Summary

Summary “The Three Laws of Robotics: 1: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm; 2: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law;

3: A robot must protect its own existence if such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law;

The Zeroth Law: A robot may not harm humanity, or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.” ― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot If the “Three Laws of Robotics” as laid out by Isaac Asimov are applied, substituting humanity for the enterprise network, the basic principles and goals of automating a network becomes clear.

The robot (automation engine) may not damage the network, or, through inaction, allow the network to come to harm.

A robot must obey with the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the first Law.

The zeroth Law: A robot may not harm the network, or, by inaction, allow the network to come to harm.

The benefits from network automation cannot, at any cost, cause network interruptions or impact to services. For the most part organizations are perfectly content running the network manually if it means stability. Should network automation impact the network negatively, especially in the early stages, those bad first impressions will be hard to recover from. Regardless of the potential time and cost savings and other benefits automation brings it absolutely cannot have the downside of causing outages or performance issues. Adopting a CI/CD NDLC, slowly progressing and evolving from network reconnaissance, to making changes to the network, to full configuration management, helps mitigate the serious risks inherent in network automation.

Development environment recap:  Microsoft TFS:

o Main repository. o Master branch. o Working branches. o Work items. o Pull requests. o Automated build. o Automated test. o Automated release. o CI/CD pipeline. o Historical view / point-in-time snapshot of network.