Podcast

Packet Pushers: Enabling Self-Service Automation & NetDevOps with Itential

Chris Wade

Co-Founder & CTO

Ethan Banks

Packet Pushers

What is NetDevOps & How is it Changing Network Operations?

NetDevOps as a term might feel like a buzzword, and maybe it is. So, what’s it getting at? The idea is to move your network along to the point where it’s self-service. That is, your network can be consumed like public cloud services can be consumed.

To safely provide self-service networking to your organization you have to know how users and business units interact with the network, how to test before and after a change, how ticketing and notification systems are updated, and how changes themselves are codified and pushed into the network..

If you’re on this journey, you’ve probably got some combination of tool spread, co-workers that have come and gone (leaving their artisanal automation artifacts behind), and organizational silos that seem determined to keep what you’re doing separate from what everyone else in IT is doing.

You’re not alone. Most network engineers trying to make automation a reality face the same hurdles. At Itential, we believe automation must be practical to implement and operate, with the goal of getting to NetDevOps and self-service.

How Itential is Making Automation & Self-Service Networking a Reality for Network Engineers

Itential was built with your network in mind. We are a SaaS automation platform that isn’t fragile, but is accessible to teams of all skillsets, and doesn’t insist you throw out your scripts and playbooks, but instead helps you bring every piece of your network under control and into alignment. We are a platform that meets you where you are, leveraging what you have and helps you scale automation to meet the needs of your business, making infrastructure easy to consume and delivered as a service, and making automation practical to implement, leading eventually to NetDevOps and self service automation.

What We Discuss In this Packet Pushers Episode

Itential’s CTO, Chris Wade joins the Packet Pushers Podcast team to discuss how Itential is helping to make network automation practical to implement, and making it easy for NetOps and DevOps teams to work together to support their networks and infrastructure, making it consumable by all. Chris, Ethan, and Greg dive into:

The advent of modern networking technology and the convergence of network and cloud teams through the evolution of hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure
How and why networking will be pivotal as the connective tissue between data centers and cloud.
Building guardrails through validation for network configuration changes
The need to support all skills to drive automation as ‘how we operate networks.’
Using the right tool/right job to allow domain automation – and coordinate across automation with orchestration.
Shifting from maintenance windows to 24/7 operations and the importance of delivering self-service networking.
The importance of being able to expose automations so that end users can consume it, whether it be event driven, form driven, or, or application driven.
How Itential is bridging the gap between NetOps and DevOps with an easy-to-use common platform for automating infrastructure.