This blog is authored by Ioannis Theodoridis(Yannis for friends and workmates). I am a network and systems engineer specializing in fault, performance, and service level monitoring for the Network and IT services. I work in the Network Department, in the IT Division of the Bank of Greece, as a member of the team of NOC engineers that design, deploy and support operations for the WAN, the LAN and the DC Network.
The text posted in this article is not in any way representative or binding for my organization. Some details are purposefully omitted for confidentiality reasons.

My relationship with network automation and programmability

The idea of network automation and programmability has been with me for a long time, long before the term had any meaning for me. In the past I have used TCL/Expect, and then Perl coupled with regular expressions to manipulate network equipment and get performance metrics through Telnet and SSH. Although Perl is a powerful scripting language, it required a lot of work to build things from scratch, as there was no community for this particular application of the language. I have been learning about Network Programmability for some time now, using various sources:

• I have attended Cisco Live DevNet sessions and labs (Cisco Live Berlin & Barcelona) and two different DevNet Express events in Athens (2018 & 2019).
• I have followed Kirk Byers