AutoCon 2 News and Updates with Scott Robohn

Not long ago, the network automation forum was founded by Chris Grundemann and Scott Robohn, two networking experts and pretty active members of the tech community.

So they wanted to start a community forum, like the name suggests, to discuss why network automation hasn't really progressed as far as we expected it by now. And so the first event, Autocon Zero, was held in November of twenty twenty three, a second event in Amsterdam in May of twenty twenty four, and now coming soon, AutoCon 2 returning to Denver in November of this year.

So joining me today is Scott Robohn to discuss what the network automation forum has been working on these last couple years as well as to give us important news and updates about the upcoming AutoCon 2 event this fall. Now this is an important event. It's an important community that they're building over there, so definitely stick with us for today's episode. My name is Philip Gervasi, and this is Telemetry now.

Scott, thanks for joining me again. It is great to have you as a returning guest on, Telemetry Now. And the last time we spoke, we got pretty eyeball-deep into, total network operations and TN ops, which we'll touch on today a little bit. But we only touched on what you're doing with the network automation forum and, the AutoCon events. Today, I really wanna dig into that a lot more, especially, get an understanding of some of the updates, new information for one of the upcoming events that I'm really excited about, AutoCon 2 this fall. Before we do that, of course, I wanna give the, give you give you an opportunity to introduce yourself to the audience. So, Scott, can you just give us a little rundown of your background and, what you're doing these days?

Sure. Thank you. It's great to be back, Phil, as always. I'm your friendly neighborhood Internet plumber.

Apologies to Stan Lee and Spider Man, but it works for me. I've been in various aspects of the networking industry for over thirty years. I got bought by the bit by the networking bug. Again, too much Spider Man analogy there, in grad school and just found my ways to get into networking projects and kinda work my way through operations and tech roles, into architect roles and went to the dark side as an SE and then an SE leader. And, in this third act of my career, now I'm an independent consultant, being able to do things like, help cofound with Chris Grundemann in the network automation forum that's just really turned into this really interesting place for dialogues around network automation.

It really has. It really has. It really took off, and I'm really excited to have seen that, to have been a part of it. I got the, the the privilege, the the honor of attending AutoCon Zero, in Denver, and that was just phenomenal.

And I saw so much positive feedback about AutoCon One as well. So I'm really excited to talk about AutoCon 2 coming up soon.

Now, you and I have done a podcast together, and, we are neither of us are strangers to the entire realm of technical podcasts. And I did see recently you have a new podcast on the Packet Pushers Network. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

I do.

Kind of as an offshoot of some of the work in NAF and taking a broader view of what's happening in network operations.

We're starting a new venture called Total Network Operations.

This is a podcast that's gonna focus on many, many different apps aspects of what it means to operate a network. You know, so much attention gets put on, you know, protocol selection, protocol design, what do the architects care about and so forth, what do the architects hand down to engineers to actually implement. But we, as an industry, don't spend a lot of time with the people who get stuck with those choices and need to keep the bit pipes up and deliver those packets.

So I really feel like this is an underserved community, and it's a really interesting opportunity to see how new technologies are hitting the operation space like AI, but not just AI, and how they necessarily need to work together, you know, across the network infrastructure you're operating, what you're doing for observability and telemetry, how security aligns with what you're doing, how do you use collab tools with it all. There's just a great breadth of technologies that need to work together to keep a network operational, and that's what the focus is gonna be.

Yeah. That's really great. You know, it it, caused me to start thinking about how much things have changed in networking in such a short amount of time. And when I say a short amount of time, I mean maybe like ten years, twelve years, fourteen years, something like that. So not not a huge amount of time.

And, I just got out of high school, Phil.

I don't know what I don't I don't know how I got here.

So Yeah.

You and me both. Right? But think back to how things were over a decade ago, a little over a decade ago. So so to me that's relatively recent memory And how networking meant sitting at a computer, like, in a cubicle or something, and then accessing local resources, some, like, file server, print server, maybe I'm logging in so it's active directory down the hall.

And, and very little left the the local Right. Network, the the campus, except for maybe when I send an email or something or access some website information or things like that. But a lot of the stuff that we did was, so much more, simple, and didn't involve the the incredible complexity that we have today where we have to, talk about things like multi cloud networking and we have container networking that we're overlays that we have now with SD SD WAN and maybe overlays in our campus and data center and things like that.

Our incredible reliance on the public Internet, which really wasn't the case fifteen years ago like it is today.

