Build. Break.
Write it down.

Connect NetClaw Mobile from the HUD

Generate an enrollment QR code in the NetClaw HUD or VS Code Mobile panel, scan it with your phone, and reconnect with the same saved device identity.

The Engineer Becomes the Agent Manager: My Techstrong TV Interview

My Techstrong TV debut with Alan Shimel, and what managing AI agents demands of engineers: clear responsibilities, meaningful evaluation, and accountability for the result.

Building With Lumen: Engineers, FlowAgents, and a Summit Full of Ideas

Photos and reflections from Lumen’s October Innovation Summit: hands-on FlowAI workshops, Greg Freeman’s recap, Marc Montez on trust, and my full Itential write-up.

Fourteen Ways to Build the Testbed: Dynamic Source Composition in NetClaw

Part two: NetClaw 1.14.0 brings static/dynamic testbed choice, fourteen source routes and reviewed pyATS activation to its VS Code and terminal installers.

NetClaw on Heavy Networking: An Open Source Network Assistant

Back with Ethan Banks and Drew Conry-Murray on Packet Pushers to talk NetClaw: MCP, explicit approvals, layered protection, federation, and the community building it.

From a Converted Configuration to a Migration You Can Test

How NetConverter and NetClaw can connect reviewed conversion artifacts with virtual-target rehearsals, validation and change evidence. Live conversion qualification is pending.

The Testbed Becomes Part of the Conversation: Dynamic Inventory in pyATS MCP

Part one: pyATS MCP can build an in-memory testbed from inventory systems and structured data, then make it available to its existing network automation tools.

Learning in Public: Elliot Conner in the VibeOps Lounge

VibeOps Lounge 007: Elliot Conner brings a Containerlab operations dashboard, an AI network planner, and a troubleshooting game to a conversation about learning by building.

Two Network Geeks, One Table: Eva Santos in the VibeOps Lounge

From Walmart freight to CWNE #521: Eva Santos joins me to talk Wireshark, ChromeOS Wi-Fi Fixer, Claude Code, and building useful tools before the token buffet closes.

Back on The Cloud Gambit: MCP, NetClaw, and AI Governance

My conversation with William Collins on Packet Pushers: MCP in production, NetClaw’s constitution, human oversight, model identity, and specialized decision models.

From an Ubuntu CD to the Agentic AI Foundation

Twenty-one years after a free Ubuntu CD got me started, the Linux Foundation’s Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) is publishing my MCP and NetClaw story. A personal honour and a milestone for the project and its community.

NetClaw Comes to Visual Studio Code

A network operations workbench beside your code: NetClaw brings Chat, Canvas, RAG, Testbed management, per-MCP setup and reviewed security controls into Visual Studio Code.

Good Friends, Systems Thinking, and a Hello World for AI

Andy Lapteff and Ryan Booth talk AI, systems thinking, and the future of network engineering—and revisit my Hello World for AI session and our subnetting game.

Good news for Hermes users!

NetClaw 1.8.0 brings protected Hermes federation and Mobile Ask Border together, following the shared HUD work in 1.7.0. Five diagrams explain the design and its tested boundaries.

Life Before AI: The Merlin Years

86,688 lines of hand-written code, about 550 hours, and the Django detour that helped me build NetworkGPT in two weeks. What Merlin taught me—and permission to build differently now.

I Saw Something in MCP. Then I Spent 18 Months Building It.

From my first MCP server in March 2025 to MCP Dev Summit Toronto: eighteen months of building, teaching, independent convergence, and the journey to NetClaw. Photos and the full presentation included.

Give your ChatGPT Dot a real network: connecting NetClaw as an MCP plugin

Connect a locally running NetClaw to a ChatGPT Dot as an OAuth-protected MCP plugin, and let your personal assistant ask 200+ network skills for live evidence.

NetClaw and Equinix Fabric: giving an investigation its provider-side evidence

NetClaw adds two new skills for Equinix Fabric and Network Edge, backed by Equinix's official MCP server, with an explicit local approval gate for any write.

NetClaw 1.1.0: Start with a conversation. Keep the evidence.

A tour of NetClaw's Chat-first HUD, Canvas investigations and optional Jev Science Officer, illustrated with screenshots from my running Claw.

