Well written. But some harsh words in there for the new DevOps, microservices nirvana :-) ++ anyway!

Kidding aside, I don't think it's all that bad ... although 20+ years as a network engineer, I've seen a lot of wheels re-invented and lots of the Docker, Kubernetes, microservices ecosystems re-invents a lot - like DNS and overlay networking. I'm all for change if it makes things better, but change for change's sake - I (and I think the collective "we") can do without.

I always lament the biggest advancement in network automation over the past 20 years is moving from screen-scraping Telnet with Perl to screen-scraping SSH with Python. Not that I'm down on Ansible, it provides way more than my little Perl script (better templating, more device support, etc.) but the software abstraction band-aid did not solve the underlying problem - network devices do not have a common language. Maybe the Ansible development effort would have been time better spent in pushing forward NETCONF or similar open standards for network device data model abstraction instead of interface abstraction.