HN838: Meet Mr. Packets – Building Your Own Agentic AI Team Member

Ethan Banks (0:00)

Welcome to Happy Networking, I'm Ethan Banks, and with me today is Hank Preston. You're like, where's Drew? Well, Drew Connery did not make today's trip, because Hank and I, you might notice from the background, we're at Cisco Live.

And Hank and I were chatting, oh gosh, Hank, I don't know, just a week or so, it wasn't long ago. But you have built something called Mr. Packets. It's not that you were being called Mr. Packets, it's not that you wish to be known as Mr. Packets.

Hank Preston (0:24)

You know, I've been known as worse, but Mr. Packets wouldn't be the worst thing to be known as. No, I built Mr. Packets as my own exploration to what agentic AI might mean for network engineers and how they can be teammates in what we're working on.

Ethan Banks (0:38)

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So your background before we get to that part of it about what you've built with Mr. Packets, you're a network automation nerd. You're like a DevNet guy and all that. Talk about that for a minute.

Hank Preston (1:21)

Yeah. So I work at Cisco.

These days, I'm in Learn with Cisco, our certification arm. But I spent many years in DevNet, where my focus specifically was, I actually went to the DevNet leadership and I said, okay, network engineers are confused about what automation means, what it means for their jobs, how do they adopt this, what does it go after? And I'm like, I think I can help. And so I went into DevNet specifically to try to define what that meant, understand what it is, and help network engineers make that transition into programmability and APIs and DevOps.

Ethan Banks (1:50)

Transition. It's more of like adding these skills when those of us that were network engineers used to the command line. We haven't spent a lot of time coding or programming, but needing to add those to the skill set.

Hank Preston (2:01)

Well, it's been an interesting evolution to go through. For a while, I was firmly of the belief that every network engineer was going to need to learn and become and add those skills. Like every engineer was going to be part and parcel, we needed to have those capabilities.

As I went through it and learned it myself, I recognized that that wasn't necessarily completely true.

Yes, I think every network engineer needed to know what the power of programmability and automation was. But new focus, new specialists in the automation space started to grow. Where you had a network engineer who, you got network engineers that I'm a data center engineer. I want to build giant data center fabrics for virtualization or cloud. And then you might have a network engineer that says, I'm a service provider, right? Working collaboration. And now we have a new specialist. I'm a network engineer and I focus on automation, programmability, how to take things and make them repeatable and use templates. So for me, that more became its own specialized skill. So we've got this like, I refer to as a Venn diagram overlap. If you're purely a network engineer focused on design, engineering, and operations, you need to know a little bit about automation and programmability. If you're going to be an automation, you're going to focus on automation, you need to know a little bit about design and operations and engineering so that you can talk to each other. But I've come to the conclusion that not in every network engineer has to be an automation expert. Right? There is a difference.

Ethan Banks (3:16)

Okay.

That's an interesting conclusion that you've come to. Because two years ago, this was not the conversation we were having, two, three, four years ago. The conversation was more like, you need to become a program, you got to understand what APIs are, everything's going to be done in Python, and if not that, then you're going to be doing infrastructure as code, and you're going to need to know state and Ansible, and these kind of tools are going to be the way we interact with networks. But it sounds like there's a distinction you're making between what you need to know and what you... I don't know how to put this.