Well, no lack of things to learn about, you know. And if we if we take this back and, you know, just focus on the automation discussion, you know, I think pick whenever you started in networking, there have always been efforts to automate what you're doing. Right? It it may have been with Perl scripts. You may go back that far. Right? It may have been using Excel spreadsheets to use macros to do certain things to network devices.

So network automation is not necessarily a new phenomenon at all.

That being said, you know, the Chris and I started out with the question of what's the holdup? Why isn't network automation further along than, you know, we think it should be? And this is how NAF was born.

Chris and I basically said, well, we're we're just two guys. We we're pretty literate in the area, but we're just two people with two different perspectives. We should probably get people together to start talking about why isn't network automation further along than it is. And that resulted in AutoCon Zero, which was in Denver twenty twenty three.

We thought we'd get two hundred people. We figured we'd call that a successful number. We ended up with three hundred and forty.

So a great slate of, presentations from end user perspectives from the most part. You know, it's we're not Cisco Live. We're not a vendor conference in the in the in the way that we have a, you know, architecture to promote or products to sell. We've become this place for people to come and show what they're doing successfully in their networks, the challenges that they're having. There was a great presentation, at AutoCon One in Amsterdam in May twenty twenty four that I can't remember the title off the top of my head, but how my first network automation project failed and how and why it's still in production.

So there's there's good stuff to learn there, all across the board.

So let me pause. I I can keep going, but I'll better to let you ask questions and and take us where you wanna go.

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I will say just real quick from my own experience. I did attend AutoCon Zero and, and I and I really appreciated how it was very much a community focused event.

There were, just hundreds of network practitioners, a lot of from the US, sure, but also from around the world. And from both service provider and enterprise from kind of the small and medium business world to, to very very large, web scale organizations and, from education, from finance, all different industries. And everybody was there really just to talk about how to do what they do better. And sure, the focus was on automation.

That that is true. And, but I I really did appreciate all of the the all all of what would have been hallway conversations at like a Cisco Live or something like that brought to the forefront at a, an event like AutoCon Zero. And then I heard similar feedback about AutoCon One, though I didn't get to go, really heard it was a fantastic event.

So, why don't you tell me a little bit about AutoCon 2 coming up? Some, information that you think would be helpful for our listeners.

And also, I heard that you have a new you as in the network automation forum has a new partnership with the USNUA, and I'd love to hear a little bit more about that too.

Correct. Well, you know, first, thanks for your feedback. Glad glad that you saw those things that, we felt became really important. We've turned into key features of the conference. You know, we we took that very end user, experience focus in into AutoConOne in Amsterdam, this past May. And, of course, why not try a conference in Europe when you've only delivered one other conference before?

We have we've just been very, very fortunate to have, a great tribe of folks around us with good feedback and good ideas on, you know, different locations. We ended up at the Amsterdam Hilton, which one of the places where, John Lennon and Yoko Ono did some of their peace-ins.

So, that was an interesting happy accident. But, bringing it forward to AutoCon 2. So that will be the week of November eighteenth twenty twenty four in Denver. We're at a different hotel in Denver because we've grown. We're gonna we're we're, sizing it for up to five hundred attendees where we only could do four hundred last time. We sold out four hundred in Amsterdam.

We fully expect to sell out five hundred in, in November this year. So I I'm gonna sound like I'm selling, but get your tickets now. Don't wait, because people will come along and say, hey. Can you open up any more spaces?

And we're gonna have to say no. Right? Because we're we're we're really sizing it. We we learned some lessons at our last event where, you know, you can fit a certain number of people in a room, but then you also want them to be able to walk around easily.

So, maybe we could have done a little better on that in Amsterdam. So we're taking great care for that in, in, Denver this year. Registration is open.

As of this recording, super early bird pricing is out there until August twenty eighth.

Only two ninety nine for a three day conference, which is really, really inexpensive. So, get your tickets now. If you if you're worried about not being able to completely commit, you can always assign that ticket to somebody else, you know, either a friend or somebody else in your organization if, if that's a concern. But I would try to reserve your space and your hotel now.

Hotel registration will be open till October twenty seventh. I know that seems like, you know, forever away, but, you know, it's gonna be here before you know it. So in terms of content submissions, those submissions closed a couple weeks ago. We're in the process of going through, a hundred and nineteen submissions for basically eighteen or nineteen speaking slots. So it's a very wonderful problem to have. You know, our advisory board is fully engaged in the process.

We will announce the final agenda by September ninth. Slight possibility will happen before September ninth, but I can't commit to that.

