In less than a month, we, we as in Kentik, will be at AutoCon 4, probably one of the premier events in the networking industry right now.
The biannual AutoCon events are put on by the Network Automation Forum and attract thought leaders, network practitioners, architects, developers from the service provider and enterprise worlds.
Lots of great presentations from the main stage, a new leadership track, and of course, the many deeply educational and hands on half day workshops going on.
Joining me today is Justin Ryburn, no stranger to Telemetry Now, of course, field CTO at Kentik, and he'll be joining me along with some of our other colleagues at AutoCon 4 next month to deliver a hands on workshop on network intelligence. We'll be covering network telemetry, traditional visibility, observability, data pipelines, modern network intelligence, including practical applications of AI in network operations.
My name is Philip Gervasi, and this is Telemetry Now.
Justin, welcome back to the podcast. It's been a while, and it's good to see you again. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And and we are doing video clips now for social media. So folks can see both of us again. Alright.
There we go.
Absolutely. But it is great to have you back on. And you've been busy. I've been busy.
And we are heading into conference season, especially in the tech industry. My calendar is full. Yeah. All the way from coast to coast and and international as well.
I'm looking forward to it, but it is very busy. But one of the one of the shining lights here, one of the the things that I'm looking forward to most is AutoCon 4 coming up, which is an event put on by the Network Automation Forum. And, you know, Justin, I just wanted to talk to you about that a little bit today.
You've been to AutoCon zero and three.
Correct? Did you go to AutoCon two?
The I'm I'm blanking on the numbers. I know they started the numbering at zero like good network engineers do, but whatever the number was that they had in Europe, the first one they had in Europe, I missed that one, but I've been to every other one of them.
Okay.
So think that would be zero, two, and three if I remember correctly on the numbers. I think I missed one.
Yep. Okay. And here we are looking at AutoCon 4 coming up in just next month in in November twenty twenty five. So, you know, what I wanted to do today was kinda get your take on the auto con event, you know, what your thoughts are now having attended several of these. And by the way, this is not a a sponsored episode by the Network Automation Forum. This is this is a Kentik podcast, but, you know, Justin and I feel very strongly about this particular event.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but probably one of the premier events for the networking industry right now.
Yeah. Yeah. For sure. It's amazing, how quickly this has grown. Like you said, I was at the first one, the inaugural one, which was AutoCon zero.
It was well attended for being the first time for sure, but it's amazing to see, you know, how much it's grown and the numbers they're, forecasting for AutoCon 4, like you said, coming up here in November. So it's definitely getting traction. It's definitely getting both attendees and the people who are presenting, together to talk about network automation.
So, it's exciting to be to be part of it and be able to participate in Yep.
Yep. I remember the first one, AutoCon Zero in Denver was around three hundred and fifty ish people, give or take. I'm not exactly sure, but around there. And then they have increased since then.
And I don't know what the numbers are right now. I haven't talked to the event organizers about this specifically, but just throwing this out there, I think we're at seven hundred or eight hundred when I say we, I mean, you know, the community, not me. But the event is at around seven or eight hundred people registered. We may get we may get a correction email after this podcast airs, but it's it's somewhere in that vicinity.
Yeah.
So, Justin, What what can you tell me as far as your understanding of what the Network Automation Forum and specifically these AutoCon events are all about?
Yeah.
I mean, essentially, they they founded Network Automation Forum in these AutoCon conferences on the premise of why haven't we seen full adoption of network automation today.
Right? Like, it's not new that people do some amount of automation of configuration in their networks. I think most of us who've been in the network industry for a long time can remember back to doing, like, expect in Perl scripts in the early days to Telnet or SSH into a device, check a couple things, maybe make some small changes to configurations.
Most people had those running on their own laptop or their own, you know, machine, their own directory. But, you know, by and large, when you talk to most network operators, they're not doing full autonomous network automation today. And, you know, the question that the the the NAF was formed to try and solve is, like, why is that? If we bring enough people together and we collaborate and we share ideas, can we see an increase in network automation and get more towards a fully autonomous running of our networks.
