Part 1 — What Is NetDevOps (And Why Network Engineers Must Adapt)

Creating Urgency and Clarity

Problem Statement: Network infrastructure is undergoing a fundamental transformation. Traditional CLI-based configuration, manual change management, and siloed operations are no longer sustainable in modern enterprises. By 2027, generative AI will account for 25% of network configurations, yet many network teams remain unprepared for this shift.

NetDevOps represents the intersection of network engineering and DevOps principles—bringing automation, version control, CI/CD pipelines, and collaborative workflows to network operations. This isn’t optional anymore; it’s a competitive necessity.

Why CLI-Only Networking Is Dying

Manual network operations face three critical challenges:

Speed Bottleneck: A network engineer connecting via CLI to configure individual devices can handle perhaps 10–20 devices in a day. Modern enterprises operate hundreds or thousands of devices. Scaling manual processes doesn’t work.

Error-Prone Processes: Human configuration mistakes account for 50–70% of network outages. Without version control, there’s no audit trail, no rollback capability, and no way to validate changes before deployment. Each device becomes a unique snowflake, impossible to troubleshoot systematically.

Skills Shortage: The market demand for network automation engineers vastly outpaces supply. Network teams with traditional-only skills face career stagnation while organizations struggle to keep pace with infrastructure demands.

DevOps vs NetDevOps: Understanding the Difference

DevOps traditionally applied to application infrastructure—servers, containers, cloud deployments. Practitioners mastered Infrastructure as Code (IaC) through tools like Terraform and Ansible, built CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions, and treated infrastructure like software.

NetDevOps extends these principles specifically to network infrastructure. This means:

• Version-controlled network configurations stored in Git, not hidden in device memory
• Declarative intent where you describe desired network state rather than issuing commands
• Multi-vendor abstraction supporting Cisco, Juniper, Arista, and others through unified APIs
• Automated compliance validation catching configuration errors before they impact production
• Self-healing networks that detect drift and remediate automatically

Real-World NetDevOps Use Cases

Organizations implementing NetDevOps report significant gains:

VLAN Automation: Manual VLAN changes took 2–3 days per request. Automated VLAN provisioning reduced this to 30 minutes, improving customer satisfaction while reducing errors.

Configuration Compliance: One enterprise implemented automated compliance scanning against CIS benchmarks, detecting configuration violations in real-time. Within six months, compliance violations dropped 85% because issues were caught during pre-deployment validation rather than reactive break-check-fix approaches.

Multi-Site Device Onboarding: A multi-location organization manually configured each new router or switch, a 4-hour process prone to mistakes. NetDevOps automation reduced this to 15 minutes with zero human intervention, ensuring configuration consistency across all sites.

Network Change Risk Reduction: Automated pre-checks before deployment validate that proposed changes won’t break BGP, ACLs, or VLANs. One financial services company reduced change-related incidents by 92% after implementing pre-change validation.

The Skills Gap in Modern Networking

The Gartner 2025 Strategic Roadmap for Enterprise Networking emphasizes that network automation maturity requires both traditional networking knowledge AND software development competency. Few engineers possess both.

The shift creates an opportunity: network engineers who learn coding, version control, and CI/CD practices become dramatically more valuable. Mid-level network engineers with NetDevOps skills command 30–50% salary premiums.

Call to Action

By the end of this 10-part series, you’ll understand how to:

• Speak the language of DevOps without feeling like an imposter
• Write Python and Ansible automation that works in production
• Build CI/CD pipelines for network changes
• Implement monitoring and observability that reveals network health
• Create a GitHub portfolio demonstrating real automation projects
• Position yourself for higher-paying, more fulfilling network automation roles

Key Takeaway: NetDevOps isn’t about replacing networking knowledge—it’s about amplifying it. Your deep understanding of routing, switching, and security becomes 10x more powerful when combined with automation mindset.

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Try this now: Export a running config from a device, commit it to a Git repo, and write a short commit message explaining the change.

Next: Part 2 — DevOps concepts every network engineer should know.