1. When “Automation” Is Just Faster Manual Work
Let’s start with an uncomfortable truth.
Most “network automation” out there today is just manual work… at 10× speed. 😅
You take the same commands you used to type on the CLI, you wrap them in an Ansible playbook or a Python script, and suddenly you can touch 50 devices instead of 5. From a distance, it looks like progress. Internally, it still feels like firefighting, just... more efficiently.
And in a lot of organizations, that’s where the journey stops.
Engineers proudly say, “We’ve automated BGP policy changes!” but what they really mean is “We’ve taught a script to SSH into 80 routers and paste config.” No real pre-checks. No proper blast radius control. No systematic rollback. No telemetry-driven validation. If the script or the human makes a mistake, the only difference is that the outage is now faster and bigger.
Meanwhile, the teams at hyperscale companies figured this out more than a decade ago. They tried the “clever script” phase. They paid for it with outages, late nights, and very expensive lessons. Then they moved on.
The point isn’t that you need to run at their scale. Most networks never will. The point is that they’ve already done the dangerous experiments for you. They’ve shown what works and what doesn’t when you push automation to its limits.
So instead of obsessing over tools such as Ansible vs Nornir vs vendor X’s magic platform, it’s time to ask a better question:
“What if we treated network automation as a software system, not as just a bag of scripts?”
That’s the mindset shift that changes everything.