So then would you say that the audience for the auto con events are largely network people, but, like, network automation engineers, or are they a little bit more broad than that?
I mean, I think it's more broad than that. That was what I expected when I went to a c zero was it's gonna be mostly the people who, to your point, like, are, you know, Kind of on that Perimeter of DevOps and network. Right? Like, they spend their day writing code that automates networks versus spending their day running wiring and then doing troubleshooting and kind of the traditional network operations, network engineering that I think of.
But it's interesting, talking to the various different attendees. It kinda runs the gamut. Right? I mean, there's pretty much anyone who who has networking as a a portion of their function that are attending these things. So it's not purely just people who are building network automation code and frameworks.
Yeah. Yeah. The those people are definitely there.
Oh, for sure.
Yeah. From what what I've seen, it's really any any type of networking professional. The spectrum from, like, you know, almost entry level all the way to very, very advanced, everywhere in between service provider, enterprise, you know, SMB, web scale, any vertical, any industry, really, really just folks that are touching network stuff. And, you know, I have noticed there are quite a few people that are focused on network automation, but even within that group, it seems like there's those that are doing it because it's their job, whether they're required to, or that's their official job, whatever, or those that are not really doing it at work but really wanna learn and wanna get into it more. And they see the writing on the wall that this is something that they should be pursuing. So I I do see those camps as well.
I do wanna mention that the key people here, you know, when we're talking about the folks, the two guys that started the network automation forum, we're talking about Chris Grundeman and Scott Robom.
You know, the and those two guys both have very extensive backgrounds in in networking. You know? And I I know both of them pretty well, Scott, more than Chris, and I know it's it's very much in the service provider space. But I will say I will say that when you attend an auto con, it does not feel like a service provider event at all. It really feels more like a a networking event, networking as in computer networking. Right?
Although there's people networking going on for sure, but it does not feel like a service provider event. It really feels like anyone who's in networking, whether it is service provider or or enterprise. So if you're pushing packets, you know, that that's the place.
You You know, it it's interesting. I'm interested to take your get your take on this, what I'm about to say, Phil, which is I think for a period of time in the industry, there was a bit of a silo between service provider and enterprise. Like, a lot of the events that were available out in the industry were either focused at service providers or focused at enterprises because the way in which they build their networks was very different. Right?
You know, enterprises have wireless networks they have to look after. They're building campus networks. There's a lot of difference between that and service provider and carrier networks where they're doing peering and they're doing MPLS WANs and and those type of things. It's interesting.
I'm now seeing it seems like more of a a swing back to, hey, there's only so many of us who do networking for a living. We should come together and collaborate, whether you're building one for a company that's an enterprise, you're building one for a company as a service provider. It's all networks. We should we should collaborate.
Maybe that's just because automation spans both, but I think I'm seeing kind of a trend in the agendas for a lot of these conferences and the attendees for a lot of these conferences kinda spanning across both verticals.
Yeah. Yeah. I tend to agree with you because, like you said, the network automation the automation piece does seem to be the umbrella theme, and that applies to both the service provider and the enterprise space. And though the underlying technologies are very analogous, routers and switches and things like that, the things that are important to a service provider engineer are not necessarily the same things as an enterprise engineer, as you said.
The idea of getting that packet out of that core as fast as possible and then down to your pop or whatever, that's something that you see as a priority in the service provider space, especially because the margin is so low on actually package reversal. Whereas in the enterprise, it's all about reliability and stability and delivering that application. Of course, service providers care about reliability and stability and all that, but it is a different it is a different beast. It is much more, in my opinion, focused on the access layer as well, whether that be closet switches or wireless or, you know, your IoT devices and your sensors and pulling in from your manufacturing environment or whatever whatever it happens to be.
And so you see a great diversity of data that really makes it harder for an enterprise. So I think the idea that, like, service provider networks are the sophisticated networks and enterprise networks are, like, whatever, lame and and cheesy, is completely and utterly false.
