Why NetOps Is Still Stuck in the Stone Age

Two Worlds, One Disparity

Take a moment to look at the image above.

On the left, you've got the DevOps world: sleek offices, top-notch tooling, and deployment pipelines running on autopilot. Engineers are sipping coffee while robots handle production workloads. It's all about orchestration, abstraction, automation, and observability.

On the right? NetOps in the Stone Age. Engineers are barefoot, hunched over chisels and stone tablets, manually etching code into rock. They're surrounded by primitive huts and beasts of burden. It’s funny because it’s true.

This isn’t just a cartoon. It’s a brutally accurate depiction of a gap that has only grown wider in recent years.

While the layers above the network, like applications, services, compute workloads, containers, VMs, and databases, have undergone profound automation revolutions, the network itself has remained largely artisanal, operated by humans typing command after command into CLI terminals, hoping not to break something with a misplaced space or a forgotten no.

The Paradox of Progress

Here’s the paradox: all modern digital infrastructure depends entirely on the network, and yet the processes to build, maintain, and operate it are stuck in the past.

DevOps and platform engineering teams have:

• Fully automated build-test-deploy cycles

• Self-service portals for infrastructure provisioning

• Auto-scaling workloads and zero-downtime rollouts

• Observability stacks that light up anomalies before they become incidents

Meanwhile, in the networking world:

• Engineers still log into individual devices to push changes

• Network state is often stored in a dozen engineers’ heads

• Incident response starts with “let me SSH into that router”

• Configuration rollback? Maybe… if someone remembered to copy-paste the last working state

We’re not exaggerating. We’ve seen Fortune 100 enterprises, global carriers, major banks, and even tech companies still operating in this fragmented, manual, “CLI-first” mode. In many of them, automation means running a Python script from a laptop.

This Isn’t a Rant. It’s a Call to Evolve

This article isn’t meant to shame or mock network engineers, far from it. The truth is that the tooling hasn’t evolved fast enough, the culture hasn’t shifted boldly enough, and the training hasn’t caught up.

We’re here to raise awareness, highlight the consequences of this disparity, and chart a path forward. Because, at some point, the cost of not automating your network becomes greater than the cost of doing it wrong.

And the longer we delay, the harder the transition will be.

It’s time to stop romanticizing our CLI reflexes and start thinking about networks as software-driven systems, ones that must be declared, validated, versioned, tested, monitored, and evolved just like any other digital platform.

The rest of this piece will unpack what’s really holding NetOps back, why “scripts” aren’t enough, and what real network automation actually looks like beyond the buzzwords.

Let’s dig in.

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