this is the art of network engineering podcast in this podcast we'll explore tools technologies and talented people we aim to bring new information that will expand your skill sets and toolbox and share the stories of fellow network engineers all right since you're new to the team to get you acquainted with our practices i'd like you to implement this change on 10 switches well that doesn't sound so bad seems pretty quick and easy sure i can handle that excellent that's just the can-do attitude i was hoping to hear you're right it'll be really simple i just need you to write up your change script schedule it with the affected areas submit a change request present your change to the approval board i'll get you the lucky rabbit's foot to have for the meeting it seems to help check the vendor website for any bugs temporarily disable monitoring during the change take pre-change backups re-up your car's extended warranty let the knock know when what you're doing and when right before the change spin around twice hop on one foot three times and say the alphabet backwards make your change on all the switches validate your change re-enable monitoring take post change backups update documentation close your change request and let the knock know when you're done whoa that's a bit more complicated than i thought the actual change is such a small piece how am i supposed to manage all that find out the answer to that question and more on this episode of the art of network engineering very nicely done i couldn't tell if you were doing an intro or like a dui check uh tim how you doing i'm doing well aj things are going good how are you oh not too bad doing pretty good andy thanks for joining us tonight how are you hey tim did you how did you get through that that was a lot of words and you didn't stumble once were you did you practice all day no i stumbled i i stumbled i'm i'm upset about it it was really good yeah i'm glad to be here i appreciate that's good stuff it was uh it's one of those things where it was kind of over the top but not really for anybody who's been through that process hundreds and hundreds of times you were like giving me some ptsd i started like that was that was quite a flashback that was good that was good and now it's time for the wins winning in our it's all about the journey discord server bob steele412 signed an offer to be a network security analyst at atnt starting next month great job bob tyler 8 got his first job in it is an information technology logistics technician tyler's a friend of the family and recently expressed an interest in getting into tech he started studying for the a plus updated his resume and landed that first gig in it great job tyler tim mcconaughey started his new job at av atrix where he is a customer solutions architect congrats tim andre passed his comp tia cyber security analyst plus awesome job andre j fundftd7 says he's studying for ccna and solved his first subnetting problem on his own great job that's no joke joe scott passed the cisco s-i-s-e which is the implementing and configuring cisco ice exam great job joe jamie passed the ccna and got a job as a junior network engineer coming over from web dev in the uk awesome job jamie ssjraptor passed the ccna that's no joke lil shep 9999 got offered a help desk job at a local msp which will be their first it position congrats lil shep hubba stank pilgrim passed their osep exam osep which is the offensive security experience penetration tester exam congratulations hubba stank pilgrim our friend robin c passed the ccsp exam the certified cloud security professional exam great job robin zanidia pastor e sd to achieve their ccmp i had to look it up it's the designing cisco enterprise wireless networks so awesome job nailing your ccmp as a wireless professional if you'd like to join our free discord community of over 2 000 members who are all there to help each other in their itun life journey uh you can check it out at artofnetenge.com forward slash iaatj which stands for it's all about the journey it's an awesome place check it out if you're looking for a community it's a great place to start we have new patreons joining us this week greg citer bob steele412 and michael meldano thank you so much for your support if you'd like to be a patron patron if you'd like to be a patron of our show and snag sweet benefits like access to our live streams where you can watch us produce the show in real time and chat with us during recording sessions ad free versions of the show merch discounts and more you can go to patreon.com forward slash art of neteng and check out our different tiers of support we truly appreciate all of your support and it really helps us keep improving the quality of the show now back to the show this episode is sponsored by attention the leader in network and cloud automation and i'm very excited to introduce our guest this this evening uh peter sparraga peter thank you so much for joining us hey thanks for having me i'm excited to be here so peter uh can you give us a quick intro who you are what do you do sure um yeah so so uh and i'll i'll i'll start you off by correcting you already it's it's regatta i knew it my bad i'm sorry i'm sorry jerry it's all good all good it's all good i should have typed that so hey um me you're not the first and you won't be the last so i've had i've had all kinds of interesting uh annunciations over the years ah so anyway yeah peter spergat is is indeed my name i am uh currently uh vice president of product management at itential which uh you know essentially means that that uh i have all the responsibility and absolutely no authority to do anything but it does give me the opportunity to come on shows like this and chat but but honestly you know while yes i'm sitting in a product management role at attention um in in reality i've got a very long and storied history um you know building networks uh i've done it on the the vendor side i've done it in the software uh side i've done it on the operator side i've done it uh throughout my whole career and um so you know it's uh i'm really excited to be here and we're talking about one of my absolute most favorite topics in the world so it should be a fantastic fantastic time all right so so marketing is in the title but you have engineering routes i do i can actually trace so so i trace a couple of different routes i can trace software development routes all the way back to uh writing cobalt code on an ibm mainframe in fact you know i was part of the you know i had my original workstation was a a virtual machine that sat on an ibm s360 oh my gosh so i've been doing virtualization really since the beginning of my career uh but but i made the leap out of of software development got into networking very early and you know i actually started in the world of installing tdm switches for a um for a uh contractor for lucid technologies so many of you all remember that name yeah um but uh yeah i started installing tdm switches and then i followed a very traditional network engineering career path through the sp rank so atm frame relay and and core ip ipm pls uh made the jump over to to data center i was uh you know at cisco at arista at a whole bunch of different startups you know for quite a long time doing engineering and operations and yeah then then decided i'd take a chance and uh joined this this little unknown startup by the name of ansible and i had a hell of a wild ride there and uh it culminated in in you know my current role here at intentional now so wait you joined them like early on ansible i was i was actually um i actually was part of the i was part of ansible before they got acquired by red hat um and uh i'm thinking i was the i think the number six or number seven core developer wow that was actually officially hired on no big deal no not at all not at all um they uh and they specifically hired me to to both build and so i actually had a dual role at answer i actually wrote all the code initially for network automation that they did that was all my code so you can blame me for all of that crap that's all my fault i take responsibility for that first wave um but then i also i actually held the dual role i was i was actually uh my own product manager which is kind of interesting because i would get into these fights with myself it was really ugly right because the engineer in me would be like you know we're doing it this way and the product manager's like no i need it this way for the customer so that was a lot of fun yeah i had a great time but um uh yeah so that's that's a little bit about my background oh my gosh that is so when when was when was ansible i'm just looking for time frame oh gosh uh 2012. dollars that's awesome i love it um you know and i can you know i can i can give it away you know uh but no i actually started with ansible in 2015 uh is when i joined ansible so ansible had already been around as a company for oh a little over a year i guess but i predated like i said the redhead acquisition um and uh red hat acquired us and i actually ascended to the role of distinguished engineer at red hat which i am very proud of yeah uh you know achieving that role at a company like red hat is is no small feat and i'm i am something i am very proud of you know to this day but um but yeah so i was with red hat and i was actually through the ibm acquisition and uh left about a year after ibm and acquired red hat for for no reason other than it was just time for me to move on and do something something new yep so i i want to go back a little bit um one of the the questions we kind of start with is is how did you get into network engineering right like when did you find out you kind of had the spark or interest in i.t tech and network engineering gosh wow you know it it it goes all the way back to to as i said right kind of that first job i had was a mainframe programmer and i got involved in this