The the process, I you know, I can say from what's been submitted and the initial conversations that are happening, It's only iron sharpens iron. Right? And the cream rises to the top. Pick your favorite analogy here.

The increased number of submissions means we're just gonna be able to pick from some of the best content from from people who are seasoned presenters, you know, been doing this for a long time, and other people who have are doing this for the first time. And we're very, very happy to accommodate people new to, you know, the conference presentation situation. You know, we'll mentor. We'll help people develop content, coach on delivery, and things like that.

So I think we're gonna have a great mix of old and new, presenters when we get to November.

One of the great add ons, so we've talked about it a little bit here, is the addition of workshops.

So we did not have workshops in in, at AutoCon Zero.

We decided to trial them at AutoCon One, and we had, you know, the two the two full days before the conference.

We had three separate workshops. You know, two lasted half a day each. One was a full day.

A selection of topics, you can go back go to network automation dot forum if you wanna see the details.

And they sold out as well. We called that a success.

And now we have opened this up into a slate of sixteen half day workshops over those two days before the event.

So, you know, when that registration opens and, again, it will be open by the time this publishes. But on August fifteenth, we'll publish the slate of workshop choices, you know, and the schedule grid that they're in. And you you you pay one ticket and you pick four.

Obviously, they're four, that don't conflict with each other. Mhmm.

But, you know, that was that was a huge piece of feedback from AutoCon Zero. People wanted workshops of differing skill levels, went really well for AutoCon One. I think it's gonna be even better for AutoCon 2.

Okay. So the workshops precede the main conference, right, by a couple days?

Correct. Correct. And it is a separate it is a separate ticket. So there's the conference ticket for two ninety nine. The workshop ticket is four ninety nine.

You can get them all at the same place, you know, the registration section at network automation dot forum.

Okay. And same location and everything, of course. Correct. Yes. Yep.

And is, is there anything different about AutoCon 2 as compared to AutoCon Zero and and AutoCon One that you'd like to talk about, of course, without giving away any of the topics or maybe speaker names or workshops, which I know are still in progress. Right? But what is it about AutoCon 2, that is new and different and that folks can look forward to especially if they have experience at AutoCon Zero and AutoCon One, especially in light of the question that was posed at AutoCon Zero, why aren't we farther along with network automation?

Yeah. I won't, I won't steal any thunder or, get ahead of any big reveals or anything. But number one, I'll say it's still a valid question.

You know, I don't I don't think there's there's been a full set of answers to it. Some have offered very good ones.

And, you know, they all there's a slider bar. Right? You know, how much of it is lack of having an automation architecture in your network design? That's a contributor.

How how are, you know, organizational impediments? You know, automation. Why do I spend more money on automation? Right?

So there's there's a mix of things that are attenuating, and I think we'll continue to ask that question. I think in twenty twenty five, we'll be able to formulate, okay. Here are other specific things that we can, help the community push and engage in more directly. There have been a couple really interesting things that have happened organically since AutoCon Zero that I think I'll feed into AutoCon 2.

Let me just talk about them a little bit.

You know, Chris and I are trying to provide a place for people to sit and talk. That's what a forum is in the classical sense. Right? We also like watering hole.

Right? We're an oasis in this desert of network infrastructure, and Chris and I are the gardeners, so we're maintenance and engineering. The seats are clean. You know, there's enough fresh water.

Right.

If you're if you wanna come and play nicely and help advance the cause of network automation, there's a place for you. Right? Come come on in. Have a drink quite literally, and let's talk.

Some of those conversations have really gone in very interesting and useful directions.

Coming out of AutoCon Zero and VR Slack community, there's been the emergence of this desire to have a framework for network automation Mhmm. That, you know, several different community members, I think four or five different people are engaged in the effort.

And they're gonna have a sidebar meeting at, at AutoCon 2, to help keep moving this forward.

That's exactly the kind of thing we want to see network automation forum and autocon events be used for. Bring people together who wanna work together to move the ball down the field.

If you're a football fan, you can pick other sports ball analogies if you'd like. Right. But but those are some of the organic things that are happening.

There's another conversation around vendor agnostic, training and certification in automation.

This one is not very far along. But, you know, I've probably poked half a dozen individuals on, would you like to get together and talk at AutoCon 2 about how we might pull this together?

So, again, organic efforts bubbling up from people who have a natural affinity for some of these topics.

I think the bigger issues beyond executing Python scripts are going to become more and more important.

And I'll just say orchestration is another big topic. How do we how do we get beyond?

