DevCentral Connects: An Automation Journey

A colleague, Dan Pacheco, our F5 guru, and I joined the F5 DevCentral Connects podcast to do a show and tell of our AzureDevOps CI/CD treating F5 as infrastructure as code with their AS3 API and Ansible! If you wonder what a CI/CD pipeline looks like or how to really automate infrastructure with an API, data models, Jinja2 templates creating JSON, and Ansible URI module all packaged up in a Docker container that is build and released from Git triggers like a Pull Request!

Check out the video here

AnsibleFest 2020

Wow! I was actually invited to present a 30-minute break-out session at AnsibleFest! Incredible!

You can still watch the session by registering for free and searching for my name or “Automate Your Network: Introducing the Modern Approach to Enterprise Network Management” in the session catalogue.

AnsibleFest 2020

My presentation is also available on my GitHub repository.

https://github.com/automateyournetwork/ansiblefest2020


BlueCat: Critical Conversations on Critical Infrastructure Ep. 1: “Where’s the automation ‘Promised Land’?”

I was invited by BlueCat to join a round-table discussion with 4 other IT professionals to have an open and honest discuss about the automation “Promised Land”

“Six non-hype network automation lessons from IT pros. Five IT pros get real about network automation during the first Critical Conversation on Critical Infrastructure hosted in the Network VIP community.”

Watch it here

Hello World!

My first Hello World! was not actually a true programming language test – in fact it was the first message I sent over telephone lines on my 2400-baud modem to another BBS (Bulletin Board System for anybody not familiar with pre-Internet computer networking) system admin who was helping me setup “The Backspace BBS” back in 1990. Seeing the words “Hello World!” typed out (slowly) across the monitor of my x286 – typed by “somebody else” out there in the world behind their computer was a memory I will never forget. My fascination and lifelong journey with computer networking had begun!

This Hello World! is equally miraculous given I registered the domain name, hosting space and a Linux platform. From there I installed WordPress on my Linux host out in the cloud somewhere, all via my browser with easy point and click steps. A few minutes of WordPress customization later and boom – I’ve established a place where I can share my journey in this world as a network engineer, and, more specifically, my transformation and metamorphosis into more of a solution developer using DevOps tools and treating infrastructure as code. It is a pretty amazing world we live in where I can do all of this from my home office in about 45 minutes from scratch.

Here I will share my thoughts on infrastructure as code and network automation; discuss the tools and techniques I am using to achieve my goals, and provide as much guidance and insight into my process. In addition to being a Sr. IT Planner and Integrator for the Canadian House of Commons (Parliament) (but this site is strictly my personal thoughts and opinions which are *not* endorsed by the House of Commons), I am also an author. Check out the Books link for information about my first book, “Automate Your Network: Introducing the Modern Approach to Enterprise Network Management”, as well as my upcoming follow-up “Automate Your Network: APIs for Infrastructure”.

Thank you for joining me on this journey – we are going to learn a lot from each other !

I wonder what my next Hello World! will be created with! Only time will tell!