project um and in this particular project we were connecting and for all your old-time listeners they'll appreciate this you know we were connecting a network for saa uh gateway which allowed pc lands running you know 3270 emulation from attachmate was the big company back then big software company to emulate green screens and and have terminal sessions into the mainframe so anyway i got involved in this in this project and we were deploying uh wellfleet routers to do sna networking uh at the time and uh so i got to know some of the guys that were doing it and i was just enthralled with by it i mean just enthralled by it and uh that's kind of where the story began for me so i actually ended up leaving my programming job i ended up joining the network team there and that's really what started my career and then then very shortly thereafter um i got hired on it at like i said the the contracting company that installed tdm switches and uh from there everything just took off and uh it was a great ride i mean i love i mean i still do it i i you know i'm still involved in networking as much as i can be you know i still uh you know i still follow the industry i still follow you know prevailing designs and you know what's going on in the industry and then of course you know certainly now from the programmability standpoint i'm deeply involved in what goes on in networking so so for anybody listening could you briefly explain sna sna systems network architecture it is the protocol and it is a full protocol stack it's not one protocol it is a whole stack a whole seven-layer stack um but sna networking was was really all about how do we connect at the time which were pc lands and in a lot of companies back then they viewed these as toys right these were just kind of you know if you weren't on a green screen that was the real you know that was the real yeah right the pc you know the lance that was you know the that was the hippie kids right that was all the you know the newbies the the the kids stuff you know doing things kind of like how you know i look at cloud today no i'm just joking um i'm very big into cloud but uh no so so anyway it was a whole protocol stack that that essentially talked about how you connected to big iron whether that was an ibm mainframe whether it was um you know or a mainframe by anyone didn't have to be ibm there were other mainframe manufacturers out there but it was a whole protocol stack about how you did that gotcha okay all right and and throughout your career did you achieve any you know it networking certifications i did i did in fact i can you know i i had a i had a number of of of them you know i mean gosh i had a whole wall of them at one point but really the culmination of it you know i did at one point uh i did hold a ccie service provider um oh wow that is true yeah that's a beast i did have that uh i've since let it lapsed i you know and be fair i you know i don't want to claim for having something i no longer have but i did i did have it i had it for quite a few years um and i was very proud of that you know it was as i'm sure you know most of your listeners know as i'm sure you guys know i mean that's you know that's the dedication right yeah it takes dedication was it as bad as you hear it is like was it just two years of hell like to get it oh yeah no oh absolutely it was and then some yeah um you know it honestly it was i mean that's i shouldn't say it like that um you know it's hard to say was it hell no because i loved it right i mean i loved it what was hell and which i think everyone can appreciate is how do you balance life when you're trying to get that certification and oh yeah by the way you still got your job to do right right your day job and so i think that's what made it hell was just trying to balance all of those facets and not let any one of them slip did you pass it the first time so peter continuing the career chat you mentioned a few times that you hit a point where you just understood that it was time to move on how is that how did that come to be was it different things was it just you started getting an interest elsewhere how did that culminate for you um you know it was i don't know if there's a one-size-fits-all answer to this in some cases it was following a technology progression uh luckily i made some really good bets you know in the course of my career you know i i saw for instance i saw the oncoming uh you know packet revolution you know back when when i was very much involved in atm and frame relay uh you know i saw what was going on with packet and made that decision early on to move into the packet world and that paid off huge dividends for me um some of them were you know making the move from you know when i was doing core service provider networking uh making the transition over to data center uh that one was a more of more of you know okay i kind of had been doing service provider networking for so long i just wanted something new and and this was back when data center was the new hotness this is about the time that i went over to arista and you know it was the it was the hotness and so it was something new and but you know i learned what i learned and what was fascinating when you start following these technology progressions is a lot of it starts to repeat itself just in different ways you know a lot of what we did in atm frame really we redid in core ip that we redid again in data center it had new names we certainly made improvements on it i don't want to say it was a perfect replacement um but it was it was you know kind of starting to rehash the the old things over and over and over again right centralized versus decentralized versus centralized in terms of how you think about control plane or network management or or etc but i think the the one that was you know that really kind of changed the trajectory of my career was when i made that decision to go to ansible um you know that was a big one that was when i actually left the the the i guess you'd say the prop the industry networking the networking industry proper right i was no longer working for a networking equipment vendor uh and went to a software company that was trying to break into networking and uh it was that's really that was a big leap of faith and i'm glad i did it i often forget that sounds exciting and i i was i was thinking in my head and jordan also put it in the chat here as well everything old is new again yeah exactly with no question no question about it you know it's it's um the ideas you know i and i think you know part of it is because there's only so many original ideas out there right in in when you start thinking about networking um you know it's it's what we do is is it's this pendulum that keeps swinging back and forth and back and forth and it swings too far one way and it slowly works back to center and then someone swings it the other way and it eventually slowly works back to center and you know i think that that's you know i've learned that that seems to be a lot of the cyclical nature of technology um which isn't to say in you know i don't want this ever to come off as sounding like like i'm pessimistic about technology i'm not i'm very very optimistic about technology and where it's going um but you start to see patterns repeat themselves for sure you know i often forget that ansible is more than just a network automation company when i started there it was not networking automation in any way shape or form right so very good um go ahead andy well you said leap of faith and you just struck me you just struck a chord with me because i recently just took a leap of faith and we just did a whole episode that's andy's middle name yeah but you know i i don't i don't know i i feel like that's kind of on the rare side like you know if you talk to all these people like they they stay in their lane they know what they're good at and that's what they do and they keep starting up to do things like why what what drove that leap of faith i mean it's a big pivot right to go from what you were doing to like well now i'm going to go to a software company and we're going to build stuff like oh what was because that's scary right or it can be i mean did you just oh absolutely it was terrifying it was terrifying were you pushed away from what you were doing were you drawn to you know like how would you frame it to take that leap of faith yeah there was a couple of things here you know one is you know obviously i have some some roots in software um you know and i continue to write code to this day it's something i enjoy it's very relaxing for me um but uh you know one thing that that i noted is through the progression of my career i did take a couple of stints where i left the kind of the vendor side of the equation and i was on the customer side and so i had the opportunity to to be you know in the trenches in engineering and operations and which i mean tim i absolutely loved your intro i mean i think i lived through that maintenance window that was fantastic um in fact i was starting to wonder if maybe you had one of my old mops and that's what you were reading but uh you know it was um you know having been through that though you know i quickly identified you know what automation could be in the networking space um you know and and so so that was one thing that really drove me to make that that leap of faith um you know i i had been experimenting at the time with um with puppet and before i made the leap over to ansible and in fact and then i got involved with in a tool called cf engine i don't know if how many people are going to recognize that name but but cf engine was in a lot of respects the original uh automation play in terms of what came out around promise theory which is is really what what is the foundation of the basis for a lot of what puppet and chef were originally designed around of course they went off in different directions