The Network Automation Map: Navigate Your Journey with the NAF Automation Framework

Описание: Abstract

Modern networks demand automation that teams can trust, understand, and safely evolve. Yet many organizations still struggle to move beyond ad-hoc scripts, brittle workflows, and unclear architectural models. In this session, we'll introduce a practical, engineer-friendly approach to building automation on a solid foundation—starting with the new NAF Automation Framework, a modular reference architecture designed by practitioners for practitioners.

We will walk through each of the framework's core building blocks—Intent, Observability, Collector, Executor, Orchestrator, and Presentation—and explore the key characteristics that make them reliable, predictable, and scalable in real-world environments . Along the way, we will highlight the essential best practices that underpin successful automation: declarative design, idempotent execution, diff-based workflows, version-controlled changes, safe failure handling, and human-friendly interfaces.

By establishing a shared mental model and a common lexicon, this framework helps teams align on concepts, compare architectures, and collaborate more effectively across tools, vendors, and organizational boundaries. Attendees will leave with clearer language, stronger architectural intuition, and practical patterns they can use to accelerate automation efforts across their own environments.

Damien Garros:
Damien is the co-founder and CEO of OpsMill, a company focused on building infrastructure automation tools, including Infrahub, a next generation Source of Truth.
Damien has been involved with the automation community for 10+ years as product owner and chief architect for infrastructure automation platforms with a specific focus on data management, mainly around Source of Truth and Telemetry. Damien was the main architect and core contributor to dozens of Open Source projects that are actively being used by many companies today Prior to OpsMill, Damien led the technical direction of Network to Code, where he was a founding member of the nautobot team and contributed multiple major features to Nautobot, including GraphQL.

Wim Henderickx:
Mr.Wim Henderickx is CTO IP Division at Nokia, based in Belgium. Mr. Henderickx provides consultancy and architecture advise in various domains. He has over 30 years’ experience in the communications and networking industry and is a regular speaker at technical conferences and is active in various open source projects.

Mr. Henderickx holds a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering, Data Communications and a Masters degree in Economy and is a Bellabs Fellow.

https://nanog.org/events/nanog-96/con...