A globally dispersed, CLI-driven network team faced the need to scale its data center footprint and become more agile.
Manual processes led to wasted skills on repetitive tasks, slow configuration changes, difficult troubleshooting, and a lack of change tracking.
The team transitioned from device-specific configurations to machine-readable formats like YAML and JSON stored in GitHub as the single source of truth.
The team had to strategically create time for process improvement despite being consumed by daily operational tasks and outages.
Inspired by SRE and DevOps teams, the network engineers adopted an agile methodology to replace their traditional box-by-box waterfall approach.
Using GitHub as the source of truth, configurations were treated like software code, deployed programmatically via APIs, and subjected to peer review and testing.
Automation was used to enforce a desired state, manage software versions consistently, and track ownership of network resources like VLANs and IP addresses.
A real-world example shows how automated deployment and QA checks reduced the time to provision over 50 hardware devices from hours to under 15 minutes.
A disciplined, source-controlled process with full configuration replacement eliminates undocumented, one-off "hot fixes" that create long-term instability.
The final result is a 100% version-controlled, auditable network that enables collaboration with other teams who can now contribute using machine-readable code.
44:40Christoph Ruggenthaler
33:20Aarno Aukia
28:34Talia Nassi
45:04Hennie Francis
50:28Zan Markan
37:24Tejas Chopra
36:09Chad Carlson
58:40Christian Strack
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.
Hensoldt Ag.
Hensoldt Ag.
Rocken AG
AllatNet Recruiting GmbH & Co. KG