AutoCon4 and NautoCon@AutoCon are in the books. It was quite the day, and I have to say that it ranks among my best days of the year in Network Automation — right up there with being able to meet up with the Network to Code team earlier in the year. It was great to see many friends from across the community. Hopefully we’ll be able to keep the conversation going in Slack and maintain the momentum.
As the AI movement continues to expand its reach into the networking space, the need for an appropriate source of truth for network data becomes more critical than ever. What I have been seeing so far in the industry for networking and AI has been a lot of working on the individual devices one by one. But when looking at leveraging AI for the network, I believe it is best to look at the network as a whole. And that is where the Source of Truth data being stored in Nautobot is going to provide the right information about the network and the relationships between pieces of information - AI thrives on context, and relationships provide that context for more accurate insights and actions.
The year 2024 will showcase the remarkable evolution and contributions of AI. One prominent application of AI lies in its ability to streamline the coding process. In this post I demonstrate how to utilize the Continue VS Code plugin as a viable alternative to the GitHub Copilot system. This will allow you to have choice on the AI back end or in this scenario, the capability to self host the AI system using Ollama.