For the last 20 years that I’ve been working in the networking sector, I’ve seen lots of new concepts/trends such as Software Defined networks, virtualization of the network or IoT, but there is one that picked my interest more than the rest: network automation.
I’m sure most of you remember, from a few years ago, there was this fear among network engineers around network automation, and the fact that all network engineers should be able to program in Python like proper developers.
Even though this is not 100% completely true, there has been this change on our sector where automation is not a ‘nice to have’ skill, it’s a ‘must have’ skill.
One of the situations that confirmed my suspicions was during a meeting with a big European ISP discussing service assurance last July. During the meeting we discussed topics such as fault management and performance monitoring, but a big part of the meeting was around network automation.
What surprised me during this meeting was the level of knowledge/detail of network automation that the customer had. A couple of years ago you could talk to people about network automation, and people were aware of it, but on this meeting the customer was not asking simple questions about how we can perform closed-loop automation or self-healing workflows, they were asking more detailed questions, things like:
- How can the automation workflows be integrated with GitHub?
- Is your tool compatible with CI/CD pipelines? Is Jenkins supported?
- Does your tool has no-code capabilities?
- What programming languages does your no-code tool support?

Github integration is essential
Their questions show the level of maturity that corporations have around network automation, and how they have rapidly moved from network + automation where automation is not an ‘added value’ feature, to Automation + network where automation is part of the foundation of the network. Corporations design their network with automation in it, it’s not an afterthought anymore.

DevOps concepts like CI/CD pipeline are applied to Network Automation
IT’efication of the network
This aligns with a concept that I learned during the last MWC in Barcelona, the IT’efication of the network.
This concept explains how the network is following the same steps than IT followed. Things like virtualization, a concept that started 25 years ago with the virtualization of physical servers, now is also impacting technologies like 5G.
Another example is the containerization of network functions, that used to run in dedicated physical boxes, now it can run in platforms like OpenShift. Or even concepts like orchestration where a deployment of a new service is completely automated, now is also available for technologies such as SDWAN, Network as a Service or 5G networks.

Microservices architect is an important part of 5G for scaling and self-healing
As a network engineer, do you need to learn Python?
My first answer to this question is that learning Python is always a good move but wouldn’t say that is a requirement (although highly recommended). Based on the feedback that I’m getting from companies, I think they understand they need automation, but this can be fulfilled with orchestration and no-code automation tools. Python or other programming languages are very useful, but you cannot base your whole automation strategy on isolated scripts, that doesn’t work on new complex technologies.
Also, the need of providing high velocity delivering new services/solutions and the requirement of maintaining legacy automations is pushing companies to the use of no-code solutions to help with these requirements.
But bear in mind that most of the no-code tools (also known as low-code automation) also can ingest code (Python, Javascript/NodeJS being the most common ones) because in some situations that is going to be more time/cost effective than using the native functionality of the no-code tool.

No-Code tools accelerates network automation