and exceeded quite a bit but but cf engine actually goes all the way back to 92 uh and it was actually a c-based application so it had to be compiled on different uh you know platforms that you're running on and i was at a wrist at the time and so i was working actually on compiling uh cf engine so it would run on arista us but um anyway so i got really excited about working with this technology and so that was part of what drove me but then the other part that really drove me is the realization that i couldn't achieve what i was trying to achieve by working for a network equipment vendor um you know i was really struggling because i was so passionate about what network automation could be but unfortunately you start to get pigeonholed sometimes right when you come from that vendor side sometimes your pigeon holds for the good and sometimes your pigeon holds for the bad in this case i was pigeonholed for the bad and so i had the opportunity to go to ansible um you know i got to know the team there really well a really great group of guys and gals and i'm really glad i i you know took that leap of faith and what year was this i feel like it's kind of early on i mean i don't want to say automation is just taking off recently but that this was quite a few years ago right uh when i made the trip to ansible is 2015 when i actually started with puppet on a wrist uh that dates all the way back to 2012. um so so yeah i've been doing network automation strictly network automation now for almost 10 years and that's long before everybody was screaming it from the mountaintops right oh yeah you were absolutely you know back then back then you know network automation was ems yeah that's what network automation was back then um you know the the idea of of automating networks really didn't exist you know it was uh you know it was still and i realized there are still some in this this boat today but i mean network automation was how good could you copy and paste from your mob document to your cli i mean that was network automation back in 2012 sounds like my whole career in network engineering until you accidentally paste into the wrong terminal window and then all hell breaks loose but you know i i think earlier now you're you're reading into my past now i think early on too uh network automation was probably more focused to large data center service provider and probably less so enterprise networks right yeah you know i think you're right um you are correct and in you know i don't want to necessarily network say on network automation didn't exist because it actually did you know if you go back to the old days of the service provider you know the tdm world the atm framework really world they were all built on automation it wasn't called that back then but they were really built on that concept uh you know for anyone who's ever experienced you know deploying an atm network i mean back then right the the management system was was the brains of the network the the nodes were really kind of stupid you know they would come up and they would download their entire config from a centralized dms system or centralized management system that's how a lot of the atm and frame really networks work um and and then we realized oh well what happens when it can't get to the nms you know then what happens or what happens when you end up in a race condition and no and neither side can figure out who's in charge um you know there were literally cases where you had to reboot the network uh to kind of get it back in sync um so it was interesting times um but uh you know i think that um you know you start to play that you start to play that out and uh it's really exciting to see where network automation has come in the last 10 years i mean it is really we have a long way to go there is no question about it but i think we've certainly come a very very long way the fact that we're even having these conversations yeah um you know it's really exciting and i guess we'll get into this as we progress but it's always been a scary thought for me that you know we're taking the brains out of the gear out of the iron and putting it in a controller somewhere like you had said like what if it falls over what if they can't reach each other i mean i'm guessing since 2012 since you've been into this i mean if these things been addressed if we hand all the intelligence over to this other centralized place and that falls over i mean is that where we get into like redundancy and you have a pair of things that if one falls over and do you know what i mean like isn't there a concern yeah i do i do because once you take the you know once you remove that control plane and put it somewhere else it's a single point of failure right theoretically right correct no well not him yeah yes in real life not even just theoretically but you know i i don't think we'll actually get there um you know i think that that i'm i'm hoping we've got enough sense to learn you know some from some of our past you know mistakes and you know we we all you know a lot of us can probably at least remember you know when when the original sdn hype started right we were going to have you know an open flow showed up on the scene and all of a sudden right it was all going to be about programming these devices and literally your brain was going to be centralized so i don't believe that's where we're going to land you know i think that you know what we're really seeing in this space is we're really starting to to come to an understanding that networking needs to be more than just simply packets ingress egress of a box networking and you know a lot of us carry the title of systems engineer okay and this is one that i love to touch on a bit because i think it really talks to the whole story and if you think about the root of that systems engineer the whole idea is to architect a system not to architect a node and i think that that you know as this thing continues to to expand and proliferate into various organizations you know my belief is is that that we're going to be running and we are running in a lot of respects distributed a very large distributed system right it's not going to be about a centralized brain and a dumb node no it all has to work together um and and i think that that's you know kind of that's where we're marching to or at least that's my belief of it um not everyone has that belief though and and you know there's a lot of varying opinions about this you know there are a lot of of individuals and organizations that are building products around this idea that you know you have to really centralize all of the the operational and state data and config data and that's the only way you can achieve automation and and i don't believe that and and i think that that that's a recipe for disaster because i think it does take us down that path sounds like a vendor lock-in kind of uh argument right you need our you need our proprietary system that only works with our proprietary iron i mean right and there's the challenge right because nothing nothing keeps the vendor in check right and that's the real problem here we we you know as opera now disclaimer i work for a software company so in fairness right yeah but but but you know that being said right i think that you know we are we are into a we're at the nascent stages of a very exciting new world in that for the first time in networking or maybe not the first time but but for the first time in a long time that that companies can now start to think about what is it i want to achieve from my operational model and then go find the right parts and products and services to achieve that it used to be right i've designed a network and now i've got a kind of form fitter i got to force fit my operational model into the tooling my vendor will give me and it's no longer that case we put a lot of power back into the designers the operators to really run the infrastructure the way they want to it run yeah the tooling my vendor will give me i mean that was that was that was the way it used to be it's like you know i mean you know in the sad state i mean think about this for a minute so we're sitting here in in you know 20 just rolled into 2022 and it's fascinating the number of organizations that are still struggling with how do i do backup of my network devices yeah yeah right yeah it's crazy to see the organizations that still struggle with the basics i mean that's that has i mean it has something to do with automation but but it's like holy smokes and i i don't know if y'all are familiar with the 321 concept of backups but right the the concept is simply i should have three copies of my data and two separate locations one of which should be offsite right i would venture to say a significant number of organizations don't even meet that minimum criteria in terms of backing up just their current routers and switch configurations in two different places it's in two places it's in the running config and the startup company no doubt exactly i wouldn't and hopefully those are the same but now because of hopefully now because of covid it's finally off site yeah exactly exactly right right all right so we found a positive for cobalt i would venture to say here's my here's my theory is that because too many places are trying to do too many things with not enough resources and maybe that's part of what automation can can help solve but in all the places i've been there's just too much work not enough people and you're you know like you can barely keep up with documentation right you build something and like oh god i gotta get this you know documentation updated for operations before i hand it off to but you know then these three other things come up that are super high priorities and so you know i i mean i can remember looking for a config backup and finding out that like they hadn't been backed up in months now the system was in place and it was all