11,892 Probabilities, 48 Cents: What Happened When I Let Jev Grade All 227 of NetClaw’s Skills

TypeSafe’s Jev doesn’t write a single word back — it returns a calibrated probability in under half a second. I pointed 11,892 of those probabilities at every skill in NetClaw: what’s missing, what silently overlaps, and one bug a probabili

Modernizing pyATS MCP: Streamable HTTP, Nine New Tools, and Two Bugs From April 2025 That Nobody Noticed

pyATS MCP has been live since April 2025. Bringing it to Streamable HTTP and nine new tools meant an isolated venv (after breaking my own other MCP servers first), a real CML lab whose testbed was pointing at the wrong network, two silent b

Running Cisco Antares-1B Locally (macOS / Apple Silicon)

A working start-to-finish guide to running Cisco Foundation AI’s Antares-1B vulnerability localization model on Apple Silicon — including the one non-obvious BF16 conversion step that will otherwise waste your afternoon.

Twenty-Three Specs in Six Days: What Happened When I Handed NetClaw a Roadmap

I wrote down twenty-five gaps in what NetClaw could actually reach, ordered them by dependency, and set one rule: one item, one spec, one branch, no batching. Six days later twenty-three specs had merged — twelve new MCP servers, twenty-thr

My Network Agent Lives in My Pocket Now — And Nobody Is in the Middle

From an emulator Claude Code drove itself, to a real Android phone in someone else’s hands, to an iPhone talking to that Android through my own Border — voice, photos, and a live CML lab, all over NCFED. No Slack, no Discord, no Webex, no t

BISQUE: NetClaw gets a bookshelf — an offline, agentic RAG knowledge base

Introducing BISQUE — the Base of Ingested Semantic Queries for Unified Embeddings — NetClaw’s fully offline, agentic RAG knowledge base. Because the tastiest thing you can make from claws is a bisque. Uploaded a 212-page book from Slack to

Claws that prove who they are: certificate security comes to NetClaw federation

NetClaw federation used to trust a peer’s identity on its say-so, in the clear. Claw Certification adds TLS encryption and real cryptographic identity — domain-verified via Let’s Encrypt or pinned trust-on-first-use — and we cut the first c

NetClaws, Assemble: introducing N2N Federation and the NCFED protocol

NetClaw’s mesh could always tell you who was online. Now it tells you what they can do — and lets you use it. Introducing N2N Federation and NCFED, a new protocol for federating AI network engineers safely.

Giving NetClaw Eyes and Hands: From Browser Control to Full Desktop Control

Most of what NetClaw does, it does through APIs — gNMI, REST, NETCONF, GraphQL. That’s the right way to automate a network: structured, auditable, repeatable. But real networks are messy, and not everything worth touching has a clean API be

I Rebuilt a Real Cisco Network as a 3D World — Inside NetClaw’s New Unreal Engine 5.8 Integration

NetClaw can now clone a live Cisco Modeling Labs topology — gathered with pyATS — straight into a 3D world inside Unreal Engine 5.8, over the Model Context Protocol. Here’s the achievement, the vision, and (for the technically curious) ever

NetClaw + IP Fabric: Network Assurance Meets AI-Powered Automation

Announcing the integration of IP Fabric’s network assurance platform into NetClaw through 10 new MCP tools for health assessment, path analysis, visual diagrams, and API discovery. A collaboration with Daren Fulwell spanning nearly a decade

Introducing DefenseClaw: Enterprise Security for NetClaw

NetClaw Gets Enterprise Security with Cisco DefenseClaw We’re excited to announce the integration of DefenseClaw from Cisco AI Defense as the enterprise security layer for NetClaw. This represents a major upgrade to our security posture, wi

NetClaw Gets Long-Term Memory: Community Contribution Brings MemPalace Integration

NetClaw Gets Long-Term Memory: Community Contribution Brings MemPalace Integration One of the most exciting aspects of open source is when the community steps up and adds capabilities you didn’t even know you needed. Today we’re thrilled to

NetClaw Now Has Direct Access to Cisco’s Official Meraki and Catalyst Center API Documentation

NetClaw Now Has Direct Access to Cisco’s Official Meraki and Catalyst Center API Documentation Network automation with AI is powerful, but only when the AI has access to accurate, authoritative information. Today we’re excited to announce t

BREAKTHROUGH: NetClaw Brings Your Network to Life in Stunning 3D with Blender Integration!