Yeah.
I and I'm not talking about, like, your corner store, like Bob's Pet Shop, that kind of network. You know, SMB with a, you know, an old Linksys router. I am talking about, you know, larger enterprise. And so in that sense, yeah, there there's a lot of there's a lot of parallels and there's a lot of analog between certain technologies, in the priorities they're a little different. In implementations, there's differences as well. But the automation, you know, understanding how to use things like Ansible and and, you know, how to write Python scripts and how to use various single sources of truth that are out there right now and popular, that's that's pretty much the same, you know, understanding whether you're you're a service provider or an enterprise, I think.
Yeah. Yeah. And that kinda ties back to your your question earlier about the the attendees and who who goes to the the AutoCon conferences, it's not just I mean, you would think based on the top the the title network automation that it's just the people doing the automation. But think about all the other, like, ancillary products and and ancillary solutions that need to exist for automation to work well.
Right? Like you mentioned, you gotta have network sources of truth no matter which one you're using. Like, that is a big part of your automation. If you don't know what the source truth is for your network, you can't do good close what I what well, what Scott and Chris call closed loop automation.
Right? You need network observability solutions, whether it's the, you know, the employer that you and I work for or somebody else's. Like, you have to have some amount of telemetry from your network fed back into your automation framework to understand the state of the network, what's going on in the network in order to do that automation. So there's a lot of things that might not be necessarily automation in they're not the actual code that's being written to automate the network, but they're very important to doing automation of the network well that are part of the conversation at the autocon events.
Yeah. That's a great point. And I don't know if you did that on purpose, Justin, but it really does segue into the next point of our outline. Basically, who's who's going to AutoCon?
We we already talked about individuals, but also, you know, vendors and sponsors. But also, you know, why, what is the nature of the workshops and the talks and that sort of thing. And you touched on that just now. Yeah, yeah, are folks that are talking about how to use Python to automate the push and config to your iOS XE devices or whatever it happens to be.
How to use Ansible, how to use an Autobot, how to use all these different things. And and those are all very, very important. But yeah. Yeah.
The the I wouldn't even call them ancillary or secondary or anything like that. They're critical, they're foundational, but like those telemetry pipelines and you know, so those those low code automation solutions. You know, you're you're right there at an automation network automation forum event.
And and interestingly enough, not everything is just about building your own stuff. There are a lot of great tools out there, low code, even no code options, and and they're there. They are there at AutoCon talking about how you can automate your network with their platform.
So I think what's interesting to me, especially over the course from AutoCon Zero to AutoCon 4, and I know we haven't had AutoCon 4 yet, but I am on the advisory board, so I know exactly what the talks are and the words that Inside baseball we're getting here, Well, to be fair, that's all been announced, but yeah, I knew it I knew ahead of time that, you know, what we're looking at are talks from folks that are not purely network automation companies, yet, vital to the overall network automation ecosystem.
So, going back to telemetry, imagine you have a network and you want to check like a simple diff to see if the network state is different than what you wanted it to be. I mean, you need to be gathering that information from somewhere.
And then if you push a change, how do you know if the change was effective? Gathering telemetry to see what, and I don't mean to check that the configuration is correct, although that's important, right?
But did did that configuration change have the intended effect on traffic? The traffic, Understanding are my BGP peers now the way I want them to be?
Are flows going over this device instead of this device? Or has my latency changed for the better or for the worse as a result of this change? All of those things are a matter of telemetry, so we have folks like Kentik and yes, other observability companies as well.
And I think rightly so.
And so, you're gonna see that in the talks, you're gonna see folks talking about telemetry pipelines, data pipelines, you're gonna see folks talking about programmatic methodologies to, you know, operating a network. You you talked about, like, if this, you know, event occurs, push this config. So, yeah, we're talking about more event driven automation, and so entire orchestration workflows. So you're seeing talks like that, and you're seeing the workshops, hands on workshops for multiple hours how to build a thing. Digging into it, how do you build this thing? What does that data pipeline really look like? How do I configure this thing?
