Take the NetDevOps Survey…See the Results

Like most “traditional” networkers, I am on a personal journey to become a NetDevOps engineer. This journey took a turn for me in early 2017, when I became a Cisco Live presenter for the first time. My colleague Kevin Kuhls invited me to join him in presenting a DevNet Workshop: “NetDevOps for Network Peeps: How to get started with APIs and Ansible”

The NetDevOps workshop at Cisco Live draws a standing-room-only audience.

The workshop attracted a large audience. Clearly, there was an appetite in the world of networkers for Ansible network automation. And it made me wonder how popular Ansible actually was, compared to the many other automation solutions out there.

That’s when a internet search led me to this blog entry: which taught me two things:

a community of networking folks had conducted a survey in Fall 2016 in an effort to measure how network automation is used. How cool was that!
I now had real numbers on how popular various automation tools were.

Some insights from the 2016 NetDevOps survey data

I’ve been quoting these numbers for the past few years. However, a lot has changed since 2016. NetDevOps has become mainstream, and we need fresher statistics. Time for another survey!

Working with Damien Garros of Network To Code (the organizer of the 2016 survey), we gathered a community of networkers from various parts of the industry, and updated the questionnaire. The entire process was an open collaboration hosted on Github:

The survey is anonymous. The raw results will be made available to everyone, just like in 2016. Anyone will be able to conduct their own analysis and reach their own conclusions.