In case you don’t follow Ivan Pepelnjak’s blog (and if not, why not?), I was honored – and a little shy – to be asked to talk to him about my “F-Script” and programming in general, as part of his new podcast series “Software Gone Wild”.
To quote Ivan’s post:
John Herbert has started writing network automation tools more than 20 years ago and was willing to share his experiences in Episode 3 of Software Gone Wild in which we initially discussed his journey from simple Perl script to a distributed configuration analysis tool (the F-script, but quickly diverged into all sorts of topics including:
– Support for numerous unique snowflakes (aka customer networks);
– The dismal NETCONF implementations we have to deal with today;
– The need for NETCONF fingerprinting because no two vendors manage to read the – NETCONF standards the same way;
– Multi-platform considerations;
– The challenges of doing everything on your own (including supporting your code indefinitely).
I had a blast talking to Ivan (it’s kind of like being granted an audience with the deity or other idol of your preference), and if you do spend the time listening to the podcast, I hope you get something out of it.
Hi John,
I like your post about the F-script, your thinking behind it, and I’m also interested in the topic of programming for network automation. I also like Ivan’s blog and his insights.
Your blog is added to my feed reader!
Gr
Thank you for the feedback! Ivan’s blog is great – a staple on my ‘networking blogs’ RSS list.
And thanks again for taking the time for out chat – I absolutely enjoyed it, and I hope others will as well 😉
Hi John – I’ve been reading many posts across our space and agree with a lot of the concerns/issues with “scripts gone wild”. If you recall I made the same joke/comment at my NFD5 presentation. So now I’m doing something about it. I’m pleased to announce that I’ve launched “Schprokits” – the first (?) network automation framework company that will give to NetOps what tools like Puppet/Chef/Ansible gave to DevOps. I just left Juniper to do this, so hopefully will have some good stuff to bring forward in about a month or so. Stay tuned!
Sounds great, Jeremy! I will be looking forward to seeing what Schprokits produces and hopefully trying it out too. Good luck with your new venture!
I have to ask – any relation to the SNL “Sprockets” sketch? 😉