Network Automation — Trivia & Interesting Facts¶
Surprising, historical, and little-known facts about network automation.
SNMP was the first network automation protocol and dates to 1988¶
The Simple Network Management Protocol (RFC 1157, 1990; origins in 1988) was the first widely adopted protocol for automated network management. Despite "Simple" in its name, SNMP's community strings, MIB trees, and OID naming scheme are anything but simple. SNMPv3 added encryption in 2004, but many networks still run SNMPv2c with cleartext community strings because upgrading is painful.
RANCID was the original network configuration backup tool and it's still running everywhere¶
RANCID (Really Awesome New Cisco confIg Differ), first released in 1997 by Shrubbery Networks, was one of the first tools to automate network device configuration backup via CLI scraping. It connects to routers and switches, runs "show running-config," and stores the output in version control. Despite being nearly 30 years old, RANCID is still in production at thousands of organizations because it works and nothing broke it.
Screen scraping network CLIs was the only option for 20+ years¶
Before NETCONF (2006) and RESTCONF (2017), the only way to automate network devices was to open an SSH/Telnet session and parse the CLI output — literally screen scraping. Every vendor's CLI was different, output formats changed between firmware versions, and a single unexpected prompt could break an entire automation script. This painful era produced a generation of network engineers who are expert regex writers.
NAPALM was created to provide a vendor-neutral network automation library¶
NAPALM (Network Automation and Programmability Abstraction Layer with Multivendor support) was created by David Barroso and Elisa Jasinska around 2015. It provides a unified Python API that works across Cisco IOS, Junos, Arista EOS, and other platforms. The name is deliberately provocative — the creators chose it because "networking needed a fire lit under it" regarding programmability.
Cisco's IOS was originally designed to be operated by humans, not machines¶
Cisco's IOS CLI, designed in the 1980s, was built for interactive human use with context-sensitive help, tab completion, and hierarchical modes. Automating it was an afterthought that took decades to address. Cisco's first API-driven OS, NX-OS (2008), and later IOS-XE with RESTCONF support, represented a fundamental philosophical shift from "humans operate networks" to "machines operate networks."
Juniper's JUNOS was the first network OS designed with automation in mind¶
Junos, introduced by Juniper Networks in 1998, was architecturally ahead of its time. It stored configuration as structured XML, supported transactional commits with rollback, and included a commit-confirmed safety mechanism. These features, unremarkable in software but revolutionary in networking, made Junos the first network OS where automation was a first-class concern rather than an afterthought.
Ansible became the dominant network automation tool despite being designed for servers¶
Ansible was created for server configuration management, but its agentless, SSH-based architecture made it a natural fit for network devices (which can't run agents). The network_cli connection plugin, added in Ansible 2.5 (2018), formalized network device support. By 2020, Ansible had become the most commonly used tool for network automation, surpassing purpose-built tools like Oxidized and Nornir in adoption surveys.
Intent-based networking was overhyped but the core idea is powerful¶
Cisco spent billions marketing "intent-based networking" (IBN) starting in 2017, claiming that network engineers would declare desired outcomes and the system would figure out the configuration. The reality was more modest, but the core concept — describing what you want rather than how to configure it — drives modern tools like Batfish (network verification), Suzieq (network observability), and policy-as-code approaches.
A single misconfigured BGP announcement has caused global internet outages¶
In June 2019, a small ISP in Pennsylvania accidentally leaked BGP routes from a customer, causing traffic for major services including Cloudflare, Amazon, and others to be routed through a network that couldn't handle it. The incident lasted hours and affected millions of users. Network automation tools that validate BGP announcements before applying them (like Batfish) were designed to prevent exactly this class of error.
The "fat finger" problem in networking has cost companies millions¶
Manual network configuration errors are so common and so expensive that the industry has a name for them: "fat finger" errors. A 2017 study by Aberdeen Group found that human error in network changes caused 80% of network outages. The financial impact of network downtime is estimated at $5,600 per minute for large enterprises — making network automation not just a convenience but a financial imperative.
NetBox became the de facto source of truth for network automation¶
NetBox, created by Jeremy Stretch at DigitalOcean in 2016, filled a gap that no commercial product adequately addressed: a single source of truth for network infrastructure data (IP addresses, device inventory, circuits, connections). It became so popular that it's now maintained by a dedicated team at NS1 Labs. Network automation without a source of truth is just sophisticated ways of making mistakes faster.