One of our customers recently sent us a repost of Bruce Davie's article "What happened to network automation?" It's indeed a reasonable question to ask "Is it lingering somewhere between fusion power and self-driving cars?" It's also perfectly reasonable to observe that, "There is a reason why people who can configure BGP correctly in complex environments are highly sought after and widely viewed as wizards."
Bruce notes that "It turned out that automation was out of reach for most of our [Network Virtualization Platform] customers." On the bright side, he posits that "I have the impression that the situation improved somewhat with the rise of microservices, and Kubernetes in particular. For all its shortcomings, Kubernetes has brought the automatic provisioning of distributed computing and networking resources to a much larger audience."
It turns out that Bruce has the right intuition. That customer who sent us his article is indeed no BGP wizard. In fact, he's not even a network engineer. He's a DevOps engineer proficient with cloud-native tools like Kubernetes. And he runs his AI cloud network with Hedgehog and our Kubernetes API. And yes, the workloads on our automated Hedgehog AI network are training self-driving cars from Volvo and Mercedes. And no, you don't have to wait for nuclear fusion. You can download Hedgehog today.