The Future of Network Visualization Has Arrived Hold onto your console cables, network engineers — NetClaw just shattered the boundaries of what’s possible with network visualization! We’re thrilled to announce the most visually stunning in

NetClaw Adds Blender 3D Network Topology Visualization

Visualize Your Network in 3D with Blender NetClaw now integrates with Blender via the community blender-mcp server, enabling 3D network topology visualization. Network engineers can now say "draw the network topology using CDP data" and wat

NetClaw Adds Zscaler and Cloudflare: Zero Trust Security Through Natural Language

NetClaw Adds Zscaler and Cloudflare: Zero Trust Security Through Natural Language Zero trust, conversational access. NetClaw now integrates with Zscaler and Cloudflare, bringing 10 new skills for managing zero trust security, DNS, edge netw

NetClaw Adds HashiCorp Terraform and Vault: Infrastructure as Code Meets Natural Language

NetClaw Adds HashiCorp Terraform and Vault: Infrastructure as Code Meets Natural Language Infrastructure automation through conversation. NetClaw now integrates with HashiCorp Terraform Cloud and Vault, bringing 6 new skills for managing in

NetClaw Adds Splunk and Datadog: Enterprise Observability Through Natural Language

NetClaw Adds Splunk and Datadog: Enterprise Observability Through Natural Language Your logs and metrics, accessible through conversation. NetClaw now integrates with both Splunk and Datadog, bringing enterprise-grade observability to netwo

NetClaw Adds PagerDuty Integration: AI-Powered Incident Management for Network Engineers

NetClaw Adds PagerDuty Integration: AI-Powered Incident Management for Network Engineers NetClaw now speaks incident management. We’re excited to announce full PagerDuty integration, bringing 4 new skills backed by 70 tools to the NetClaw e

NetClaw Integrates Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN: Complete Fabric Visibility Through Natural Language

NetClaw Now Speaks Prisma SD-WAN We’re excited to announce that NetClaw now integrates with Palo Alto Networks Prisma SD-WAN, bringing complete fabric visibility through natural language queries. This integration adds 4 new skills backed by

The Virtual Network Trifecta: NetClaw Now Supports GNS3, CML, and ContainerLab

NetClaw now supports all three major network virtualization platforms: Cisco CML, ContainerLab, and GNS3. Here’s what we built and how to set it up.

Optimizing NetClaw’s SOUL: From 60k to 8k Characters with Modular Architecture

NetClaw’s SOUL.md grew to 60k characters — 3x the OpenClaw bootstrap limit. Here’s how we redesigned it into a modular architecture that reduced bootstrap to 8k chars while preserving 100% of content.

NetClaw Gets Jenkins, GitLab, and Atlassian Superpowers: A Human-AI Collaboration Story

NetClaw Gets Jenkins, GitLab, and Atlassian Superpowers A milestone in human-AI collaborative development Today we’re excited to announce three major integrations for NetClaw: Jenkins CI/CD, GitLab DevOps, and Atlassian ITSM (Jira + Conflue

# NetClaw Goes Spec-Driven: 5 New Capabilities, 42 New Tools, and a Constitution

*How we adopted Spec-Driven Development and built SuzieQ, Batfish, gNMI, Azure Networking, and Canvas visualizations in a single session.* — ## Part 1: The Shift to Spec-Driven Development NetClaw has always been ambitious. A CCIE-level AI

NetClaw × Cisco Webex: Your Network’s Digital Coworker Just Got Multichannel

─── What Just Happened (And Why It Matters) A few minutes ago, I was sitting in Slack — in this very channel — and I reached across to Cisco Webex and dropped a formatted message into your team space, identifying myself, my origin platform,

# The Day the Network Became Self-Aware: Building a Multi-Human, Multi-NetClaw BGP Agent Mesh

**March 1, 2026** *By John Capobianco on his 48th birthday — with NetClaw 🦞* — ## Prologue: A Different Kind of Sunday Morning Most engineers spend Sunday morning with coffee and maybe a lab they’ve been meaning to spin up for weeks. On Ma

