Training and Transition

The transition phase

The transition phase is likely one of the most painful parts of adopting any new technology. There is a natural resistance to change. Several new tools are being introduced all at once. Stressing the importance of following the new processes for network management is the most important component of a successful transition to network automation.

The philosophy of “automate everything” must be adopted by everyone for this to work. Manual out-of-band changes cannot be tolerated once full automated network configuration management has been put into effect. Conflicts between the manual changes and the source of truth will exist. Most likely, these manual changes will be overwritten and lost the next time an automated change is made. This occurs because the changes were never added to the code repository, which leaves the network potentially impacted with no way to track what happened. Such a hazard exists, and therefore should be avoided at all costs. The staff needs to be educated on the serious and negative consequences of making manual changes.

Training

Network engineers will need a substantial lead ahead of network operations. This is because they will likely be the ones writing the initial playbooks and converting the network to code. Network operations can then be trained on how to execute the playbooks. Over time, more NetDevOps can be adopted, and network operations can start updating the data models and potentially write their own information by gathering playbooks. Meanwhile, the network engineers will continue to write logical templates and potentially more complex, or new, data models.