Nathan Pearce

DevOps, look what you've done. Now I'm one of you guys.

What says more DevOps than Star Wars and DevOps combined together? I know: Redbubble.com.

So DevOps has created some challenges for the networking industry. To people outside of DevOps, this is what we think you're doing: pipelines, toolchains. You're all having a great time collaborating, and you seem to be smiling a lot more than everybody else, so forgive us.

But then a network person tries to talk about what they do to a developer, and it sounds like a big bucket of nuts and bolts. I still tell people that I just change inkjet printer cartridges for a living. It's easier.

Switches, routers, protocols. It's kind of like putting a square peg in a round hole. I'm sure many of you have been in such situations.

So why do we have this problem? Well, the problem that we have is that there isn't a common language between the two. We have NetOps, where over on one side, they're still using the mouse and the keyboard, and at the other end of the scale, we've got frameworks, runtimes, toolchains. We've got declarative interfaces.

Try and get these people to talk. The gap between them is large.

It's not really like putting a square peg in a round hole. It's more like that moment when you park your tractor on top of your trailer while going under a bridge. Who's been in one of those meetings, trying to come up with actions of these two different worlds?

This is a lot of the problem. A lot of this software part of ops and development, how we got to DevOps, they've got these... Looks like a water slide on the right side. I'm not going to say waterfall, not in this room.

A lot of ops is still on the other side, though. We're still project-oriented, working in series. How do we get this transformation to happen then, where we get people off the keyboard into what they see as this crazy futuristic Matrix?

But we have to do it.

So, APIs. A lot of networking vendors started creating APIs and documenting APIs on how to use their infrastructure. APIs are not a native language to people who sit at the keyboard or use the mouse to configure security, et cetera, services.

Documentation does not teach best practices. Give me a Swiss Army knife and MacGyver I do not become.

So we got a group of people in the networking industry, and we got very DevOps about this. We got marketing people, networking people. We got developers, software developers, hardware manufacturers, salespeople in a room with some very bad Chinese food, and we decided we're going to work out how we can make this transition.

We worked out we needed to create a common language. We needed that domain knowledge of networking closer to DevOps. We needed a medium where we could bring all their expertise and serve what's going on within DevOps to help continue that acceleration.

We tapped into things like the automotive industry. I know you guys already use a lot of this for examples. We've got automation in the middle helping people, and then we've got people helping automation. That's when we get to the continuous integrations.

We used a lot of metaphors. We then went on from the automotive industry, and we taught them things like imperative versus declarative. Do you want to make the sandwich, or do you want to go to the drive-through? And then we taught them about the sandwich could have 500 types of bread these days, and nobody wants to make the sandwich anymore.

So we started to get creative, and we looked at other things. We even looked at a Netflix documentary series on Abstract and an artist, Christoph Niemann, who does an incredible job of finding that perfect level of abstraction, because you don't want to spew the schema of the network technology into your toolchain, do you? No.

So we realized what we had to do was get them to make their own training course. You can only teach them how to teach themselves. You can't teach them everything.

So we made a bunch of network engineers write their own automation training in Markdown. And we made them do it in GitHub, something they'd never seen before.

Once they'd done that, they knew forking, they knew pull requests. We then showed them toolchains. We had a toolchain kickoff to apply a Sphinx theme to their training course, to throw it into an S3 bucket, and suddenly, before their eyes, like magic: a free, self-service NetOps to Super-NetOps training program.

They made this themselves.

We don't just have people at F5 doing this. This has customers making pull requests to it. We have a huge movement behind this, which is great.

This was actually me at a computer networking event in Orlando, Florida, just last week. Super-NetOps is getting very well received, and I've started wearing Nacho Libre-style masks for work.

You can either go and look at this training course, send your networking people to it, f5.com/supernetops, or just fork the Git repo and tweak it to your environment.

But leave no ops behind.

Thank you.