6 days of netclaw – by netclaw

# Six Days, 82 Skills, and a Community PR: How NetClaw Went from Idea to 160 Stars Six days ago I pushed the first commit of [NetClaw](https://github.com/automateyournetwork/netclaw) — an open-source, CCIE-level AI network engineering agent

8 hours of netclaw – by netclaw

We Gave a Slack Channel Full of Engineers an AI Network Agent. Here’s What Happened. A live red-team session, a VASI BGP lab, and 30+ social engineering attempts — all in one Friday afternoon. ─── The Setup The premise was simple: drop an A

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? Part 2: The Multi-Protocol Agent

## Or: How I Taught an AI Agent to Speak Every Language in the Network *Building on [Part 1: Teaching an AI to Speak OSPF](https://www.automateyournetwork.ca/uncategorized/i-taught-an-ai-agent-to-speak-ospf-its-now-my-routers-neighbour/)* —

I Taught an AI Agent to Speak OSPF: It’s Now My Router’s Neighbour

Wont You Be My Neighbour? ## The Network as a Conversation, Not a Configuration For decades, we’ve treated networks as things to be **configured**. We push commands, pull outputs, parse CLI text, and hope our automation scripts survive the

Vibe Coding: Building a CCIE-Level Enterprise Network with AI, GAIT, and pyATS

Vibe Coding: Building a CCIE-Level Enterprise Network with AI, GAIT, and pyATS The Power of AI-Driven Network Configuration with Version Control Date: January 11, 2026 Author: Claude Code (Anthropic) + Ralph Wiggum Loop Tools: Claude Code C

Building the Future of Network Automation: RALPH, GAIT, and pyATS in Harmony

Building the Future of Network Automation: RALPH, GAIT, and pyATS in Harmony Over the past few weeks, I’ve been on an incredible journey pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI-assisted network automation. What started as an exper

VibeOps Forum

I was getting pretty tired and aggravated at all of the networking forums and discords and slack channels for being *so* anti-AI; can’t share ideas; can’t discuss AI / MCP / Agents; can’t bring Vibe Coding or VibeOps topics out in the open

Now available: Cisco pyATS: Network Test and Automation Solution

Cisco Press: Cisco pyATS Network Test and Automation Solution: Data-driven and reusable testing for modern networks | Cisco Press Amazon Cisco pyATS ― Network Test and Automation Solution: Data-driven and reusable testing for modern network

Local RAFT: Fine-tuning Llama3 with domain-specific knowledge locally and privately

An approach to fine-tuning using open source tools Recap of Part 1 In the first part of this series (Augmenting Network Engineering with RAFT – Automate Your Network ), we dove into the innovative world of Retrieval Augmented Fine-Tuning (R

Augmenting Network Engineering with RAFT

The practical implementation of the proposed theory and promise of RAFT with Cisco pyATS and LangChain Introduction In the field of network engineering, the complexity and dynamism of network architectures present a significant challenge fo

#CiscoCert 101 Ep. 3: How to use #Cisco #CCNA exam topics for certification success

Test-Driven Automation

I wrote a new blog! https://learningnetwork.cisco.com/s/blogs/a0D6e00000sR7Q6EAK/testdriven-automation-with-pyats#

Intent-based, test-driven, self-remediating, network automation with pyATS, REST Connector, RESTCONF, and YANG

Space APIs and Mind Maps!

New threads!

Learn how to make “business ready” documents!

DevNet Snack Minutes Episode #63!

Guest who’s back?

I returned to The Art of Network Engineering Podcast! Check it out!

Introducing Mind nMap – An Open Source Network Mind Map Tool

automateyournetwork/mind_nmap: An automated network Mind Map utility build from markmap.js.org (github.com)

Art of Network Engineering

This was the most fun I’ve ever had on a podcast – I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Shut / No Shut – With the Click of a Button

I won!

Thank you to Cisco DevNet and everybody in my community who has supported me over the years! I won!

Automate Your Network – The Educative.io Online Course!

