Last year, we surveyed 400 networking and security professionals in diverse industries, examining an array of factors: automation maturity, adoption, motivations, benefits, cultural behaviors, challenges, NetOps practices and tooling. What resulted was the 2019 State of Network Automation Report (SoNAR). Among the survey findings, the SoNAR results illustrate how network automation tools and behavior affect NetOps, correlating automation with business performance, IT outcomes, and success factors for team and individual work.
Today, Juniper Networks invites you to participate in the second-annual State of Network Automation Report (SoNAR) survey for 2020. This year, we’re pleased to open it to all networking and security IT professionals around the world.
The first 500 respondents will receive a US $50 gift card of their choice and subsequent participants will receive a US $25 gift card (terms and conditions of the survey apply). The survey is straightforward, multiple choice and takes just 15 minutes to complete, covering topics of NetOps domains, multi-vendor technology, automation tooling, processes, culture, team and organizational performance and some basic demographics.
While the survey is only for NetOps and SecOps pros, we welcome others to download last year’s comprehensive 2019 State of Network Automation Report to review the findings.
What’s New in Automation
SoNAR is a great way to advance your automation thinking and education, but traditionally the biggest impediment to automating NetOps has been the technological barrier to entry to gaining hands-on experience. Imagine that you cannot start experimenting in production networks. The lab networks are rare and costly. Virtual networks can be complex and require knowledge of virtualization. And even when you find yourself with a playground, setting up the tools to try something, just to see if it’s useful, can demand many skills that aren’t familiar to most network engineers. Even if they are, all of this painstaking work might simply inform you that this wasn’t the right tool for a given task.
With the introduction of NRE Labs in 2018, Juniper changed all of that. We built online browser-based learning for network automation—free to use (Juniper-sponsored), free of logins and tracking and free to contribute to (100% open source code and community). The barrier to entry to try network automation was now turned on its head. It’s fast, free, easy and fun!
If you aren’t following the NRE Labs learning environment and community at nrelabs.io, check it out! The new and improved NRE Labs website is faster than ever, mobile-friendly and home to new lessons. In the 2019 SoNAR, configuration management tooling ranked as the top of tool function for network automation. It’s safe to say that Ansible is likely the top choice among respondents in this category. Thanks to Red Hat’s contribution, users can now learn Ansible for network automation in NRE Labs. Plus, it’s a multi-vendor lesson, employing Cumulus and Juniper virtual network devices in the topology.
Accelerate: Trend is Not Destiny
Juniper has continuously enabled network automation since it launched its first product. Did you know that originally, Junos only had an API? Then, customers asked us to build a CLI – so we did. And while the CLI of the network OS still dominates NetOps for most practitioners, we’re committed to changing that.
As a company rooted in engineering, we’re obsessive about improving network hardware, software and network architectures, but also deeply passionate about enabling and inspiring others to apply engineering to transform networking operations—culture, practice and tools.
The future is not the CLI, it is the API. The future of change control and intent is not in configurations, it is in networking infrastructure as code and test-driven pipelines. The future of visibility and troubleshooting is not in manual commands and correlation of events and telemetry, it is service-level indicators, intuitive visualizations and automating in continuous improvement in reliability with event-driven infrastructure. The future of regulation and assurance is not in dive-and-catch reaction, but in AI-assisted analytics and real-time AI-driven adjustments.
Our mission is simple: accelerate the journey to an automated future for everyone. We know buyers will reward stewardship into the future and see how Juniper is committed to evolution and flexibility through openness. We demonstrate this with hands-on tools like our contribution and sponsorship of NRE Labs and we’re doing this with industry research and education like SoNAR.
Your Impact
Any good research starts with good data. Compiling the 2020 and future State of Network Automation Reports would not be possible without active participation from industry professionals like you.
While we especially thank our Juniper customers for their contributions, we encourage you to share the survey with your professional peers that may not be Juniper customers. Together, we can capture the best results on the general state of network automation, just as we did last year.
If you’re a networking and security professional, the SoNAR is for you.
The survey won’t stay open for long, so claim your gift card soon and share the survey with your peers using juniper.net/SoNAR.