Alright, I know how to I know how to do things to my network with Python.

I have my scriptorium on my laptop, you know, or I'm smart enough to put it in a git repository and share it with my team. Mhmm. How do I tie that to How do I tie that to other events in the network? How do I trigger off automations based on telemetry information?

I think that's going to continue to be a growing theme and call it orchestration within the network realm, in particular, but even orchestration with other IT disciplines and IT silos, you know, the connection to, you know, a high level service order management system.

You know, the one of the workshops that was done in Amsterdam and will be repeated at, at AutoCon 2 has to do with a workflow orchestrator that was built by the the Dutch National Research and Education folks in collaboration with some public entities in the US, including ESnet and others. And, you know, there's really interesting things that can be done in terms of, you know, I want this service, have that service request, fire off a whole set of automations to make things work automatically.

So those are some of the big things. What what piques your interest there?

What piques my interest, you're asking? Yeah. Oh, wow.

Rarely do I get the questions turned and the tables turned and and, and the tables turned.

Tables turn. That's right.

Right. Well, piques my interest, I think, is probably what you just explained about, orchestration, and then going beyond just whether it'd be simple on box or off box scripting, things that I'm very familiar with and have done over the years as a traditional engineer.

But but like you just said, getting into those more advanced workflows where you can enable the automation, of a lot of different services to be spun up and integrated with each other because of the nature of how we do networking today. So I could get away with certain types of simple scripting back in the day because that's all that was required. I wasn't integrating with all these other types of of services and systems. And, you know, I got my Kubernetes stuff over here, and there's networking there.

And I'm trying to deliver an application that's running off of some services there, but then I got its back end over here in Azure, and I'm trying to figure all this out. It's all part of it's all networked together. And so being able to, ingest the information, the telemetry from all of that, to be able to push config to all of that, to be able to put that into some sort of a workflow where I'm continually looking at it and making those adjustments over time as the application performs poorly or as, like, users do stupid things. That's that's what really interests me the most.

What you didn't mention, which would be a really cool thing to see, would be how, we are going beyond just, like, an automation workflow and orchestrator, and then using, predictive analysis and, maybe applying some ML models. We probably will gonna be are gonna be talking about that. Whether it's from the main stage or on the side hallways, I'm sure that's gonna be a topic of conversation. But in any case, looking at that, the addition of that intelligence to the to those orchestrators as well. That's, I think, gonna be really a really cool conversation to have with folks that are in the weeds working on this stuff.

For sure. And so you brought us back to it. If you hadn't, I would have.

Okay.

If I go if I go back to AutoCon Zero, I I went into planning for that event thinking, yeah, there's gonna be some great AI and networking conversations, you know, from users.

And there weren't. Right? There were some interesting submissions, largely from vendors that turned into a panel. And that was that was fine.

And, you know, I I I have my own acronym, IIWII. It is what it is. Yeah. There you go.

I I expected more content on use of AI, and there wasn't as, you know, there wasn't much as as I expected. That's just an indication of where where organizations are in terms of really putting AI and AI based tools into production.

We're gonna be a year down the road compared to November twenty twenty three. I fully expect there to be, you know, some other interesting content with things that have been done over the past year. And I will reveal that there are at least a couple workshop topics that involve, really interesting use of AI for building tooling. And, because as of this recording, those discussions are not public yet. I'll I'll leave it at that. But I think you'll see some really interesting proposals there as well.

And notice that I never said the letters AI.

I I know. I'm I'm trying to be I'm I'm casting a broader net here. Right?

So Yeah.

Well, I mean, I personally like to differentiate between the broad term artificial intelligence and, generative AI in particular, which is predominantly what is being thrown around especially in the networking industry is like a copilot tool. And then, of course, AGI, artificial general intelligence, which, is obviously, there's overlap. They're related, but it is a separate thing. And, and and then, of course, differentiate differentiate between that entire world and then the actual models and algorithms that we use to solve very real problems with data, whether it's mining insight out of data, whether it's identifying correlation, identifying seasonality and trends, you know, sometimes very mundane activity and sometimes very sophisticated.

But I do like to differentiate among those things, so that we are speaking correctly and accurately with no marketecture involved whatsoever.

Now getting back to AutoCon though, one thing that I like about AutoCon is that it is not a one and done event. It's a recurring event. Right? This is the third one coming up. So that kind of creates an interesting dynamic of, maybe an AutoCon culture and and people getting to know each other having met, perhaps at an AutoCon itself. You know what I mean?

