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We are halfway through Season 3 of NetDevOps Live! (okay, slightly over halfway through) and it’s been everything I had hoped it would be.

NetDevOps Live! April 2020
4 Amazing Episodes in April 2020 looked at Ansible, GitLab, Batfish and HashiCorp

We started off super strong with a network automation favorite in Ansible.  It was wonderful having a chance to speak with both Andrius and Sean about what’s happened recently with Ansible for networking, and what’s coming in 2.10.  I for one understand the whole “collection” thing much better.  If you missed us live, or just wanna revisit it, you can catch the episode on-demand anytime you want.

In Episode 2 we went right to fundamentals of all things programmability with a dive into git and GitLab (no I didn’t misspell GitHub ?).  As a former Cisco guy, Brad understands what it takes to dive into automation as a network engineer, and really helped highlight the importance of good source control, as well as how GitLab is an excellent option for every team looking for a code and collaboration tool.

Without a doubt Batfish has the coolest logo for this season, but there’s so much more to this excellent network validation and health tool from Intentionet.  Samir was kind enough to join me for Episode 3 and talk about the problem Batfish is trying to solve, and gave an EXCELLENT demonstration the tool in action.  Our discussion and chat helped me understand use cases and opportunities to try out Batfish in my environment.

And rounding out April on NetDevOps Live! saw a long time friend of the show, Kevin Corbin, join me once again to dive into some new ideas and ways of looking at network automation and changing assumptions and ideas. I could probably do a whole season of NetDevOps Live! on the tools from HashiCorp (if that sounds good let me know in the comments), but in Episode 4 Kevin broke down where Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad fit into the “stack” of tools managing our infrastructure in the land of “hybrid cloud”. And despite a few technical difficulties, we had an excellent discussion that I know everyone will want to watch!

We aren’t done yet! What’s Coming Next?

Still to come in May 2020
May goes out like a LION on NetDevOps Live! with shows on Postman, NetBox, and ELK!

So April was pretty amazing, but take a look at what we have in store in May 2020.

On May 5th join me as Kevin Swiber dives into Postman. I know what you’re thinking… “But Hank, I already know about Postman.”  That might be true, but I guarantee you’ll learn something new from Kevin.  Heck, I learned something from him just by chatting about what we COULD cover during the webinar.  You won’t want to miss this one.

The second week of May might be the one I’ve been most looking forward to.  Jeremy Stretch joins me on May 12th to talk all about NetBox, one of my personal favorite tools in my NetDevOps tool chest. It’s becoming more and more popular with engineers and enterprises.  Heck, they are launching an entire virtual conference dedicated to NetBox (I really hope my talk is selected ?).

And the bookend on Season 3 is May 19th where we get a look at the true dragon’s treasure horde of automation, logging.  That’s right… where else can you find insights into what has been happening in the network, and if something is “normal”. George Kobar has been working hard pulling together a great demo of ELK running on the DevNet Sandbox that we hope you’ll want to try out yourself. Definitely won’t want to miss this one.

What could be better?

I think we can all agree that Season 3 of NetDevOps Live! has been absolute perfection and we should hangup our console cables and go back to our day jobs, right? … WRONG?  I’ve no doubt there are more excellent topics we can dive into and explore in the future.

What do you want to see from us next?  Please let me know in the comments, or over on LinkedIn and Twitter.

And don’t forget, Seasons One and Two of  NetDevOps Live! were also jam packed with content, and are available for your binging pleasure anytime on DevNet.


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Authors

Hank Preston

Principal Engineer

Learning and Certifications