The past couple of years I have attended Autocon, a conference organised by the Network Automation Forum. This year, it was located in Munich. As we have never really visited Munich before, we decided to go to Munich a few days before the conference so we could explore the city together. We traveled by (international) train (first time in a ICE for me) all in all it was great experience.

Intro

This is a two part blog, I’ll start with the city-visit, if you want to only read about the conference feel free to skip it.

Citytrip

Day 1: Friday

First we dropped off Wulf at the kennel in Hipolytushoef, not really the right way to go to Munich, but it is a really nice place for him, so absolutely worth it. Because we arrived late in the evening and because we were tired from traveling, we decided to just grab a quick pizza and eat it at the hotel. We got a pizza from Dr. Drooly’s which is a really nice small pizza shop, closeish to our hotel.

Day 2: Saturday

We started with a nice breakfast at Vollaths, really relaxed atmosphere, and great food. After we walked around the city center for a short while and visited the globetrotter (our favourite outdoor gear shop). We were just in time for our cycling tour around the city. We had a nice guide named Scot, who was originally from New York but now spent his days showing people around Munich. We really liked the tour and really liked cycling around Munich, perfect way to view a city. Opera After the tour we had some more time to sightsee and had a quick dinner at Bahnwärter Thiel, which is a sort of small version of the RAW gelande in Berlin. The dinner was ok, but not great. After this we were both tired so we just relaxed in our hotel room.

Day 3: Sunday

We didn’t make concrete plans for sunday, so we decided to go to the Olympia Park, which is the ‘72 Olympics location. It’s pretty cool that most of the sportsfacilities are still being used many years later. When we were finished with the park, we quickly looked around the BMW experience, nice cars but a little outside our price-range ;). Then we didn’t really know what we wanted to do, so we checked googlemaps for options, and we decided to visit the Nymphenburg Palace gardens, which again was really nice, though a bit busy. Lastly we had a really nice dinner planned at ELSA, which was really good german food in a modern style. If you visit Munich, I would plan a dinner there. ELSA Tomorrow Ante will train home, and I will go the conference.

Autocon

Autocon is a conference about network automation, there are workshops and talks, all focused on network automation in the broadest sense of the word.

Workshops

I visited four workshops during the first two days of the conference. The ones that stood out were, “AI for the Networking Curious” by Eric Chou, and “Modern Network Observability” by Christian Adell and David Flores. The first one, was a really good introduction to using A.I. in a deterministic way, with some nice network focused examples, during the workshop there was also dialog about use-cases for A.I. but also some concerns etc. I really recommend speaking with Eric if you have the chance. The second workshop about Observability was also really good, I am currently not doing anywhere near enough with Observability and this workshop inspired me to improve that area. Currently working on getting streaming-telemetry working with my network, and combining that info with info from our SoT (netbox).

Talks

The talks this year were split into multiple tracks on thursday, as I have only attended the general track I can’t comment on the other tracks, I’m looking forward to the youtube uploads of both the NAF framework track and the Leadership track. The presentations that resonated the most with me were;

“The Cognitive Biases Impacting Network Automation” by Michael Bushong, a really interesting talk about cognitive biases, especially on how to frame your automation solutions so you can sell them better, either to your own management or to customers.
“Rethinking Network Monitoring” by Christian Adell & David Flores, somewhat similar to their workshop, but a great intro for everyone who didn’t do their workshop.
“Lessons Learned Testing Network Automation Solutions” by Ivan Pepelnjak, I’ve always been a fan of Ivan’s blog, and have followed it over the years, the presentation was interesting, and the delivery good. There is still a lot of work to be done in QA for most vendors.
“Automating firewall rule deployment in a highly regulated environment” by João Soares, nice lightning talk about firewall rules, which is something we still struggle with in our own automation. All in all the talks were good, but there was a little bit to much repetition, it would be nice to have a little more in depth presentations next year.

Socials / Hallway track

This year there were even more social events, both by NAF and vendors so it was a very busy week, I enjoyed speaking to former colleagues and people i’ve met over the last few years. This is the most valuable part of the conference in my opinion.

Conclusion

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time in Munich, and I will be starting on observability right away. After implementing gNMI + logging + prometheus integrations with netbox, I will be focusing on improving our testing setup when we update our templates, we will of course be using containerlab for this, as there are finally usable JunOS containers to do testing.