supposed to be working but you know whatever like something fell offline a server stop whatever so so you could even have the system in place and it stopped working but nobody checks and i yeah so you know hopefully i mean that's what it seems like to me like you know if automation can solve some of that stuff back your things up do three two one and check every day to make sure it's working and if it's not email somebody right because otherwise you have to go look like me and i'm like well hell i don't have a current config now what am i going to do so i i well you know i i think you start to you know you start to ask the question though you know very few people there are pockets out there i'm not denying that but but i would say by and large most network engineers or operators you know see the value of automation right now you know whether they're doing it whether they're doing it at scale whether they're doing it for everything different topic but i think we all agree that there's value there right now i think the new challenge is how do you make it accessible right it's one thing to recognize i need it or i want it or i can benefit from it but how do i make it accessible and i think that that is where we're starting to see one area where we're starting to see a lot of of emphasis and advancement in the industry um you know if if uh at the risk of having you know tomatoes thrown at me um you know i mean but that that is that is one of the unique things that i tension is doing right we're really focusing on how do we make automation accessible to the masses you know it cannot be i mean i've got a background in software development um i'm very comfortable writing code but i also understand that that i'm probably in norman or i'm probably a minority in the networking industry right um you know in fact i would venture say there's there's a significant number of folks who got into networking because they took you know cs 101 at their local college and said uh-uh this is not what i want to do for the rest of my life i do not want to sit here and write code eight hours today yeah so so you know i think we have to recognize that and and it cannot be just simply all about network automation means i'm writing code and i think that that's where we're starting to see very slowly but we're starting to see that pendulum move again well that's why i love danceable so much like aj ran an ansible demo for us because i'm one of those guys that's like oh god automation python you know i failed out of computer science forever ago right so when when yep ansible was a much easier lift for me i was like oh wait i can write some yaml files like absolutely so that yeah i mean i really like personally i like tools that for a network guy who has avoided software has you know writing code his whole life to give me tools that make it accessible to you know an easier lift you know get me in the game let me automate something and get excited about it and i'd have to spend six months trying to learn you know lists from dictionaries from for loops you know like because because to me it's just a for whatever reason i have a hard time getting the programmatic stuff in my head although there's so many reasons absolutely i mean you know there's everywhere you turn there's another class another you know there's so much stuff out there to learn which is great free resources too there is there's tons of stuff out there i think the industry has done a fantastic job making you know uh resources and doing some knowledge sharing and just making things accessible you know and i think that that you know one thing i would always encourage every network engineer uh to do is whether or not you're into programming and i'm not here to say you know yes get into it no don't get into it but i do encourage you know whenever i talk with with folks who say you know help me in in my career help me understand you know how to how to achieve you know get to my get to a place where i can do some of the things that you've done and and you know i always tell them you know but it's worth it excuse me to take one or two introductory courses even if you don't ever become a competent programmer because it trains you in a way of thinking about things and that part is you know in a lot of respects we do this in networking we just don't realize it but but but you know programming takes it even a step further and it really forces you to take a very complex problem and break it down into very simple steps we do this in networking we just don't realize we do it sometimes so anyway i always encourage folks to at least you know take that one or two you know classes or that one or two things out online or whatever it is because you do get benefit out of it even if you don't become a programmer as a result absolutely so peter i don't want to make this chat just about software-defined networking but i want to use it as an example so many many organizations have adopted software-defined networking in one facet or another in multiple in some cases so you may have a controller of the campus a controller of the data center a controller of your security fabric do you in your crystal ball do you see you know more third parties going after that market as a way of tying those different controllers together is that something that i tensiles um can do or has on track to do what are your what are your thoughts there so so you know if i think about it just you know kind of strictly from from the the basis of your question you know the the wonderful thing about controllers is it's another way to create uh vendor lock under lock it right um you know the if if i can if i can if i can put a controller there and and make the interface from that controller to the end device proprietary so that no other controller can come in and do anything yeah it's another form of lock-in is what it is and i think that's why you see a lot of it now i don't want to say it's all bad i mean there's a lot of great functionality i mean you know if you look at for instance you know what meraki did i think that they did a wonderful job with this and and you know kind of turning what was a complex problem in terms of managing wi-fi access points into something much much more manageable you know so i think some good has come of it but i do believe that that you know specifically if i put my intentional hat back on for just a moment i do think that there is opportunity out there and i think that this is an area where you'll see that attention continues to make uh investments because we understand that you know there is no such thing as a source of truth okay it's probably going to be a bit of a controversial statement all right hold on hold on you're the you're the automation guy instead of everything everybody's told me how dare you i love it i love it there we go so i woke everybody up there is no such thing as there is no such thing as a source of truth what there is such thing as there's many sources of truth and and i think that when you start to understand that you start to adopt that your sources of truth live all over the place right they live in your ipad they live in your dns they live in your inventory right they live on your device they live all over and i think that it's a bit of a fool's errand to actually believe that that they're that i'm going to take all that consolidate that into one data structure i'm going to come up with one model that's going to work for me for everything i'm ever going to want to do right uh you know insert open config here and see how well that's solved that problem um you know i think that that this is where i tenshill's big focus is it's saying look we recognize that there is you know value in all of that data but it's only valuable if you're getting the data from its source instead of dealing with shadow copies and and and whatnot of that data and so that's where we continue to make investments to make it very easy and very accessible for customers to be able to stitch all of that data together for the purposes of achieving an end-to-end uh use case so would you say that itentials products are are aggregators of that sources of those sources of truth or they they just have a way to go get what they need when they need it yeah it's more about our ability to go get what we need when we need it you know it's it's all about and let me draw a bit of a parallel to to kind of i think hammer the salmon so it's always tough to do this right when you're listening if i had a whiteboard this would all make sense um but but if you think about sitting in a meeting with network engineers right we've all been in a meeting prior to the days of copen when we actually sat around a table that was a novel concept right um you barely could ever if you're having a meeting about network design about a problem whatever i would venture guess that you can't get 10 minutes into that meeting before someone's going to set up from the table walk over to the whiteboard and start drawing the network right and from that point forward the entire focus of the meeting is going to be that whiteboard and someone people are going to continue drawing on it right another person may come over and they're going to draw a bit to the whiteboard someone else is going to come and they're going to draw a bit to the whiteboard and what they're doing is they're describing a process whatever that process may be right i go and got my ip address from over here i had to make a insert into my dns over here and you've got different people sitting at the table and they're all contributing to this whiteboard now take that visualization take that concept and apply it to what attention is trying to do we have built a product that allows you to visually design that workflow and be able to have all of those teams come together and each provide their piece of the whole picture so that at the end of the day you can hit go