Itential @ Networking Field Day

The Evolution of Network Automation

Transitioning from Consumer to Producer

Network automation is going through an evolution right now. Most network engineers have built awesome scripts or playbooks that solve some problems but you’re nowhere near deploying like AWS. For most, automation likely saves you some time and reduces human error but isn’t the sort of thing you can package up into a product and enable the rest of the organization to consume, let alone be delivered as a self-serve product for app dev teams to utilize.

In this session, Peter Sprygada, VP of Product Management will dive into making sense of the evolution of network automation and how network teams can become producers and evolve from building network automations to offering infrastructure products with Itential.

You’ve built a library of useful automations to automate tedious, time-consuming tasks. But as your efforts scale, so do your headaches. You’ve got different scripts for different tasks, written in different languages, with varying levels of access. And when your network starts to grow (along with the complexity of what you need to automate), things start to get messy. Fast.

In this session, Wyatt Sullivan, Technical Marketing Engineer, will showcase Itential’s new Automation-as-a-Service offering and how NetDevOps engineers can standardize automation execution across Ansible Playbooks, Python Scripts and OpenTofu plans and how to enable secure authorization and role-based access control, turning automations into self-service products that teams can access and execute independently.

Most network teams leverage some sort of domain-specific automation, whether through open-source tools or controller-based software to implement network changes more efficiently. While automating individual tasks may suffice in certain cases, scaling infrastructure as a product for broader consumption requires standardized processes. Orchestration unifies tools, services, and automations across your ecosystem, streamlining each step for greater efficiency and enabling the flexibility to combine automations into new, composable products.

In this session, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing will demonstrate how to connect different automations and systems to orchestrate the provisioning of a new product. You’ll see how Itential integrates with everything from change management tools to documentation processes, so every automation step — from pre-checks to notifications — happens smoothly and consistently.

Orchestrating the provisioning of infrastructure is a key opportunity to capture and store essential data throughout the deployment process. Every time you automate provisioning, you can gather critical insights—technical details, product states, and more. However, without proper tracking and organization, it becomes challenging to understand what’s running where, its current state, or the next steps required.

In this session, Dan Sullivan, Director of Solutions Engineering, will demonstrate how to define, capture, and leverage stateful data to build and manage self-service infrastructure products. You’ll discover how Itential empowers teams to track product states over time and publish reusable workflows that developers and internal customers can access through a self-service catalog.