I think the elephant in the room here is the AI stuff. Right? We haven't mentioned that yet.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a whole another thing we can unpack in a minute. But I wanna put a finer point on something you just said, which is, you know, there's gonna be talks on, Like, You here's a commercial way you can do that.
Right? There are commercial vendors there that provide whether it's automation frameworks, whether it's observability platforms, source of truth platforms. There are commercial vendors there, but there's also a lot of people there who are building their own doing DIY. Right?
So both options are, you know, represented there. So, you know, whether you're wanting to build or wanting to buy, you have options for both and could kinda come to an auto con and learn, like, what are the pros and cons of each approach. Right? There's no one size fits all.
Not one thing is is right for everybody. And I think, you know, the NAF has done a nice job of keeping a balance of of both so that people can make that, you know, operators, the the the end consumers that are building these networks can make those decisions for themselves on what's right for their organization. And one of the thing one of the main reasons that I attended the original AutoCon Zero in Denver was one of the hats that I wear here at Kentik as as field CTO is I'm in charge of our alliance ecosystem, Right? And working with the other vendors that are part of our ecosystem that our customers are deploying in their networks, companies like iTential and NetBox and Adato Bot and Ansible and and all these other companies are obviously part of our our ecosystem.
And started looking at the other sponsors who were gonna be there. I'm like, wait a minute. These are all the people that I'm trying to spend time with to make sure that we've got good integrations. We've got good go to market alignment with them and so forth.
Like, this is a perfect place for us to to be if for no other reason than just to continue those conversations. Right? So, you know, that's, I I think, another Maybe thing that is less obvious that is going on at at AutoCon that, that the group has encouraged is not only all the vendors being there and sponsoring and helping pay for the event and put the event on, but there's actually a lot of collaboration between them. Right?
A lot of the there's there's very little, you know, bad blood or fighting with among the vendors. Most of the vendors that are at the autocon are actually working with one another to build an ecosystem that helps the end customers build closed loop automation systems. Again, whether they're they're building their own or or buying off the shelf solutions.
Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point because there there is this aversion, at least for me, right, among and among engineers that I've worked with over the years. There is this aversion to marketing and to sales and to vendors in general.
There's this almost like, I'm an engineer. I'm going figure this out. I don't want to just buy a solution. I'm going to build something.
I'm going to design something. So maybe there's an ego thing there. I don't know. But certainly, there's an aversion to heavy vendor activity.
And You know, I think the network automation forum has done a really good job with with that with AutoCon. And it makes sense because if you think about it, you know, I've spent my entire career working with vendor solutions. And, yeah, there's engineering involved for sure, but, like, I'm installing brand X gear with, you know, their syntax and and some other proprietary technology or brand brand y access points or whatever it happens to be or I'm using somebody's framework that, was created that I didn't invent, I didn't invent my own Python libraries, importing those libraries. So when it comes down to it, it does make sense to get very comfortable and familiar with what the vendor ecosystem is all about because those are the solutions that, I mean, for better or for worse, that's what we're working with in this industry to build networks and to run networks.
There's an element of engineering, absolutely.
But it's within that context.
So I think they've done a great job with that.
And you know, I'm seeing that both from the talks and the workshops and and just the presence of booths and stuff.
Yeah. And I think a lot of that skepticism among the engineers comes from some bad actors where there were so much marketing around a solution. It's hard to unpack the marketing and figure out, okay. What does the solution actually do?
How does it actually work? Right? And to your point, I think AutoCon has done a nice job of not allowing that. Right?
Like, if you're a vendor and you're gonna show up, there has to be some educational there has to be some technical depth to the content so people actually understand how the solution how the product actually works. Doesn't have to be completely vendor neutral. Right? You don't have to, like, hide the logo, hide who it is.
You know, they're not ashamed to say, hey. This is vendor a. This is vendor b. This is vendor c, but there has to be some technical depth to the content.
