[superbaconman]

I've been building network controllers my entire career and the "hard part" has never been interacting with devices. Like who cares if you're using Ansible? The hard part is configuring these things; Every vendor has a different way of configuring the same 5 solutions to the same problem, and even with a single vendor network you may have to tailor your configs based on the device type that you're configuring.

IMO there needs to be some higher level abstractions emerge. Half the time I just need a layer 2 network (please don't ask me to configure it one way for a point-to-point vs greater than two endpoints. if there's an optimization to be made do it for me). The other half the time I need a layer 3 network that can peer with BGP (don't ask me what underlay or overlay protocols to use, I only care about the VLANs I'm terminating on).

Slightly related: Cloud providers expose APIs for networks to setup peerings between the cloud provider's network and the network's end customers. These APIs aren't standardized at all, and are a complete PITA for networks that try to integrate their SDN solution with multiple cloud providers. This is one area of complexity that the big guys could cleanup without a lot of work.

[dfex]

Agreed - this is more or less the problem statement that OpenConfig was designed to solve (minus the making optimisation part), however the chicken-and-egg problem for vendors is always: few people are asking for it, because until every vendor supports it, only a few people will use it.

[ilyt]

Well, industry tried before with NETCONF, good luck...

[beams_of_light]

NETCONF doesn’t abstract anything though. All it did was provide a programmatic method for configuring devices.

[tryauuum]

I don't know about network automation much. Is NAPALM still a thing, is it viable?