and you get a full end to end delivery of a use case but it's not one person sitting down and writing a code it's everyone contributing to that whiteboard with their own sources of their truth with their own ways of doing things you know with their own inputs and outputs et cetera and that's really the focal point of what we're doing at attention and what we continue to drive with our our platform okay before before we dive too deep into i tension here there was one question i had to ask you so you yeah you pivoted uh once again in your career where you went from you know networking to software and now you're you're in marketing um was the was that pivot as big and scary as the networking to software development oh gosh it was probably bigger i mean holy smokes right talk about talk about ripping the training wheels off you know the beauty you know when you're technical you always have that to fall back on right and i think we all understand that you know when you're technical you always have that to fall back on when you make that transition to whether you're you're moving into management whether you're moving into leadership roles whether you're moving into sales whether you're moving into product management or marketing you know now you're starting to leave some of that training wheel behind in a big way um because now it's not about what can i do at the keyboard it's you know what can my brain come up with and absolutely it was it was one of the more scary easily the most scary scary pivot i made um you know unfortunately or fortunately again depending on you want to look at it i'm one of those bizarre engineers that loves to get on things like this and talk or put me on a stage and i'll talk all day long right about because i just love the technology and i love talking about it and it was just it was a very natural thing for me to kind of gravitate towards very cool very but yes it was very scary i i asked that somewhat selfishly because of you know the content creator in me even the tech engineer and me i i just want to combine the two and and do that for my job but we'll see how this pans out absolutely absolutely i mean i get it no question about it but but you know if you think about it right and and especially anyone who's designed networks there is a substantial amount of creativity involved there oh yeah uh you know i mean yes you're using a lot of prevailing designs but we've all been faced with those problems whether it's constraint on the design or constraint of the application or a budgetary constraint whatever it is we've had to get creative and it's amazing you know when i talk with a lot of networking professionals and they'll make comments like you know i'm not creative or you know i i don't have you know i'm i'm engineering you know very focused i'm like are you really let's talk through that a little bit because i think a lot of network engineers have that creative you know component to them and that's how we got to the art of network engineering so um i i think now seems the goodest time is any um can you tell us who is itential how did they get their start you know give us a little background on on intentional the company yeah so so attention's been around for gosh almost seven years now a lot of people don't know that um but we're very still you know we're still very young in terms of a company even though we're seven years into this um you know a lot of that is is due to the industry that we're in um you know we focus on building networking cloud automation that's what we focus on doing so very and it's kind of like how i just described it right it's this idea that you know we have this belief out there that sources of truth live everywhere right there is no one source of truth there's many sources of truth and in order for an organization to be successful they have to be able to easily tap into all of those sources of truth um we also believe very strongly that automation has to be and tooling around automation has to be accessible not everyone's going to sit down and open vs code or vim if you're like me or emacs or you know notepad i don't care right know what not everyone's going to sit down and start writing code it's not to say one's right or wrong not not say one is better or worse it is to say though that if if we don't make this technology accessible then it's never going to really catch on and it's never really going to be what it could be you know to network operators so so that's the other big element of what we're doing attention is making it accessible i think the third thing that we're doing is we're trying very hard and i'm going to use a vendor i'm going to use a vendor as i'm here because we're all going to have heard the same thing i'm about to say but you know we try very hard not to have a technology religion uh you know we try very hard to be a a tool that allows customers to build and orchestrate network workflows but do it by bringing their their practices their tools their ways of doing things in other words we're not going to walk in the door and say i want you to forget everything you've learned up to now get rid of all of your tribal organic knowledge right you need to sit down learn our tool learn our way of doing it and we are now the center of your world right that doesn't work anymore you know and if you need a great reference go look at circa you know in the 90s you know network node manager from hp you know that's a great example of that right it had to be the center of the world because if it wasn't it didn't work and and we're trying really hard not to do that so you know if you've got your investment in ansible great bring it along we work with it if you're using terraform fantastic let's do it if you decided to go down the custom development path wonderful we can work with that if you've got api enabled devices hey no problem all of that works with our system what we're doing is giving you those tools to allow you to now orchestrate across the entire implementation the last thing i'll say about it and i think it's maybe the most important point is that automation network automation has to be more than just the execution of automation right because there's more to it than that when you look at ants i mean i love ants i have a very you know i i you know to this day i mean i'm very proud of the work we did at ansible and i think it's a fantastic tool um but ansible focuses on the execution of automation if we think about a network change and that's why i love tim's interest so so much because you know you think about there's all kinds of things that have to happen before you start automating then there's the active of of the automation and then there's all much stuff that has to happen after right at the beginnings i have to get my my addressing for my ipam i have to get information from inventory um i have to do a bunch of pre-checks on my network i got to make sure that i'm ready to go now i can make my change and then oh yeah guess what there's a whole bunch of things that got to happen on the back side before you know that automation can be considered done complete and successful and that's really where our focus is so wait i attention can run pre and post checks for me i tension can run well so so you can run your own pre and post checks but i tension gives you the ability to build it right into the workflow and that's the point that sounds nice sorry tim good oh no problem peter you talked a few minutes ago about it being more than just one person at the white board that's right if you will um in in being multiple teams multiple sources of truth with most i want i shouldn't say most with many organizations being siloed in the it teams who who do you usually work with who's coming to you for help is it is it primarily network teams at first system teams it teams in general what does it look like oh it's not work teams for sure it's network teams now the question is about which network teams right and i think that's kind of the crux your question and and to some degree it's all and it just all depends but but you know think about think about any good size enterprise today and networking right typically you're going to have probably a group that manual manages the core now let's think about it like a global enterprise right now right you have a team that manages the core network right those guys are are probably mostly still manual driven a lot of cli right they're they're kind of the old guys like me right they've been doing it a long time they don't need these new fangled tools right they know exactly what they need to do they know how to type out the cli commands you know what not and but then you've got a different team that maybe is managing your sd-wan deployment right they're part of the network team now um then maybe you have another team that is is handling your data center right and and they've got a whole different scenario right because they're trying to run things at scale they've got to move fast they get they can rubber stamp out their devices um then you got a whole nother networking team they're doing stuff in the cloud because we all know network engineers don't do cloud right no of course they do they have to right that's the reality of the world we live in today it's not just my cli based device anymore it's not an api device it's a controller-based device it's stuff running in the cloud all of that is networking now and and we need uh tools and this is where this is where potential really focuses on building a platform that allows us to do that horizontally across all of those types of of implementations so so let's let's talk about that platform is this a on-premises platform is this a cloud platform what yeah it is i mean really you're going to ask a product manager that question yes it's yes no uh so so yes potential got to start as a traditional on-premise premises implementation so we have uh really