Shift Left: Building Network Automation That Lasts

Getting something automated is hard. Keeping it automated as networks, platforms, and business requirements evolve is even harder.

Too often, automation is treated as the final step of a project rather than something that should influence how systems, data models, APIs, and operational processes are designed from the beginning. The result is brittle automation that requires constant maintenance, struggles to adapt to change, and eventually becomes more expensive to maintain than the manual processes it replaced.

A shift-left approach encourages us to think about automation much earlier in the lifecycle. By considering automation during the design of services, APIs, data models, workflows, and operational practices, we can build systems that are easier to automate, easier to evolve, and easier to operate over the long term.

In this session we share ideas and experiences that help move network automation from a collection of scripts to a sustainable engineering discipline.