So the engineers who are showing up actually get something out of it and actually learn how it works and not just marketing slicks. Right?
Yeah. Yeah. In fact, that's one of the things that we've discussed on the advisory board, Slack channel, and in our Zoom meetings is, you know, that there that there is no aversion to a vendor. You know, they they are the folks doing the stuff in the industry.
But when you come with a talk or a workshop idea, it is to educate and to edify and build up the engineer. And so, there is an educational component, but it absolutely can be in the context of that product as long as it's useful and practical. And so I think that the overall tone and flavor of the auto con events has been has leaned much more. Can a tone lean?
You know what I mean? The entire kind of feel of it leans more toward the engineer and less toward, like, the VP and C level.
But, you know, I I I wonder if that that's changing a little bit as the event gets larger because there have been developments of a leadership track, sort of marrying all of the technical KPIs to business KPIs, to use business terms, And and then seeing how these worlds fit together. So I'm starting to see some of that develop right now as well. And and we're gonna see that at AutoCon 4, which I think is really interesting.
Yeah. You know, one of the themes that, at least at AC zero, I heard, maybe a little bit at AC two as well was, this is great. I wanna get started. I've I've drank the Kool Aid.
I'm ready to start doing more automation. How do I get, like, support from my leadership to take the time to learn, to train, to bring this in? How do I change the culture where people aren't logging into the CLI and making manual changes on the CLI but are doing things in a more programmatic way and doing version control in in GitHub or whatever. Right?
Like, how do I how do I, like, shift from my current status in how we're doing things today to that? And I need executive and leadership sponsorship in order to be able to do that. How do I get from from here to there? That seemed to be a recurring question that was coming up from the organizations who obviously aren't, you know, way down this path.
Right? And so I think Yeah. I think, like you said, at at a at AutoCon 4, they're planning on having a leadership track. And my understanding and keep me honest here on this, Phil.
I think my understanding is the whole purpose of that is to try and encourage more of those type of conversations. Right? Like, how how do we as a community, how do we as an industry Get more support for doing more automation. We those of us who are engineers and have seen this be successful understand that there will be value to the organization.
We'll have more stable networks, more repeatable process. You know, that does translate to ROI for the organization. But how do we how do we translate that into business terms that the executives that are having to make decisions for the business can actually do it? And I think that's the goal of leadership track, right, is try and have those type of conversations.
Yep. Very practical, very real.
I've had those conversations myself when I brought an automation initiative to my manager. I worked for a large enterprise. Most of my career was with VARs, but I did work for a large enterprise for a time.
Really the point was like, how much time is it gonna take you? And, you know, how does that translate to, you know Yep. Saving the company money or or, you know, increased reliability and uptime, blah blah blah. They just basically wanna know, okay. You're gonna spend this much time and effort.
Does that translate to anything, you know, positive for the for the organization? And that was a for profit company, by the way, so that was top of mind. You know, and that, you know, the way that that works when we talk about these kinds of talks and these kinds of workshops, whether it be highly technical or, you know, on this leadership track, is specifically an advisory board kind of going through all of the submissions. So there's a public request for proposals and they're collected over time And the advisory board, which there are a dozen or so individuals discuss and then stack rank them. And, you know, there is an end result of of what talks and what workshops are gonna be know, are selected.
There isn't you know, Scott and Chris in particular kinda step away from that. Of course, they organize that activity and Sure. Part of it, but they don't They don't manipulate that process. That really is up to the advisory board. So the idea here is that the talks, the workshops, these kinds of things, the the names that you see, the individuals that you see, and the titles that you see are a result of a collaborative effort of what I believe are like minded engineers, whether they be practitioners, working for vendors, really anybody that's that has a vested interest in in network automation. That's how that comes to be from event to event.
What's the makeup of the advisory board? Right? You're saying Chris and Scott kinda oversee the process, but they're not the the final decision maker on what talks are gonna be approved and and ultimately make it make their way on to the agenda. The advisory board is the one kinda I don't know if it's a voting process or how that's how how you come to consensus on that.