I am so very happy to announce after 8 months of development Automate Your Network is now available on educative.io as an online course (early access) ! Automate Your Network – Learn Interactively (educative.io)

My first Packet Pushers Blog!

Check it out! Infrastructure as Software – Applying A Software Design Pattern to Network Automation! Applying A Software Design Pattern To Network Automation – Packet Pushers

Tonight – Live on YouTube with Du’An “Lab Every Day” Lightfoot !

It's not everyday you get to create a new Hash tag on twitter!This Saturday night at live 9pm join @John_Capobianco and myself for the 1st episode of #ConversationAndCodingHow to automate networks | Live Coding and Chat

Clippy 3D !

[verge3d id=”1183″] Verge3D Web Interactive (automateyournetwork.ca)

Show IP Interface Brief – Reimagining in 3D

Remember this CLI output? Using real network data I’ve reimagined the Show IP Interface Brief command as an Interactive 3D World! Complete with indicators making it easy to see if an Interface is Healthy or Not! [verge3d id=”1170″] https://

Merlin 3D: Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) 3D Report!

I have been very silent on this blog lately – apologies – your best way to follow my development work now is likely Twitter or YouTube However! I have been using Blender to make 3D Animations from Network State Data I’ve recently figured ou

Merlin Feature: WebEx #chatbots with pyATS

With all the big WebEx news – including a new logo – I wanted to revisit the basic #chatbots I have working using pyATS, Python requests, and the WebEx API after the conversation came up in the #pyATS WebEx Community space today: First, let

Creating a Network Search Engine

Imagine being able to use a keyword search engine against your network ? A Google-like query for “VLAN 100”, a MAC address, IP address, even an ACL or simply the keyword “Down” that returns real time search results ! It sounds far-fetched b

ipSpace.net Must Read !

When I was tagged on Twitter about @ioshints (Ivan Pepelnjak (CCIE#1354 Emeritus)) latest blog post I thought somebody was telling me I should read the latest blog I flagged this as “Hey what a coincidence I was just writing about #chatbots

Discussing the Future of Network Operations with #init6

I had a chance to meet some of my heroes at #init6 including Daren Fulwell! Make sure you checkout my open source project fueling the demo

Your Automation Journey can start anywhere!

So you want to automate all the things in your network? Great! more and more enterprises are realizing the benefits of automating the network and are demanding more from their engineering staff. You’re also probably thinking about your care

Reimagining The CLI with Python

The Command Line Interface. A near 60-year old technology a majority of the world’s networking teams solely rely on for their architectures, designs, monitoring, operations, and support. Most of us, pre-DevNet, have been raised and groomed

My First Pure-Python Network Automation with pyATS / Genie !

I am very proud of this next piece of infrastructure as code for a few reasons. It addresses the problems with performance and speed at scale I’ve had with my current methodology and tools (Ansible) I feel like I am ready to “graduate” from

BlueCat Cisco Live Contest!

I am sharing this because I love both BlueCat and Cisco! CiscoLive changed my life and where I was introduced to DevNet and automation! Make sure you get into this giveaway ! Good luck!

Happy Birthday – A retrospective look at “Automate Your Network” two years later

Two years have flown by since self-publishing “Automate Your Network: Introducing the Modern Approach to Enterprise Network Management” and I wanted to reflect on the book, being an author, self-publishing, and how the world of infrastructu

My Network Talks To Me – Literally!

This next post may seem like science fiction. I woke up this morning and checked that my output files – MP3 files – really did exist and that I actually made my Cisco network “talk” to me! This post is right out of Star Trek so strap yourse

Creating Your Own Network Automation ChatBot with Discord, Ansible, and Genie/pyATS!