So one other interesting aspect that just comes with having a regular conference over time is that people are starting to know each other. We throw the word community around quite a bit.

Yeah. Exactly.

Now there is real community developing through real people that are interested in talking to each other and working with each other. Yeah. And I think that's part of how we how we got to that automation framework discussion with folks that just kinda naturally were talking with with each other and hit it off. We all know the hallway track is important and the ability to just have conversations about things and go sit, grab a coffee, grab a beer, whatever your your your beverage choices and, sit through and talk about things.

And people rubbing elbows and getting to know each other a little bit, leads to the, hey. Have you thought about this? And, like, you know, yeah. I have.

Here's a way we could start tackling this. So as NAF matures and our our constituency has more time to get to know each other I wanted to use the word congeal, but that's just gross. Yeah.

And I just used it, didn't I? Never mind. Don't edit that out. That'll be entertainment value.

It's staying in.

Yeah. Folks folks are getting to know each other and getting a little more comfortable with working with each other. And I think I think with every next conference, we're gonna have more of that each time. That's been really interesting for me to watch.

I'm I'm very fluent and comfortable with the concept of community in other other areas of life. And, I've never seen it come together like this in the tech world. Doesn't mean it hasn't in other forums. I'm sure that it has.

Yeah. But it's been personally impactful for me.

Yeah. I agree.

And considering that so many of us in this industry work from home and, we lack some of that interaction, there's only so much you can have as far as interaction with other humans via Slack Yep.

And and Zoom calls. And it's it's useful, but, to have this opportunity to connect with other engineers that aren't necessarily on your team and you're working on a specific project for work, it's pretty awesome. I agree with you, Scott. That I think is also one of the biggest draws for me, to what you're doing.

But there is another community that I wanted to address with you. Sure. I did see that you are now partnering with the USNUA, that NAF is partnering with the USNUA. I don't know exactly what you guys are doing, though. All I know is that little bit. So can you explain a little bit what's going on?

Happy to. Well, you know, full disclosure, you know, both you and I are involved in our own local US anyway, NUGS, network user groups. Yeah. You know, you're doing a great job in upstate New York, and I'm trying to get things moving in Virginia along with others too.

These aren't solo efforts by any stretch. But, USNUA just does an excellent job of those local opportunities for people to gather and geek out on networking and usually in a brewery. Not always, but usually. Mhmm.

We found some real affinity with USNUA, from the NAF perspective. And we said, you know, we're trying to do these larger, lower frequency meetups, you know, conferences, and USNUA does work on the the smaller, more local, what would it look like to have some kind of cooperation? Mhmm.

So they have they have, stepped up and are going to sponsor the Thursday evening AutoCon 2 social event.

Oh, wow. Awesome.

So NUG at NAF, I think, is one of the taglines they're using. And, you can go to USNUA dot com and see their little advertisement on that.

They have promised a very interesting event.

There'll be a debate. Go to go to their website to see what the debate topic will be. And, you know, they're managing all the sponsorships that are gonna be contributing to, you know, helping cover the cost for that. So, that's been, a super fun addition to, you know, just Chris and I, you know, working all the angles here. There's also another partnership I wanna point out, and that's with Packet Pushers.

Packet Pushers is our exclusive media partner, and they've been doing an incredible job of getting the word out. And I think in Amsterdam, you know, Ethan Banks, I I have a new nickname for him, and it's real time real time Ethan.

After every session Nice.

He had a post on LinkedIn within minutes, the close of every session. And, they'll be they'll be there at AutoCon too.

They'll they'll roam the halls. They wanna talk to people. So if you if you come, don't be shy. They wanna talk to people and get all sorts of different perspectives.

And who knows if it's if it's interesting enough, it might, it might make something that gets broader distribution. Yeah. Yeah. But but that's the that's the partner landscape between USNUA and Packet Pushers.

I I just also wanna give a shout out to all our sponsors. You know, I it's too long a list. I won't go through the the list here. But, these things don't happen without, vendor and technology supplier support.

We're very, very appreciative of of all the help that, vendors are doing through sponsorships.

Yeah. For sure. And, this is an audio, podcast, so you can't see my shirt, but I am wearing a New Hampshire NUG, n h nug t shirt today, which is the nug that Ethan, leads. Well, Ethan and and Chris Reid. So Ethan Banks and Chris Reid co lead that.

If I had gotten the memo, I would have worn my new Vermont NUG shirt, which I picked up last week after attending my first Vermont Vermont up in Burlington.

Yeah.