But, like, you know, talk me a little bit more through that process and then also, like, who makes up this advisory board? Are they all from one vendor? Are they across vendors, across industries? Like, Graham, what's the the makeup of the advisory board?
Yeah. Well, the advisory board is made up of of folks that either are invited to or submitted their name to be part of the advisory board in the first place. And like I said, there's a dozen or so, I think thirteen, I don't know, around that.
And global, So we are not all in the United States or not all in Europe. We are global, and we are part of the board for one year.
And so right now, the way it's gone is that you're on the board for two events. In this case, it's AutoCon three and four. So the previous one in in Prague and then this one coming up in Austin.
And, you know, let's say in this past one, there were well over one hundred talks submitted.
And we go through them one by one individually. Now we can discuss them in our Zoom calls and in our Slack channels. Hundred percent. Hundred percent. Sure. But then we all go our own into our own corners, and we rank what top ten we want to see or what top ten, you know, fifteen whatever happens to be.
And on the back end, those are compared and contrasted, and you end up with a resultant set of the top ten or whatever number we're looking for, depending on workshops and things like that. We're looking at the title. We are looking at the description.
If there's an abstract, whatever kind of information to get a little bit more color. And so the advisory board needs that information. We did we do we did receive some talks that had just a title, and it was difficult. We're like, I don't know what this is.
But we also see the name of the submitter, what organization they're from, what company they're from. Sometimes people submit on their own. I might know who they are and I know who they work for, but they're not submitting on behalf of their employer. So we see that.
And we've also seen of course, they're submitting on behalf of their employer. Those are a little bit tricky because then you see some vendors that submit a variety of different talks, almost kind of like stacking the deck, but that's why we have the advisory board. We see that and we walk through it, and we really have this idea, this focus, and we talk about this explicitly in the meeting, so this is no smoke and mirrors, Justin.
What are the most compelling talks? What does the industry, like what's going on?
What does it seem like folks wanna hear? What do we wanna hear? So yeah, yeah, we chose a bunch of AI stuff for this one coming up. I can't help it. You know?
And People wanna hear about AI?
I'm shocked.
Yeah. Yeah. But but also but also from very, know, beginner level all the way to advanced. So Yeah.
So there's also that component that we're like, you know, there's a variety of people coming, and when you're pushing one thousand people in attendance, you're gonna have a spectrum of skill sets. So it was very important to us that we chose both workshops and talks that, you know, there was something for everyone. Let me let me let me change that. There was something relevant, practical, and hopefully helpful and informative for everyone.
And then you as an attendee can choose which workshop and talk you wanna you wanna go to.
And I guess I'm I'm assuming you're trying to get a mixture and and blend between end users and vendors. Right? So some people who work for an organization that has gone on an automation journey and has been successful, has some learnings pro probably both good and bad to share with the audience as well as the people who are building solutions and products that can help with that? Is it trying to get a mixture of both. Right?
Absolutely. Especially when you start to unpack the build versus buy argument, I mean, you're gonna have vendors talking about what they build because a lot of people, especially in the enterprise, don't have the time, staff, resources, or wherewithal to build a very sophisticated AI system, for example. And so you're gonna look at what can I purchase that has those features in it or some kind of a system or as a service, whatever it happens to be? And like in AutoCon two, I gave a talk on using AI for network operations.
And at the time it was kind of a nascent thing, right? So I talked about text to SQL and Rag and I barely touched on agents. Now moving forward, we're talking about very sophisticated agentic AI systems, right? Cool.
And a lot of folks are gonna struggle to build that out at scale in the enterprise. You know, certainly in in corner cases, certainly if you have the resources, great. You know, the data engineering team. Or if you are, you know, doing it in your basement as a POC, which you then, for like learning purposes, all great.
