TCG081: Network Automation Forum: From Simple Survey to Global Community
Network Automation Forum (NAF) emerged organically from a 2022 survey question about why network automation adoption lags in the industry, evolving into a global community-driven conference series with events across two continents. The founders emphasize that NAF's success stems from its commitment to practitioners-for-practitioners ethos, vendor neutrality, and willingness to listen to community feedback while protecting foundational values.
Summary
The transcript documents a podcast discussion featuring Scott and Chris, the co-founders of Network Automation Forum, along with Eric Cho from Network Automation Nerds and host William. The conversation traces NAF's origins from Chris's 2022 survey on network automation adoption, which revealed surprisingly low implementation rates despite decades of discussion. This discovery prompted Chris and Scott to organize an initial gathering with trusted advisors in Seattle, which validated the need for a community-driven event.
Autocon Zero launched in Denver in November 2023 with nearly 350 attendees—far exceeding the organizers' expectation of 200. The conference's rapid success led to expansion to Europe in 2024, with events in Amsterdam, Prague, and Munich, alongside additional U.S. events in Austin. Attendance grew from 350 to over 700 at its peak in Austin before stabilizing around 650 in Munich. The organizers note that European attendees demonstrate stronger skepticism toward commercial pitches and greater interest in open-source solutions, whereas U.S. audiences show more appetite for commercial tools.
The discussion addresses NAF's foundational principles: maintaining a practitioners-for-practitioners focus, vendor neutrality, and organic community-driven development. Notable examples include the Framework working group, which emerged spontaneously from community discussions rather than founder initiative, and the evolution from single-track events to multi-track conferences with workshops, leadership tracks, and specialized content. The founders emphasize that feedback integration requires balancing individual complaints against broader sentiment without overreacting to single voices.
The conversation explores historical context for network automation's slow adoption, examining how the Cisco CLI certification boom in the late 1990s created professional identity conflation between "CLI mastery" and "network engineering," creating psychological barriers to automation adoption. The speakers discuss how different platform vendors (Cisco, Juniper, Bay Networks) approached management interfaces differently, shaping industry expectations.
A significant portion addresses sponsor management and maintaining vendor neutrality while growing the event. The founders set clear expectations with sponsors upfront, emphasizing that NAF welcomes vendor participation but not vendor ownership. They note that employee advocates from sponsor companies have been instrumental in helping sponsors understand NAF's value proposition without compromising community integrity.
Looking toward Autocon 6 in Tucson, the organizers plan refinements including clarified "advanced" content tracks (acknowledging that "advanced" means different things to different engineers), continued Framework development, and broader sponsor diversification into IT automation, cloud, and AI sectors. The speakers frame NAF as a garden requiring continuous maintenance rather than a self-sustaining system.
About this episode
William Collins is joined by guest co-host Eric Chou as well as Network Automation Forum founders Scott Robohn and Chris Grundemann to discuss how their community emerged from a simple question: Why haven’t we seen full adoption of network automation, yet? They discuss the growth of AutoCon and how its practitioner-focused, vendor-neutral approach has fostered<a class="excerpt-read-more" href="https://packetpushers.net/podcasts/the-cloud-gambit/tcg081-network-automation-forum-from-simple-survey-to-global-community/" title="ReadTCG081: Network Automation Forum: From Simple Survey to Global Community">... Read more »</a>
Key Insights
- Chris's 2022 survey found that despite 14+ years of discussion about network automation, most network engineers still configure networks manually via CLI, indicating a fundamental adoption gap rather than a technology availability problem.
- The founders explicitly chose not to run a closed-door conversation about creating a framework; instead, approximately three dozen community members spontaneously coalesced around the need, and a core group of six drove it forward, resulting in the NAF Automation Framework.
- European Autocon attendees demonstrate significantly stronger negative reactions to vendor pitches and stronger positive reactions to open-source presentations compared to U.S. audiences, a difference the speakers attribute to regulatory environments like GDPR that create deeper skepticism.
- Scott and Chris attribute much of NAF's smooth execution at Autocon 5 in Munich to learning to trust venue staff, letting go of clipboard management, and intentionally spending more time in conversation with attendees rather than problem-solving logistics.
- The term "advanced content" has become as problematically vague in the conference context as terms like "SDN" or "cloud" were in industry discourse—twelve engineers asked to define it produce fourteen different answers.
- The Cisco certification boom of the late 1990s, coinciding with Cisco's peak market capitalization of $560 billion in March 2000, created a professional culture where CLI mastery became conflated with network engineering identity, creating psychological resistance to automation.
- The founders implemented a strict policy of setting expectations with sponsors upfront about NAF's community-driven mission, requiring honest conversations with new sponsors while allowing previous sponsors to operate with understanding from prior interactions.
- Eric Cho credits NAF with changing his perspective from skepticism about network automation's applicability to the broader industry toward full investment in the movement, driven by seeing the energy and excitement at Autocon Zero.
- The NAF working groups that emerged between conferences—including the Euro thread and U.S. thread Slack discussions—generate significant value independent of in-person events, with community members implementing framework ideas at other industry conferences without NAF's sponsorship.
- Scott describes the foundational challenge of community event management as deciding what elements constitute immovable base layers (like practitioners-for-practitioners ethos) versus what can be experimented with (like workshop formats or track structures).
- The speakers argue that network automation's historical resistance stems not solely from vendor dominance or technology maturity, but from how professional identity became bound to platform-specific CLI expertise, making automation adoption feel like identity loss.
- The organizers intentionally broadened sponsor recruitment to include companies outside traditional networking vendors (IT automation, cloud, agentic AI) while maintaining conversations about preserving NAF's community character against "money wants the mic" pressures common to growing conferences.
Topics
Transcript
. In late 2023, in November, we were all introduced to Network Automation Forum, where a simple question was asked, a deceptively simple question. What is the holdup with network automation forum where a simple question was asked, a deceptively simple question. What is the holdup with network automation? Another individual, so I'll say that one individual ran a survey, and then another individual heard about that survey, and we happened to have both of them on this podcast. And years later that question has turned into a seven-person conference on multiple continents and a vendor neutral reference architecture in a community that keeps telling um network engineers that the four words they most need to hear you are not…
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