I highly recommend catching Packet Pushers 333 “Automation & Orchestration In Networking” by Drew Conry-Murray and guests Pete Lumbis and Michael Damkot.

While the discussion is all about NETWORK DevOps, they do a good job of decrying WHY current state of system orchestration is so sad – in a word: heterogeneity.  It’s not going away because the alternative is lock-in.  They also do a good job of describing the difference between automation and orchestration; however, I think there’s a middle tier  of resource “scheduling” that better describes OpenStack and Kubernetes.

Around 5:00 minutes into the podcast, they effectively describe the composable design of Digital Rebar and the rationale for the way that we’ve abstracted interfaces for automation.  If you guys really do want to cash in by consulting with it (at 10 minutes), just give me a call.

It’s great to hear acknowledgement of both the complexity and need for solving these problems.   Thanks for the great podcast Drew, Pete and Michael!

Oh… and I’m going to be presenting at Interop ITX also.  Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to talk 1×1 with Drew.