But I think by and large, a lot of folks are gonna wanna look at what they can purchase, whether in a hybrid model, can I outsource the data pipeline or can I outsource the entire thing, whatever it happens to be? And so you get folks like us, like Kentik going in there talking about, hey, here's an already built data pipeline, and you can serve your models if you want, and then of course, what we're doing now at Kentik, running our own artificial intelligence workflows to interrogate data and to do some programmatic root cause analysis, which is really, really cool, and I think one of the more compelling use cases for AI right now in network operations.
And there are other vendors that do that. And so, yeah, some of those talks are gonna be from a vendor that basically says, look at what we built.
But it's not like in this bubble of marketing and sales. It's look at what we built because we're proud of this thing that we built that solves real problems and it's cutting edge technology.
Not trying to sound like I'm just marketing Kentik here because there are other other vendors that do that as well. So Sure. As an attendee, you do get to hear what variety of vendors, whether they be direct network vendors or observability vendors or low code, no code automation vendors are are building, whether it's AI or or something else. And then, you know, you can make a better informed decision about your own build versus buy situation.
Know? So I think it's Yeah. Very, very practical, very, very real, and it's not lopsided. I don't get the sense, maybe you disagree, I don't get the sense that it's more heavy vendor than operator.
Really see that there's a push to get operate, especially the success stories like you mentioned. The success story of some engineer somewhere who built this thing and automated this particular, and here's why it worked, or the failures. I do remember a couple of people talking about, here's why it didn't work and it all fell apart, but it was a great learning experience.
Yeah. I mean, that's kinda goes back to the growth mindset. Right? Like, if you view failure as a learning opportunity and not a completely negative experience, right, it's like, alright.
Pick ourselves back up, dust off, and move on, and then share that experience with the community. So, hopefully, not everybody has to hit those same branches on the way down the tree. Right? So there's a lot of value, in the community and having those type of conversations.
You know, I wanted to circle back on something you've mentioned a couple times, Phil. You you used the term talks and workshops. So I'm assuming, keep me honest on this, that, you know, people are gonna hear people on a main stage with some slides and some PowerPoint talking through, you know, experience they've had automating different things, talking about AI and and Rag and some of these type of different things. But then there's also time that people can sign up for these workshops to sit down and actually get their hands on this technology and spend some time learning through practical exercise. Maybe let's talk a little bit more about those two things.
Yep. Well, the conference itself is a couple days, but the workshops precede the conference by a couple of days. So the entire you're there for an entire week if you do all the workshops and conference. But you have these two dedicated days early in the week, Monday and Tuesday, and you can pick and choose which workshops you want to attend.
Now they are not included in the cost of the general conference pass, but certainly you can purchase both and there's value in doing all of it, but certainly if you can't afford it or your employer can't cover it, there's value in doing one or the That being said, they are paid workshops and right now most of them are sold out. And what they are, are four hour They're not purely presentations because they are meant to be educational and hands on to an extent. So most of the workshops have slides, yes, because there's education going on, but also lab activity. And every workshop, depending on who's presenting, whether it's somebody presenting on their own behalf because they wanna do a thing, they wanna show you what they and then help you build it, or it's a vendor, the workshop is meant to be highly educational and then highly practical.
Let's show you how you can do this thing. Now, to be fair, sometimes that means you gotta walk into a workshop and already have an understanding of how to write some Python. So so you do have to pick and choose based on beginner, intermediate, advanced. I think those are the three levels.
Maybe there's an expert level. I don't know. But you you you pick a skill set or a skill level, and you you go in that way.
So for example, the workshop that we're doing, it's called Building Smarter Observability with Network Intelligence, which is a fancy way of we're gonna talk about what Kentik does as far as observability. You know, our our our and and if I'm gonna put it in terms of a data pipeline, which I always like to do, we're gonna talk about how we ingest, process, store, and then serve up tons and tons of network data, network telemetry, the variety of the the volume, all of that. And the reason we're doing that is because that's we believe, I believe, that that's a major foundation to automation and then, you know, even advanced automation in in the form of AI and programmatic activities using AI tools.
