w00t

Again - we invite anyone and everyone with enable on a production network to complete the survey, and we hope that everyone here will share the survey in other foraa as well - mailing lists, newsletters, social media, discord, slack, reddit, etc, etc.

Survey results have been submitted as a talk for NANOG 95 in October. And will be available publically one way or another before the end of the year.

Thanks! ~Chris

-- @ChrisGrundemann http://chrisgrundemann.com _______________________________________________ NANOG mailing list

https://lists.nanog.org/archives/list/nanog@lists.nanog.org/message/DQWEQSG3...

On Mon, 22 Sept 2025 at 21:11, Tom Beecher via NANOG <nanog@lists.nanog.org> wrote:

- Current tooling usually gets written with current languages and frameworks. - Older tooling stays around until it's required to be replaced. - Everyone automates some things , nobody automates everything.

Coworker was looking at Ariasta AVD and it made me realise how little will any of this ever help the type of networks I work with. This higher-level provisioning addresses well the needs of DC nodes, but not DC edge or SP. And even cloudy shops don't care much about DC edge, as even hyperscalers largely write things like BGP policies by hand. Because you touch them very rarely, and for most they are very simple, there is not much to be won for a problem that is much harder to solve than bringing up interfaces. Does the community have any appetite for some type of gRPC BGP policy API? I'm thinking of a streaming API, with concerns for latency, possibly concerns for being SIMDable (otoh that may be ridiculous micro-optimization, as long as the API pipelines). The API would send pre-policy adjribin prefixes to some host over gRPC, and gRPC would respond with action that the device should take for that prefix (reject, accept, prepend, add/remove community etc). Of course we should recommend that vendors offer the ability to run the gRPC server on the local RE as well, so you can keep this entirely distributed without circular dependencies forming. I think very few would extract a lot of value from this. For us particularly almost all our config complexity is in BGP policies, and there is no work happening to reduce pain here. This would allow you to write your own policy engine in whatever language you want and then drop that server in any any-vendor RE for platform agnostic BGP policies. The alternative option, having some common policy language is far more unreasonable ask. -- ++ytti