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Update the index with more information and strategies.
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26 changes: 19 additions & 7 deletions docs/index.md
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# A Perspective of Network Automation

These are all my own opinions and only offer a perspective from my experience working in and along many different organizations. I will try and cover many topics related to network automation and I hope to be able to convey the why, what, how and who of network automation.
These are all my own opinions and only offer a perspective from my experience working in and along many different organizations. I will try and cover many topics related to network automation and I hope to be able to convey the **why**, **what**, **how** and **who** of network automation.

I think the first question we need to ask is **why**?

## Reasons WHY

If we take a look at some of the reasons **why** an organization may want to adopt network automation:
If we take a look at some of the reasons **why** an organization may want to adopt network automation.

- **Enhancing Operational Efficiency** to optimize engineer time to be able to increase business value delivered without increasing the head count linearly.
- **Cost Reduction and Resource Optimization** to reduce the operating and capital costs associated with managing the network.
- **Enhancing Security and Compliance** is critical in today's security landscape and in some industries it is a mandate to retain configuration drift for auditing purposes.

There are a lot more reasons **why** an organization may want to adopt network automation, but I think we need to ask ourselves **why** we may want to adopt network automation.
There are a lot more reasons **why** an organization may want to adopt network automation, but I think we need to ask ourselves **why** we (network engineers) may want to adopt network automation.

- **Provide self-service for the network** to provide simple interfaces for users to consume the network that helps **enhance operational efficiency** AND allows you to get away from constantly logging into devices and provisioning a new VLAN.
- **Manage the network as code** to be able to write tests for network changes, configuration rendering and remediation, etc. to **enhance security and compliance** AND reduces the amount of times you will have to diff two different snapshots to get an answer to your boss ASAP.
- **Telemetry to enable robust alerting and reporting** to allow business units to retrieve valuable network data to make data driven business decisions such as **cost reduction or resource optimization** AND allows you to manage the data collection rather than the reporting and business logic.
- **Provide self-service for the network** to provide simple interfaces for users to consume the network that helps **enhance operational efficiency** AND allows you to get away from constantly logging into devices and provisioning a new VLAN that was needed by the server team yesterday, but they just told you today.
- **Manage the network as code** to be able to write tests for network changes, configuration rendering and remediation, etc. to **enhance security and compliance** AND allows you to automate your documentation of the implementation and rollback tasks before that pesky CAB meeting that nobody listens to anyways.
- **Telemetry to enable robust alerting and reporting** to allow business units to retrieve valuable network data to make data driven business decisions such as **cost reduction or resource optimization** AND allows you to manage the data collection rather than the business logic or color scheme of the report.

I hope these points help tie together that we can both deliver business value that matches our organization's goals and benefit from this shift in **how** we work when we adopt network automation.

## Network Automation Strategies

Expand All @@ -26,6 +28,16 @@ There are many strategies when it comes to network automation adoption, but at t
- **Decentralized**
- **Hybrid**

Overall, each organization needs to determine what benefits they stand to gain from each strategy, but realize that picking a strategy boils down to what each group of engineers are expected to deliver as business value and stay as closely aligned to each groups core competency.

## Network Automation Platform

The platform is a critical component in the decision making process. The requirements need to be clear as to why the platform should exist and what the business problems the platform will be solving, and how users (who) will be able to utilize the platform. In the majority of context, we want to make the platform consumable and easy to use by network engineers.
The platform is a critical component in accelerating automation adoption. The requirements need to be clear as to why the platform should exist, what the business problems the platform will be solving, and how users (**who**) will be utilizing the platform. In the majority of context, we want to make the platform is consumable and simplifies creating automation for network engineers.

The platform should be the foundation and be treated as a product. The platform is typically a bunch of different components(tools) that are integrated together. A few of the benefits of treating the platform as a product.

- The platform will evolve naturally by implementing bug fixes and new features that are raised by users of the platform.
- As the platform matures and new teams are on-boarded to it, they gain the benefits of the features and bug fixes that came before them.
- It allows the users to remain users and focus on their core competency.
- Allows for standardized implementations of common use cases.
- Tailored training for how users can consume the platform and increase speed of adoption.
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# Network Automation Strategies

A strategy is how your organization is structured which will dictate your strategy or may require an organizational update to adhere to the selected strategy.
How the organization is structured typically dictates your automation strategy, but I think it should also be assessed whether your current organization structure causes more friction when attempting to implement automation.

- **Centralized Platform**: This will typically have a larger team or organization that will maintain the tools and components within the Network Automation Platform. Your customers in turn are engineers who utilize the platform to accomplish business objects by building automation and self service automation. This allows the platform organization to understand the needs of customers and the lifecycle of the platform such as bug fixes or new feature requests of the platform.
- **Decentralized Platform**: Each team will have their own automation platform and these may or may not look similar, but each team is responsible for managing their automation platform, but have full control.
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