Software Gone Wild by ipSpace.net

I stopped tracking the (lack of) progress in network automation years ago, when I realized I had nothing new to say. As an eternal optimist, I hoped I was just missing something, but Urs Baumann (the guest of Software Gone Wild Episode 206) destroyed my hopes when he said, “I can still use the same slides I created 10 years ago”. On a more positive note, he recently completed his Master’s thesis on AI in network engineering, so we ended with a nice chat on its potential impact.

Whenever I’m ranting about vendors changing their data models or APIs with every other release, there is inevitably a vendor engineer chiming in, saying, “Life would be so much better if the customers wouldn’t insist on doing screen scraping for the last 50 years.”

While some of that screen scraping is pure inertia, we sometimes have good reasons to do it rather than use protocols like NETCONF, gNMI, or protobufs. In Episode 205 of Software Gone Wild, I’m discussing some of those reasons and exploring the gap between vendor theory and reality with Dinesh Dutt, who is unlucky enough to have become the world’s foremost expert on crappy network telemetry.

Why do we need Infrahub, another network automation tool? What does it bring to the table, who should be using it, and why is it using a graph database internally?

I discussed these questions with Damien Garros, the driving force behind Infrahub, the founder of OpsMill (the company developing it), and a speaker in the ipSpace.net Network Automation course.

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The first IPv6 specs were published in 1995, and yet 30 years later, we still have a pretty active IETF working group focused on “developing guidelines for the deployment and operation of new and existing IPv6 networks.” (taken from the old charter; they updated it in late October 2025). Why is it taking so long, and what problems are they trying to solve?

Nick Buraglio, one of the working group chairs, provided some answers in Episode 203 of the Software Gone Wild podcast.

In March 2024, I received my first PR from an airplane: Sander Steffann was flying to South Africa to deliver an Ansible training and fixed a minor annoyance in the then-new multilab feature.

Of course, I wanted to know more about his setup, but it took us over a year and a half till we managed to sit down (virtually) and chat about it, the state of IPv6, the impact of CG-NAT on fraud prevention, and why digital twins don’t make sense in large datacenter migrations.