Automation in Optical Networking

If you are reading this you can do this!!!

Google , ChatGPT, Stackoverflow and your little efforts will do it.No worries!!!

This article is not for professional automation engineer but for the enthusiastic professionals who just want to start but  need some guidance to do .

This article is purely  written on the basis of my personal experience through out my career and the intention involved  is to help my friend and folks in understanding the basics and get a glimpse of automation in networking world , so that they can feel motivated and don’t get scared with jargons used for automations.

In my terms:

***Automation is not replacing jobs but enabling you to live life more efficiently and with freedom.It is just an act of kindness by technology to give back to the its users and the creators.***

The scale with which networking communication devices and its usage is  increasing, we need lot of network bandwidth and automation in place to operate, configure, predict  and manage it.Also to have a more robust  ,scalable and reliable network we need agnostic and low latency automations that can help grow the network .

Why automation is needed? Out of 1 million reasons few are as:-

• It will make your life simpler and cheerful from monotonous and boring pieces of job.
• It will give you time to think something more creative .
• It will give you more flexibility as automation can be enabled or operable from remote places.
• You can spend more time with your loved ones .
• It can give you sense of security and confidence.
• It can lead you to be a successful entrepreneurship  .
• It improves efficiency and reduces errors that can be made by human.

What are the things you can automate? Out of 1 billion reasons few are as:-

• Everything that you do is sooner or later can be potentially automated.
• Device logins and configurations can be automated.
• Metrics polling can be automated to fetch some values from device.
• Network Management can be customised or scaled.
• Encryption key rotation can be automated.
• Capacity monitoring , planning or network design could be automated.
• Fault Alarming can be automated.
• Link routing and restoration can be automated.
• Network self healing and fault remediation could be achieved.
• Reporting and metrics evaluation could be achieved.
• Multiple cronjobs could be done and automated.
• Network discovery could be automated.
• Regression steps can be automated.
• On weekends, device/feature runs based testing tasks can be automated.