NANOG's video: Evolution of Network Automation at Roblox

Mayuresh Gaitonde The network automation stack at Roblox has grown and evolved over time taking into account several old and new use cases, as well as problems and challenges encountered over time. Quite often, we hear people talking about the amazing work happening in organizations around network automation that aims to solve hard problems and simplify workflows. We don't however, hear much about the problems and challenges that Network Automation teams face with their existing automation stacks on a day to day basis as the network grows and demands increase. The aim of this presentation is to provide a glimpse into the Network Automation stack at Roblox, starting from day 0 and revisiting some of the challenges and problems with our older automation techniques that led us to evolve the stack and solve the problems in creative ways over time. Along the way, we learnt several things related to building and operating a robust and scalable automation stack, which I will try to to share towards the end. Mayuresh Gaitonde: I am a Network Engineer turned Network Automation guy / Network Reliability Engineer who loves building micro-service based frameworks for the monitoring, provisioning and deployment of large/web scale network environments. I am a fan of Open Source but less so than building things myself to get the job done :) I prefer coding in Go and Python and recently have developed an active interest in front end development using React-JS. Career wise, I have led web scale network automation efforts at Facebook and Roblox over the last decade. Prior to Network Automation, I was mostly involved with network design and operations for vendors and ISPs. I hold dual active CCIE certifications ( # 33010 ).