two components we have the intentional automation platform which really focuses on orchestrating network change this is that end-to-end whiteboard i keep talking about that we can plug anything into and then we have a secondary product called the attentional automation gateway and and really that's its sweet spot is really to provide api functionality on top of non-api implementations so think of it this way ansible is a playbook it's not an api wouldn't it be great if i could put an api on top of the playbook that i written i've written and then plug that into a workflow yeah that's what that's what potential is doing with platform and gateway um like i said it is a traditional on-premises application although earlier this year we announced for the first time that that we are moving into the cloudy world where we're moving into the the software world so we uh our first iteration of that is we've delivered a path uh around the attention automation platform so a customer can run a potential automation platform on itentia's cloud uh get all the benefits it's the same platform that they install on prem it's just not running in the cloud and it leaves customers the burden of having to install it manage it and do all of the admin work uh associated with running a server gotcha okay um where does the the cloud connection come in if i'm if i am connecting to azure aws you know you name it how am i interfacing with that with potential well one one of the things that couple of things um in our workflow capabilities and and this is a decision that that that we made very early on i'm glad we made it i think it was the right decision um is that that we can consume apis natively and and this this is what differentiates us from say the terraforms of the world right so you look at something like terraform or or and even ansible to that degree i'll use terraform a little more prevalent in cloud but but ansible would fall into this this category you know the challenge with some of these tools is that you know they're providing a abstraction on top of the api not the ap not the raw api capabilities so aws you know amazon publishes an api terraform comes through and they give you a whole bunch of of modules that can consume that api but it's whatever the designer decided that they would expose from that api right what we've done it from an intentional standpoint is we said you know let's take the abstractions let's throw them away because they don't bring really any value let's just work with the raw api capabilities so whether i want to you know technically if i wanted to i could automate ec2 instances with with potential automation platform i can actually do that today easily um so so so the way we do that is we plug the api directly in uh and we can do that really for any system so whether it's cloud whether it's controller um you know whether it's your coffee pot if it's got an api we can plug it right into our workflow designer and we can design workflows across it uh that's that's really the power of of what we're doing from potential's perspective now coffee is a service absolutely i mean how is that not a thing right oh wait i guess it's just uber going to starbucks for me so but um no it's it's um but but i think that you know what we're also you know what we also do is is we have we've made a pretty significant investment though is just having a tool that does automation only gets you part of the way there all right um this was even true with ansible you know ansible's great but the problem is ansible is very a raw toolkit right you're going to sit down you're going to write that playbook from beginning to end and how many people are guilty and be honest with yourselves that you're using ansible and you fall back into the same pattern that you had in the network space and you start copying and pasting and you start with a player book you're like oh i gotta write a new phone wait a minute i got one close let me copy and paste it into my new playbook and make all the changes i want right i mean that's the reality it happens um you know what what we're doing one of the other elements that that we're doing at attention is we're making an investment in delivering what we call pre-built and these are essentially things you can plug directly into the automation platform that are pre-defined workflows that do common tasks um and when i say do common tasks i mean uh right up to doing things like i want to do a software upgrade on an asr 9k and do it in a very controlled way these are the types of things that we're adding to the platform and are available in in to our customers uh that they can immediately plug in and immediately become a functional doing things on their infrastructure hmm software upgrades via automation now you have my attention a few of those i hear so when you reload the thing and it gets kicked into ram on and takes a dump then what does the automation know i mean there i've been at places that we didn't want to automate software upgrades because there's just so many variables yep yeah that's it it's a it's a fair point i mean there there is you can only automate to the extent that that a system gives you the capability to automate it right you know the unfortunate part and it makes me sad set automation aside for just a minute it makes me sad in the networking industry that that i mean these are are not problems that that people don't know how to solve right insert cloud init here right you know it's like we know how to solve these problems but but but a lot of of networking devices unfortunately are either too old or they just haven't given been given the love that they need or for various other reasons and and we can probably go through a whole litany of of other reasons um unfortunately you know we have what we have in the networking space yeah it's sad but you know it is what it is now i will say this though you know by by being able to control that workflow and be able to put as much upfront work into that there is an awful lot of opportunity to put the checks and balances in place to hopefully make sure you don't get in that that statement right i would never you know the engineer in me says don't ever say never right i mean i know that i've lived it too many times right the most foolproof system in the world is gonna be the first to break um but but nevertheless you know hopefully we're at least starting to get a little bit smarter about these things so i i think one of the biggest fears when you start talking automation at least for for network engineers is and and andy you've brought this up before i know i've brought it up before is okay gosh what do i got to learn now what do i got to figure out next peter can you kind of go into uh itentials automation studio as far as being low code drag and drop you know what do people need to know day one to get started before you yeah i mean that's really that whiny tim is that no i said i did it too sorry peter go ahead dang it i need great i mean i need dan here i can't beat dan um you know i think that that hits the heart of what i was i was kind of mentioning around you know the accessibility of automation so you know what we've done at attention is is you know part of the platform is what we call automation studio and that's exactly what it is it's driving drag and drop concept uh you know i can drag apis onto my canvas i can drag transformations on on my canvas so that i can transfer my input to to the desired output and and this is this is that analogy i was drawing to the whiteboard right just like in in you know when we used to sit around at conference rooms and we all would go to the whiteboard and write our piece on it and what you end up with is you end up with a schematic same concept with automation studio it's just now it's being done on a canvas with drag and drop elements that are pointing at api endpoints it's the idea though that that we can build these workflows you know through intuitive user interfaces as opposed to someone having to drop down to text editors and encode it and we can be just as powerful and achieve just as much uh going that direction i'm sorry i might have phased out so what is automation studio i mean it sounds amazing automation is is a is a component of the potential automation platform so the essential automation platform is is is really three major components it is our automation studio which is our design element this is where you design uh all of your workflows and and you can so you build your end-to-end workflow uh whatever it is you're trying to do and everything from start with a ticket to end with a slack message and everything that happens in between uh it's the uh what we call operations manager which is really the execution element side of platform where it actually runs those workflows and then we have a third element which is config manager and that is how do you that's bringing intelligence to how you manage uh network device configuration so that's your golden templates you know how do you put rules in place that say you know this line should be this this line can never show up in a config and be able to to perform actions of of that nature so that would catch mistakes conceivably right somebody it it it'll look at your head it can do it don't you don't delete all the vlans off a trunk right my take on that has always been it will do what you tell it to do yeah so if you tell it to catch mistakes and what you're telling it is the mistake to catch then yes it'll catch mistakes but that's pretty helpful because i've always been exhausted in almost every maintenance window i've ever worked like i'm not really my best self so having some of that intelligence distributed and checking things for me it sounds super helpful yeah i agree i mean i've lived through that as well i mean i can remember and and i'm sure a lot of the a lot of folks can can relate to this right you get done