And so we're going to go through things like just an educational run through of terms and what that ETL looks like, the extract, transform, and load pipeline in data.
And then why you need to do certain type of ML pre processing if you're gonna use this data to serve up to AI models, so all of that stuff.
And then for our particular workshop, the hands on component is looking at some of that stuff of like, all right, how do I configure these devices to send flow or to send SNMP or whatever? Where does that get stored properly and why?
And then what does an AI kind of workflow look like in actual person? Not something running on a llama on my laptop at home, but what does it look like at scale? So that's the kind of stuff we would cover. Other people's cover very different things. We're seeing workshops on, like, how to build your own, you know, MCP server and rag system, things like that. We're seeing stuff about how to do change validation with container networking and stuff like that.
I think there's a workshop on building AI agents, and just a hands on workshop guiding folks through building, I think, two or three specific agents for network operations. So you're gonna probably see things like trace route and ping, some basic stuff, but it helps get you to understand it. And that's the kind of stuff that you see. Whether it's beginner or advanced, whether it's a little bit more on the vendor side because they're kind of walking through how this thing works, or it's just somebody that wants to show you how they built the thing. That's kind of the gamut there.
Yeah. And I've, you know, sat through, workshops at both the last two auto cons, and I will say everyone I've sat through were were well done. You know, like you said, you get a certain amount of presentation to kind of Present an idea, a concept so that you can understand it, but I won't speak for everybody, but I think most engineers learn by doing. Right?
And so that's what I really enjoy about the workshops is someone presents an idea. I'm like, okay. I think I get it. Let's get our hands on and actually play with it because that's where the real learning, at least for me, takes place.
So I think I'm gonna sort of like I'll say back in back in my day, back in the old days, when you used to do a, like, a Cisco training course, you go to, like, a global knowledge or something and take an actual course, you'd have a certain topic. Let's say you're learning OSPF. Right? You go through all the theory of OSPF and different LSA types and areas and all that kind of stuff.
And it's like, alright. Now let's log in to either a real Cisco device or a virtualized Cisco device and configure OSPS so we can apply this, you know, what we just learned to practical exercises. And that's what everybody's trying to accomplish here with the workshops at AutoCon is a similar concept, smaller smaller amount of time invested. Right?
These are, like you said, all I'll kinda summarize that.
They run Monday and Tuesday. So you're gonna choose, Monday morning. There's gonna be, like, three or four, something like that, maybe five to choose from in that time block. So you're gonna choose a workshop.
You're gonna sit through for that four hours, then you'll have A block Monday afternoon, and then a block Tuesday morning, and a block Tuesday afternoon. And like you said, these are A separate ticket from the conference itself. They have a little bit more limited because you can only have so many people in a room with their laptops out doing these, so they do sell out quickly. I think, Phil, the last time I looked, there were about thirteen tickets left.
By the time this recording drops, they they may be sold out. So if they are, definitely get in early for AutoCon five. There's definitely a lot of value in getting your hands on these solutions and Getting to to practically learn what you're learning in theory.
Yep. Yep. And for folks, as we're wrapping up here, for folks that are interested in registering for a workshop or multiple workshops, right, or really for the entire event, and I do believe that there's value in being there for the entire week. It is in Austin, Texas, the week of November seventeen through twenty one. And if you go over to the networkautomation dot forum, that's the website, networkautomation dot forum, you can find more information there about how to register and then accommodations and things like that.
And also browse the workshops and talks, which are now public. So Justin and I will be there. We are delivering a workshop on behalf of Kentik. And and then, of course, we'll have a table and and we'd love to to chat with folks that are hanging out and be know, with our people, with other nerds. Right?
It's Yeah.
Love it. Those parts. Yep.
So Justin, thanks so much for joining today and look forward to have you coming on again soon.
If you have a comment or a question about today's show, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach out to us at telemetrynow@kentik.com. So for now, thanks so much for listening. Bye bye.