Hank Preston

It’s a new year and a new decade, so it’s time for a NEW BLOG about network automation. I am getting ready for Cisco Live Europe 2020 and want to give everyone a preview of some of what I’ll be talking about in my session How DevNet Sandbox Built an Automated Data Center Network in…

Break out the popcorn and candy for the conclusion to my exploration of Network Service based automation and how we’re using it within DevNet Sandbox as part of our own internal automation strategy.  In Part 1 the focus was on what consuming network services was like after they were built, and…

One of the common types of network engineering sleuthing is discovering what changed when the network is behaving differently, but everyone is saying “nothing changed.” In large networks this can be like looking for that needle in a haystack without a magnet… long, tedious, and rew…

Welcome back to my series on how we are putting network automation to work in the DevNet Sandbox.  This time around I wanted todive into some of the deep technical bits on how we’re using automation to configure and manage our network in a “Network Service” based model.   For this…

You don’t need to look hard to see that DevNet is growing, and as DevNet grows, DevNet Sandbox must grow. DevNet Sandbox provides engineers and developers access to Cisco, partner, and open source infrastructure, and software as a service from “the cloud.”  For a variety of reasons…

Eight months ago I joined the DevNet Sandbox Engineering and Operations team. For the first time in about eight years, I was back in a role where I had day to day responsibilities for a production environment. A big reason for my interest in joining this team was to see what it was like to apply the…

Back in March of 2018 I wrote the blog “How Do I Get Started Learning Network Programmability?” to help answer, well that question.  It was (and still is) one of the most common questions I get asked.  It’s been a wicked ride this last year and half in network automation, I figured…

Network automation can be used for many things. The other day Jon Hudson posted a question on Twitter. “Can anyone point me to a Troubleshooting example in an automated network?”.  This was a timely question as I had actually just done that exact thing in the DevNet Sandbox network to he…

NetDevOps Live! Season 2 Starts April 2019 Oh yeah, we’re back and better than ever.  After a relaxing off season made up of multiple Cisco Live events and other conferences, we are back with NetDevOps Live! Season 2.  And in Season 2 we are taking a look at network automation from start to fi…