Before you finish your next automation script

An excellent article from Wall Street Journal about pitfalls of automation:

This philosophy traps people in a vicious cycle of de-skilling. By isolating them from hard work, it dulls their skills and increases the odds that they will make mistakes. When those mistakes happen, designers respond by seeking to further restrict people’s responsibilities—spurring a new round of de-skilling.

Something to consider when you hand over that new automation script to your network operations center.

Al-too-na! Al-too-na!

There is a lot of press these days about new Facebook datacenter and how it (almost) means death of Cisco-Juniper-Arista. Here are the questions:
Did somebody try to run multicast on white-box switch?
Where do you place Rendezvous Point in this network?
There is only handful of companies with Facebook- or Google-size network, but hundreds of companies requiring multicast support in their data center. Until white box switches learn to run IGMP/PIM/MSDP Cisco and Juniper will have plenty of customers with deep pockets.