The Future of Network Automation: Are the Chatbots Coming for Us?

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Lindsay Hill@northlandboy

Who am I?

• Product Manager at Brocade• Focus on Network Automation and Integration

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Disclaimer

© 2016 Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. CONFIDENTIAL under Strict NDA, Confidential 3

This is my own idle speculationDoes not represent $employer official position in any wayOK?

What’s a Chatbot?

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“A chatbot is a service, powered by rules and sometimes artificial intelligence, that you interact with via a chat interface.”

Chatbots Magazine

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Why the hype?Because Facebook’s doing it

“We’re excited to introduce bots for the Messenger Platform. Bots can provide anything from automated subscription content…[to] live automated messages all by interacting directly with the people who want to get them.

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BECAUSE FACEBOOK’S DOING IT

Tay, the “super-chill” AI…

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“Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbotto be a racist asshole in less than a day”

“Microsoft’s racist chatbot returns with drug-smoking Twitter meltdown”

“Microsoft terminates its Tay AI chatbotafter she turns into a Nazi”

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Still….could we use Chatbots for network automation?

What pieces do we need?

• Frameworks for interacting with both humans & networks• Should our bot be ‘dumb’ or ‘smart’?• Lots of data

– Valid configuration choices– Human speak decoder

• A good reason to do it

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Slackbots are already here

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Network APIs & Configs

We’re getting better at APIs. Netconf, REST, OpenConfig, etcSupporting a simple set of configs is easy, but...What about expanding that set?Should our bot automatically implement validated configurations?Or do we still tell it exactly what to do?

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What about the human interaction?

• Simple rules are easy “Configure port 5 on switch sw02ftc as access mode, VLAN 100”• How should I decode “I’ve got a new app to install”

or “The Internets are broken” ?• Can we “learn” what people are asking for? And

make the responses seem more ‘human’?• What if people poison the well?

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potato … potato … potato … potato … potato …

Do we really want to chat with our networks?

It looks like you’re provisioning a VLAN. Would you like me to:A) Automagically do it?B) Screw it up badly, admit

nothing, and throw random accusations?

C) Die in a fire?

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OK….maybe not for net eng folk?

• Would customers be able to describe a service in sufficient detail?• I’m not confident they can• They might request a higher-level service, and that triggers some specific

network flow

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Will it Happen?

• We have the tooling, and we can get the data• But do we have the need, and the will?• Maybe

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It’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future

Q&A

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Thank you

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PS…I’m hiring PMs & TMEs