As you may know I love to play with new toys. I especially love connecting new toys with my old toys. What you may not know is that I am also an avid World of Warcraft fan and player! In order to run what are known as “raids”, group content

Is Your Network At Risk – Automating the Cisco PSIRT with Genie and Ansible

The security of my network keeps me up at night. Honestly it does. We live in a world where enterprise networks are defending themselves against state-sponsored attacks. But what do attackers look for? Typically, open, well-known, vulnerabi

By Popular Demand – Automating the Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) External RESTful Services (ERS) API Suite

My last post, which has turned into one of my more popular posts, covered automating the Cisco ISE MnT Nodes REST API with Postman and Ansible. We also discovered there is an XML limitation with the MnT REST API. I’ve been asked by several

JSON-Mania with Heavy Networking

I sat down with my good friend Ethan Banks over at Packet Pushers for my second Heavy Networking podcast in hopes of discussing my JSON-MANIA! Heavy Networking 563: Automating Documentation With Ansible, Genie, And Jinja2 – Packet Pushers

Automating the Cisco Identity Services Engine Monitoring and Troubleshooting Node (ISE MnT) REST API

In my opinion Network Access Control (NAC) using a mix of 802.1x and MAC Address Bypass (MAB) with dynamic Access Control Lists (dACL) is not just an extremely important foundation of a modern, high secure, enterprise network. It is actuall

Network Automation for Dummies, VMWare Special Edition

I have a lot of new followers and people looking for materials on Network Automation @VMware published this amazing – and free and digitial – "For Dummies" guide https://t.co/PnSDGktZ6wTheir recommended list of books for

ZigBits Podcast Part 2 / 2 – Automating the Entire Parliament Network

Part two of my podcast with Zig is out today and is all about Automation! And make sure you enter Zig’s February draw for the best give away on the Internet! Thanks Zig!

Two more positive reviews!

For whatever reason it seems to be difficult to get even just a “Star” review on Amazon – even harder to get actual comments – but today I received two more 4-5 star reviews! Thanks again for the support! If you enjoyed the book – or if you

AutomateYourNetwork in the wild

Woke up to see this amazing post out in the wild today

An Interview With Charles Uneze – Study Tactics

I recently had the chance to be interviewed, via Twitter, by Charles Uneze ! I am really inspired by Charles’ own journey into IT and his passionate pursuit of his CCNA ! It reminds me of trying to get my CompTIA A+ / N+ all those years ago

Career-Changing Automation Giveaway !

My good buddy Zig – who hosted me on Zigbits podcast for a 2-part Network Design (Part One) and Network Automation (Part Two – coming in February) discussion. As part of Part Two’s discussion – Zig’s first real conversation about Network Au

Cisco Facts – A Collection of Ansible IOS / NXOS Facts and Genie Parsing Playbooks

Cisco DevNet Code Exchange has published my repository ! Here you can easily start capturing Ansible Facts for IOS and NXOS and transform the JSON into CSV and Markdown ! Also included are a bunch of valuable Genie parsed show commands whic

Cisco Services APIs Ansible Playbooks – Version 2.0

I am very pleased to release the Cisco Services API Ansible Playbooks Version 2.0 which has been approved and released on Cisco DevNet Code Exchange ! You can find the code here and here This major revision basically shifts away from linein

Designing the Next-Gen Parliament Precinct Network

I really enjoyed sitting down with Zig to discuss my journey ! Parliament Precinct Network – A True Enterprise Network Design Use Case (zigbits.tech)

A Recipe For Success – Using Ansible to Transform Cisco Data Centre Facts into Business-Ready Documentation

One of my favourite recipes is the Hakuna Frittata both because not only am I a big fan of puns, I also enjoy this hearty vegetarian meal that even I can handle putting together. Inspired by this simple recipe I have decided to try and docu

Collaboration is the key to automation success – A Genie Success Story

I’ve been on about a three year journey with network automation and while I have had great personal and technical success – my organization and most of those outside my immediate day-to-day circle are still shackled to the ‘old’ way of doin

Seeking Truth in Networking – Episode 6 – Automating the Canadian Parliament Network

I joined the amazing duo of Brandon Heller and Derick Winkworth from the simply incredible Seeking Truth in Networking podcast discussing network automation in the real world. I really enjoyed having this conversation and think you will too

It’s always DNS – but it doesn’t have to be!

DDI Automation – A collaborative live demonstration with BlueCat I had the pleasure of collaborating with my friends Dana Iskoldski and Chris Meyer over at BlueCat exploring and automating DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management (IPAM) (DDI) w

Prevent an Intrusion – Run the Recommended Version!