with a maintenance window it's 2 33 3 30 4 30 in the morning uh you know maybe you you got called into the maintenance window late you know maybe you uh had a couple of drinks with dinner and and now you're really struggling to get through this maintenance window and you're exhausted by the time you get to the end of it and now you got to sit there and stare and compare two configurations to figure out is it back to what it should be and not miss something i mean configurations aren't you know 10 lines right so um you know i think the other element that we're driving with with configuration manager is also around the idea of of generating configuration and specifically what we call golden golden configs um and that's that ability to we all do this naturally but we've actually encoded it into features into the software where you can chunk the config up into its various pieces and then reconstruct it at the end right so so there are parts of the config that we know going to every single device that's out there i don't care what it is right they all point to the syslog server they all use this ntp setting etc then there are pieces that are maybe regional you know regionally specific then there are pieces of the config that are locally significant and so we've actually provided an entire tool or trial ui as part of platform that allows you to build the config that way and then we will construct the final config for a device that gets pushed out so when you go in so there's existing configs in the environment right that you're going into so does this consume those configs and then do what you just said break them up into it can it can yeah the the two features work together so you got the compliance as part of it which is that's reading in the config and then applying all the rules and making sure everything is valid and then you got the golden config which is really all about how do i build a device configuration so yes it all it all works together at the end of the day so it can work on greenfield and brownfield it's not like oh it's better for new deployment but brownfield uh oh how do we get all these configs to do what changes is your starting point yeah yeah exactly greenfield you're gonna start with the golden config brownfield you're gonna start with compliance okay so so peter when you were first talking about potential you were you know kind of pointing out like well if you're doing your own homegrown python if you're doing ansible terraform it does all these things and i kind of thought for a second well this sounds like a solution for people who are already automating but you know as we've had this conversation it sounds like too if you're not yet doing automation i tensile could be what helps you get there oh absolutely call me right away um if that's the case no i'll see every time i slip every once in a while i slip into that marketing hole i can't help myself um no in all seriousness you know absolutely you know i think that that you know automation network automation is an interesting thing from the aspect that that i think a lot of organizations um they look at it a little more holistically than they need to you know automation doesn't have to be i've automated my entire device config from soup to nights for every device in my infrastructure automation can be as simple as i want to make sure that i've got the right syslog server programmed on every single core network router and i'm going to automate that that can be one line you know and and and i get value out of that and and so what i of you know throughout my entire career is you know as as i've always been doing this this is this conversation i've always had with customers is that you know start small get comfortable with the technology the technology does you no good if you're not comfortable with it if you don't trust it if it if it you're not comfortable with it you're never going to embrace it so start small simply automate one line in your config let that go for a month then come back and auto in another line or two more lines right and grow into automation instead of looking at your config and saying holy smokes how am i going to build something that's going to automate you know this 1500 line you know core router config so that's what i was just thinking so attention can help automate small shops up to very large places with the latch without question here yeah okay absolutely absolutely and and we have we have customers that that are are very small in nature that that you know users we have very very large customers um you know that uses that that are doing you know tens of thousands of automations a day and i i really appreciate the end to end approach in that it's it's more than just the change it's the uh working with the itsm solution it's uh like you said at the end you can send a slack message to make sure the the team is updated that something's been done i like that it's more than just you've taken the approach of more than just the change it's the entire change process and i think a lot of network engineers um and others can appreciate that it has to be i mean it's the only way it works in in my mind um you know what what good does it do me if all i'm doing is focusing on the execution of the change if i still have to sit there and manually go you know read the ticket from i don't know servicenow and i got to manually go get a ip address for my time and i got to manually go update inventory and i gotta you know manually do all my pre-checks i mean that that doesn't service anybody any good um you know and i think in a lot of respects you know what we're trying to do here and and the we in this context is really just you know the thought of network automation right the broader you know what we're trying to do from an industry perspective is we're all about trying to buy time right there is no i don't want to say there's no there's not as much value in making the change as there is in understanding what change needs to be made and how you go about making that change so if we can free up a user's time a network engineer's time so they can stay more focused on what's the change i need to make or how do i go about the change versus actually executing the change that's a big win that's a big win for the engineer that's a big win for the engineers company that's a big win for the entire industry in my mind i'm guessing and i will i'll go out on a limb on this one but i'm gonna guess none of us got into the networking industry myself included so they could sit there all day and type no vlan 100 on 300 switches yeah that's that's that i mean that's the true value right is just that the scale i i remember i had we've talked about it before i had like an snmp location string i had to update on a scad ton of devices and yeah like old school me right i i i'd have to log into each one one by one and do it and it's awful you know you got a small environment not that big but you know not that big of a deal you know home lab whatever but yeah go go update on you know 350 devices like oh my god absolutely and then when somebody shows you how it can be automated oh here's a little bit of thing you do this and you pull that you press one button and watch the magic happen like again i go back to aj's you know demo that he did he's done a couple automation demos for me i'm just like oh my god but i needed that oh my god moment because prior to that it was just all way too abstract and coding scary and but then when i saw how me sitting in the chair operating a network and like oh i get it now i don't have to log in and copy and paste the stupid command in the 350 devices ah that's right that's exactly right that's exactly right it's magical i like that so so peter i i have to ask one of my favorite questions for folks that have any sort of tied in like network automation you have quite a storied history in in network automation specifically so how do you recommend any network engineer get started with it oh that's a dirty question you should have warned them just do it i mean just do it no i mean i kind of touched on it already right start small yeah um that's that's how i always tell people start small you know you don't need to go boil the ocean you don't need to go automate your entire network you don't even need to go automate your entire device configuration just start something small and and get comfortable with the technology because two things are happening at once right one you're learning to automate and and automate is an action right it's not it's not i think we you know i've talked a lot about this in the past right it's not a product it's it's it's right it's um it's an action so get comfortable automating and then get comfortable with the tools and don't be afraid to try different tools and try different approaches right there the the network automation market is so vast right now i mean yeah everybody is talking about network automation in one form fashion another um you know so there's a lot and there's a lot of differing ways and a lot of different approaches to doing it so you know what i always recommend is you know try out different things um you know be comfortable with the technology and and i think that that's how you get started with this because you will have and i think andy put it perfectly right you will eventually have that aha moment and when you do it's a beautiful thing it really is i had mine 10 years ago and and it was you know it was fantastic and everyone will have it if you just give it time so can we can we beat up on python for just a moment yeah let's do it but but related related to what aj just asked so you know find your pain point for me it was snmp location updates on a bajillion devices what so that's my use case so now i know okay this is because i have skin in the game this is gonna help me you know make my life better i'm not gonna have to go through all that pain it could be a