Friday, July 2, 2021

Automation/Orchestration as a "product" vs open source/devops approach?

Lately, I've seen most vendors are offering their own solutions to automate and orchestrate their network kit. Usually cloud/portal based solutions that talk to the API on the devices. Sometimes requiring some kind of on-prem component, but more often than not totally cloud based.

My question is, I see a lot of chatter here all the time about how it's time to learn devops skills, and if you're planning to work in the field for another 20 years, you had better hop on that devops bandwaggon and become a coder, or you'll soon be out of work.

But... aren't these packaged and sold products for automation and orchestration going to most commonly solve all of the problems that automation solves, but require a much lower total cost of ownership?

At the end of the day, buying and using this product will offer all the same benefits of having a full time developer team maintaining open source products that have been modified to manage network kit.

Maybe I'm being incredibly short sighted, but I see the cost of that only making sense for "hyper scalers" which 99% of organizations don't fall into that category (far from it!)

Thoughts?



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