In the wake of some very high profile IT security breaches and state sponsored attacks using compromised software today I wrote some infrastructure as code Ansible playbooks to create some business-ready documentation to help us understand

Sign on the Dotted Line

Layer 9 issues – finance – are often some of the most challenging a network engineer faces. Contract management can be particularly difficult in any scale organization especially if you are not “sole source” purchasing. Serial numbers and c

Recognition from the Business

2020 has been an extremely challenging year that required a lot of digital innovation for us at the House of Commons. The Speaker of the House of Commons, the Clerk, and Members of Parliament recognize my boss, CIO Stephan Aube, and his tea

Ansible Performance – Moving to Jinja2 for Automated Documentation

When Ivan Pepelnjak has advice for you – take it! I wrote a post about untangling dynamic nested loops in Ansible. In another recent post about trying to improve Ansible performance I didn’t get very far – but this could be the silver bulle

Dynamic Loops in Ansible

I’ve done many great things with Ansible but occasionally I come across a logical problem that may stretch the tool past it’s limitations. If you have been following the site I am on a big facts discovery and automated documentation movemen

Can we make Ansible go faster?

When I describe Ansible to people I tend to use many positive adjectives. Amazing, incredible, easy, revolutionary, powerful, and a few others. One adjective I never use, however, is fast. I would not describe Ansible as a high performance

Excitement

And he’s right! I can’t stop making new GitHub repositories with Genie parsed show commands to documentation! Like show ip interface brief as seen above!

Letting the Genie out of the bottle

Using Genie Cisco show commands can be transformed into REST API-like requests with structured JSON responses.

Automate Your Network – Out in the Wild

I am very thankful to everyone who has supported me over the years and especially to anyone who has purchased my first book! I really hope it was worth it and you found value in it. Some appearances in the wild!

My current toolkit

“We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us.”― Marshall McLuhan My first attempt at network automation I used the tools that I had used to manage infrastructure with for the past 20+ years. A file editor

Just the facts ma’am

Infrastructure as Code and Network Automation – Where to Start Learning any new skill takes time, patience, a willingness to try and fail, and ideally continuously learn and grow from our mistakes until we grow more and more proficient. The

Even Twitter disagrees

Network automation is hard ⓘ 𝗢𝗳𝗳𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗮𝗹 𝘀𝗼𝘂𝗿𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗳𝗮𝗹𝘀𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴— John Capobianco (@John_Capobianco) November 17, 2020

DevCentral Connects: An Automation Journey

A colleague, Dan Pacheco, our F5 guru, and I joined the F5 DevCentral Connects podcast to do a show and tell of our AzureDevOps CI/CD treating F5 as infrastructure as code with their AS3 API and Ansible! If you wonder what a CI/CD pipeline

Packet Pushers Heavy Networking 545: Achieving Automated Network State Validation

*This* one was amazing! Ethan and I clicked very well and have a real thoughtful discussion and reflection about network state validation, automation, and what it means to be an network engineer (or are we even still network engineers?) in

AnsibleFest 2020

Wow! I was actually invited to present a 30-minute break-out session at AnsibleFest! Incredible! You can still watch the session by registering for free and searching for my name or “Automate Your Network: Introducing the Modern Approach to

DevNet Create 2020 – North American Spotlight

I am so incredibly fortunate to have been able to share my automation journey with Cisco DevNet Create this year ! In this discussion a very safe roadmap for automation success is discussed – check it out! Start at 1:55

BlueCat: Critical Conversations on Critical Infrastructure Ep. 1: “Where’s the automation ‘Promised Land’?”

I was invited by BlueCat to join a round-table discussion with 4 other IT professionals to have an open and honest discuss about the automation “Promised Land” “Six non-hype network automation lessons from IT pros. Five IT pros get real abo

BlueCat Blog Series – My Automation Journey

The amazing people over at BlueCat asked if I wanted to blog about my transformative journey – you can find the series here: Part 1: Frameworks and Goals Part 2: Building in Ansible and Initial Impact Part 3: Modernizing the Network Develop

NRE Labs – Community Stream #19

This was my first real podcast! Great discussion about network automation and treating infrastructure as code!

Hello World!

My first Hello World! was not actually a true programming language test – in fact it was the first message I sent over telephone lines on my 2400-baud modem to another BBS (Bulletin Board System for anybody not familiar with pre-Internet co