So, it was it was beautiful. Glad I got a chance to go.

Yeah. I I am glad you did too. It's a beautiful area, and I love the work that AJ is doing up there.

So I I will say that, you know, having worked for VARs for many years, there there tends to be you you you work by yourself a lot.

Very infrequently did I ever interact with coworkers. I would with customers from time to time. Sure. But very often, you know, you're alone in a data center at a crash cart, in the hot aisle or the cold aisle depending on what you're plugging into. Right? And, and you can do that for days, weeks, months on end without much interaction with any sort of, colleagues.

And so, having this new community that you're developing and growing, I think, is very, very valuable not only to answer those questions and to help folks learn, but just to connect with other like minded people in our industry, you know. Not just like minded, but also the the diversity of ideas within our industry. That's valuable as well.

So I really appreciate that about what, what you're doing with NAF and with with what NAF is doing alongside these other communities now together.

Definitely agree. There's there's a joke in here about BGP confederations, and I'm not kidding.

I mean, you're we we're we're connected. We're passing packets with each other. You know, we can do one thing in our our AS. You can do another thing in your AS, but we can still peer, and we can still exchange information.

Oh, yeah. Absolutely.

Now we can go with that extended metaphor all day and talk about prefix filtering and stuff all day.

Absolutely.

Right.

So so for folks that are attending AutoCon 2 coming up or thinking about attending AutoCon 2, what should they expect as far as the technical level of this particular conference?

Now we've been talking a lot about thought leader kinda level stuff as far as answering that question, why has network automation not really progressed in the industry as far as we thought it would by now?

Or will it be, a lot more technical in nature as far as, speakers and presentations getting into the weeds of tools and, methods and methodologies and workflows and that sort of thing. Now I guess as I'm saying this and asking you this question, I'm thinking about the fact that you have two days of workshops that come before the main conference. So maybe it's a healthy mix of both. Nevertheless, I wanna know from you, what can folks expect from AutoCon 2 this coming fall?

So for the workshops, almost every workshop is gonna have a hands on component. So it's very, very focused on doing you know, we're making sure the network infrastructure and Wi Fi access is rock solid.

So so you're gonna walk away with practical skills and having done something that hopefully you haven't done before from a configuration perspective or new tools that you've never used, from the workshops without question.

All the all the sessions almost have each has an applied aspect to them.

The the thing you have to worry about in a, you know, presentation to a room of five hundred people is if you wanna go up there and show CLI commands or consoles live on the screen, it's hard to read. And, you know, there are more people in the room like me with older eyes that, may have a hard time, you know, reading those things. Things. So when you say technical content from the presentations, I would say, yes. Absolutely.

But it's not always in the form of, you know, configurations or details of Python script or so forth. And if anybody wants to take a look, you can go to, the network automation forum YouTube channel. Just, you know, search for it. You'll find it without problem. And you'll see every session from AutoCon zero and AutoCon one, and you can get a very clear idea of the nature of of those presentations.

Awesome. Okay. So unless you have any other updates about AutoCon 2 specifically that folks should be aware of, I think what I'll do is wrap it up here. And, Scott, thank you so much for joining me today.

I really appreciate it. And, really excited about AutoCon 2 coming up in, November, but also for all of the stuff that's happening with NAF and partnerships with other organizations, of course, and the work that you're doing. So, thanks very much for joining today. Now, if folks do have a question for you, about NAF, about AutoCon 2, about automation.

Where can they find you online? How can they contact you?

Hit me on LinkedIn. That's the that's the best way to do it. And let me just echo, you know so thank you for your kind comments and enthusiasm.

I will play it right back at you. I can't tell you how excited I am for November.

Don't get me wrong. This is hard work. There's a lot that goes on behind the scenes to pull this together, but it's it's work that is just super fulfilling to see, you know, what we're able to do here by letting folks come together. You know, we're not doing anything magic.

We're just basically providing a place for people to come and talk and share ideas, and that's that's been that's the magic in the people coming together and sharing what they're doing. So really, really hope you can make it to AutoCon 2. Don't don't delay. Get your tickets soon. Thanks, Phil.

Great. You got it. And you can find me still on Twitter, network_phil. You can find me on LinkedIn as well, very active there.

And, you can find my blog networkphil.com, though I do quite a bit of writing these days on the Kentik blog. Now if you have an idea for an episode or you'd like to be on the guest, guest, or you'd like to be a guest on Telemetry Now, please reach out at telemetrynow at Kentik dot com. So for now, thanks so much for listening. Bye bye.