Evolving Network Automation: Why Speed Alone Is Not the Goal

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The Network Hasn’t Changed… But Expectations Have

And the automation you’ve adopted might be making things worse, not better.

Every network still needs to be available, secure, fast, and invisible. But today's automation practices are increasing fragility, not reducing it. Here's why network usability, state consistency, and business alignment matter more than speed alone, and what you should do instead.

The Core Requirements Haven’t Changed

No matter how many layers we’ve added, no matter how the topology shifts: the foundational requirements of networking remain the same.

Whether you’re a telco, cloud provider, enterprise, SaaS platform, or even a government, your network must deliver:

• High Availability: Downtime, in any form, is unacceptable. Some 9s are table stakes.

• Resilience: Networks must withstand multiple simultaneous failures, including links, paths, control plane anomalies, and self-heal with minimal impact.

• Security by Design: Not bolted on after deployment, but baked in from day zero, from device hardening to trust models and key management.

• Consistent Performance: Predictable behavior across traffic classes, with deterministic latency, jitter, and throughput.

• Scalability and Interoperability: It must grow, evolve, and integrate with other environments without ripping and replacing.

• Usability and Invisibility: Because users don't interact with the network or think about the network. They should only experience fast, secure, reliable applications. The network must remain invisible and not get in the users’ way.

So what changed?

The Pressure Curve Is Rising

While the requirements mentioned above haven’t changed, the intensity has skyrocketed.

Today’s environments are multi-cloud, edge-distributed, and globally available. SLAs are tighter, attack surfaces are larger, and expectations from users, regulators, and product teams are unforgiving.

The network is no longer just plumbing; it’s critical business logic. It must:

• Adapt dynamically to workloads.

• Serve as a policy enforcement point.

• Deliver telemetry and observability at very short intervals.

• Recover from failure before anyone notices.

And so… automation arrived as the savior.

But it didn’t always work.

When Network Automation Goes Wrong

The network engineering community, long skilled at mastering protocols, diagrams, and CLI, recognized the need to modernize.

So, we learned Python. We adopted YAML, JSON, XML, Jinja. We wrote scripts. We pushed configs via APIs instead of SSH. This shift was real. Necessary. Even urgent.

But as with all evolutions, we’ve hit growing pains.

Let’s examine the problems introduced when automation is treated as the end goal rather than a method to express intent and enforce correctness.

Problem 1: Script Proliferation and Silos

In many orgs, every engineer writes their own scripts for various purposes, including provisioning, failover testing, interface templates, ACL pushes…

Before long:

• You have 10 different ways to configure a BGP peer.

• There’s no code reuse, only copy-paste.

• When someone leaves, their scripts die with them.

This is how spaghetti automation happens. It’s no better than doing things manually.

Problem 2: Inconsistent Network State

Automation doesn’t guarantee consistency. If anything, it amplifies inconsistency faster.

When engineers run different scripts with overlapping logic, configuration drift emerges:

• Interfaces tagged inconsistently.

• Routing policies behave differently across sites.

• QoS parameters misaligned with service expectations.

Without a single source of truth and state validation, you’re just automating chaos.

Let me elaborate on this idea so you can get a better sense of what I'm trying to convey. Several posts in this newsletter will touch on this concept:

Automation, by itself, is not a silver bullet for consistency. In fact, when implemented without discipline, it becomes a powerful amplifier of chaos. Consider a scenario where multiple engineers independently create automation scripts to manage similar parts of the network, VLAN provisioning, route redistribution, ACLs, or interface descriptions.

Without a unified model or governance, these scripts often have subtle differences in logic, formatting, and assumptions. While each may function correctly in isolation, the moment they overlap, like targeting the same devices or configurations, they introduce unpredictable behaviors and configuration drift.

The result is a fragmented network state that diverges from the original intent, often without clear visibility into what changed, when, or why.

This fragmentation is particularly dangerous because automation operates at speed. In a manual world, inconsistency spreads slowly, one CLI command at a time.

In an automated world, a single misaligned script can propagate incorrect configurations across hundreds of devices in seconds. The more automation you add without a shared source of truth, version control, or validation framework, the faster the entropy builds.

In this sense, automation is not inherently a solution. It is a force multiplier. Whether it multiplies good or harm depends entirely on the design discipline, operational maturity, and the presence of rigorous safeguards around its use.