six hour maintenance window logging in all that crap one by one right let's do it in 20 minutes so the challenge that i have had and continue to have is python is a tool right that i could do that with so as a network engineer without a software background how much python do i need to know and and this might not be a question you can ask but the challenge i keep having is you know there's there's python for network engineering like curriculum there's 100 days of code where it's like well don't do any network engineering but learn a bunch of python and there's there's two schools of teaching and for me i'm like well i just want to get it to you know log into a device and blast this line in and save it and do a quick validation but i've always had a hard time so i'm beating up on python because i never really know how much like how much python does a guy who's never done python need to learn to automate one line of code and 300 devices right like it should be easy it shouldn't be a big deal but then you're like well there's 300 courses i can take some of them are geared toward me some of them aren't and and depending on who you ask some people say no learn the basics the fundamentals don't worry about networking yet because you have to know all the mechanical so it's just been a pain point for me but such a hard time with python because i get in there i start studying and then i'm like but ah when do i get to the point when i push the magic button you know so is there a question in there do we have to cut that out did that make no sense well think about it like this let me let me try this think about it this way you have to start with what it is you're trying to accomplish right there's no one right answer to this question right if if your goal is to become a python developer you're going to take a very different approach to this then all my goal is i just want to see this work i want to log into a device and run show version if all i ever do is that i'm happy right and and so i think that that that's the starting point has to be be honest with yourself about what you want out of what it is you're trying to do that's the starting point from there yeah then then then you've got this whole sea of of stuff out there um you know i think that that you know imitation is the is the greatest form of flattery we've all heard it right and i do believe that you know with the amount of code that we have out there now today it would be challenging for you not to be able to go find something that doesn't mimic what it is you're trying to do maybe it's not exact but it's pretty close and um you know so if all you're trying to do is that one simple command you know go go beg borrow and steal from the open source community that's what makes open source and that's the third point people make i was like oh just go find it and do it but then i don't understand what i'm doing so that but i think you said just ssh into a box and do a chauver like i've never done that in python maybe that's a good start for me right that's right that's right it's it's all about the basics for sure right i i will say this unless your intention is to get into development as a profession sitting down and learning the basics right and getting into what's a string and what's an ins and what's a dictionary and what's a list there's no that's useless who cares but everybody in networking is learning this stuff and you feel like you're at a disadvantage you know what i mean i you know i i i don't know if i'd agree with that state yeah it's just i know that that's what's getting this outfield exactly just about saying that that's what's getting so much oxygen right now you're absolutely right everywhere you turn all you hear and see is i'm a network guy learning programming right i'm a network gal learning programming that's all you see in here right now i can tell you at least from my point of view and for the number of customers that i talk to in a day week month and year that it's still a vast number of of folks that are are becoming critical programmers are in the minority i mean a very small minority so i can bring in i tension and solve my automation problems and i don't like do i need to know any python do i need to oh my god you don't even know i have to know what python is i don't even have to spell if you if you can if you can if you can work a mouse you can automate with attention yeah that's my kind of solution i don't wanna so simple that point click done oh gosh i sound like a windows commercial now nice nice well peter is there anything about itential or yourself that we didn't ask you that we should have asked you oh wow um yeah this is that point where you know of course i've got i've got all of our marketing people on my shoulder saying okay now you know i i don't know if anything specific you know i think that that if if anything you know i would say that that um network automation right now the way we think about it is is still very much at its infancy and i think we all have to recognize that kind of taking back to what andy's point just was you know we hear so much about network automation everywhere we turn you would think that that it is mature it's evolved it is you know we've got it all figured out we don't we're all flying by the seat of our pants some of us a little bit you know some of us are a little more buckled than others um and i would potential in that category but but i think the point being is that you know we're going to evolve a lot in the next 3 five seven ten years um it's going to be you know this is going to be a long road this is i think it's safe to say that that we've moved beyond uh the that this is going to be a flash point kind of technology right or a flashpoint you know change i think that this is a cultural change i think it's a cultural change for the better i think it's an exciting time to be a part of network automation um i think that there's a lot of good going out there and i think that that in order for that to continue um you know i think it's important that we all you know kind of get involved in this thing in one way shape or form or another whatever that is um you know i think it's just a really exciting time to be part of this industry i think it's a great time to to look at companies like edited look at what they're doing you know try to read past the words and really dig into kind of what we've done here and and and again right kind of getting this idea of you know what is it i'm trying to accomplish and and look at you know what's out there and what it's capable of doing i love it i absolutely love it i want to say thank you to all of our patreons for joining us tonight if you're interested in joining our patreon program you can go forward to patreon.com of netenge and hang out with us while we record episodes you can ask questions to the guests and just chat with us while we do our thing peter where can people learn more about itential ah please come see itential.com or i guess if i go old school www.idental.com they'll both get you there uh there's plenty of of marketing materials out there white papers technical reports or technical papers etc uh you can also sign up for a cloud account at that point get started uh you get started for free create your account you started working with potential automation platform start building workflows automate your coffee pot uh if you've got an api driven one it's all good um and uh then also come visit visit us in the in the twitter sphere you know additional tweet us you can also tweet me directly at privateip i always love to hear from people i try to be as engaging as i can be um so don't be shy i love it private ip i i i don't think i'm following you but i will be shortly um as we record this episode you are a couple days away from participating in network field day 27 so uh when this episode releases it will be well after that so we will make sure to put links to uh the itential presentations for nfd in the show notes so you can go watch those and see more peter presenting i'm sure it'll be a team of people for my potential though uh not not just peter but um you can learn a whole lot more about attention from networking field day um are you ready for the big presentation oh i am you know i you know i i i have to admit it's it's i do i do i get very excited um you know uh whenever i'm presenting at conferences if anyone's ever seen me presented a conference um you know i i walk from one side to stage to the other um i how i've been able to sit in my chair this whole thing is has been uh unbeknownst to me that's very unusual for me i'd love to present because i love the technology so much and i'd love to interface with folks and you know just hear different perspectives and you know just kind of keep a beat on what's going on in the space i love the nfc advertisements i i watched chris wade's uh presentation back in february uh of i tential and it was just a really you know 24 minutes the sync takes you through the whole you know soup to nuts and it was uh yeah i really like those kind of distills it down to the you know what you need to know it does it does yeah agreed all right peter spargata thank you very much for joining us tonight we really appreciate your time thanks for having me it's been great guys thanks great and we'll see you next week on another episode of the art of network engineering hey everyone this is aj if you like what you heard today then make sure you subscribe to our podcast and your favorite podcatcher smash that bell icon to get notified of all of our future episodes also follow us on twitter and instagram we are at art of net edge that's art of n-e-t-e-n-g you can also find us on the web at art of network engineering dot com where we post all of our show notes you can read blog articles from the co-hosts and guests and also a lot more news and info from the networking world thanks for listening you