Why this site exists
A place to write down what production network automation actually looks like — the failures included.
There is a lot of network automation content that stops at “I connected to a switch with Netmiko.” There is very little about what happens on day 400, when the automation owns thousands of devices across multiple tenants and a single list operation in a config generator silently reorders every RADIUS method list in the estate.
This site is for the day-400 problems.
Most posts here will be a war story: one concrete problem, what I tried, what actually fixed it, and the part that generalizes to your environment. The ground I cover is Nautobot in production — Golden Config, SSoT, SD-WAN design generation, ZTP — and the CI/CD that keeps it repeatable.
A few rules I hold myself to:
- Real problems, real fixes. No tutorials reposted from docs. If I didn’t hit it in anger, I don’t write it up.
- Patterns, not proprietary details. Everything here is about the lesson, reproduced or generalized. No employer’s internal systems show up by name.
- The failures stay in. The wrong turn is usually the most useful part.
If that’s your kind of thing, the RSS feed is the honest way to follow along. New writing roughly weekly.