NetOps Meets DevOps - The State of Network Automation

Modern agile development practices, microservices, containers and cloud infrastructure have combined to empower application developers to innovate faster and update applications more frequently than ever before. This adoption of agile development and operational strategies requires more scalable and flexible infrastructure teams and processes, ensuring that production network, Layer 4-7 application services and applications can scale as needed. Therefore, development and test resources are ready whenever requested.

Network operations teams need the same level of reusable, scalable and software-defined automation to control network resources as systems and cloud administrators have over computing and storage assets. Modern, open-source-driven automation-as- code solutions provide proven technology to accelerate the transformation of network operations using automation to support digital initiatives and DevOps priorities.

At F5 and Red Hat, we were curious about the state of network automation and co-sponsored a survey of more than 400 IT DevOps and NetOps professionals to explore the topic. Our findings identify opportunities where NetOps teams can learn from DevOps best practices, integrate with continuous deployment toolchains and take advantage of modern, open-source- driven automation technologies to create a more agile, business-centric value for tomorrow’s networks.