About Us > John Herbert

John Herbert

John has worked in the networking industry for over 20 years, and obtained his CCIE Routing & Switching in early 2001. A network engineer by day, he has consulted in the UK and USA for internet and mobile service providers, financial, retail, and other enterprise customers, designing, supporting, and troubleshooting networks of all sizes and types. He now works in the enterprise space, enjoying knowing where he’ll be located every week and that he’ll be home for dinner. John blogs at http://movingpackets.net/ where he shares his thoughts and experiences with automation, scripting, best practices, commonly needed solutions, technical challenges, and whatever else interests him in the networking and technology arena.

Posts Featuring John Herbert

Why Your Infrastructure Sucks For Automation

Having convinced myself in previous posts that my automation projects will never be finished and that I will forever be supporting 101 different device connection paradigms, I thought that in…

All I Want For Christmas Is … RESTCONF?

As somebody not lucky enough to have a nice clicky interface with which to manage and automate all my equipment, I have to develop my own tools to do so.…

Automating the Automators

I’ve heard repeatedly from people in this industry that what we need is a single interface to our infrastructure. For status monitoring, perhaps that’s best represented by the ubiquitous “Single…

Silo-Busting and Dream-Dashing; More Fun With Automation

With the popularity of Agile methodologies and the ubiquity of people claiming they were embracing NetOps/DevOps, I could swear we were supposed to have adopted a new silo-busting software-defined paradigm…

Automation Paralysis: Why We Get Stuck Automating The Small Stuff

Despite all the talk of all our jobs being replaced by automation, my experience is that the majority of enterprises are still very much employing engineers to design, build, and…

Where Is Your Configuration Source of Truth?

Ask a good server engineer where their server configuration is defined and the answer will likely be something similar to In my Puppet manifests. Ask a network administrator the same thing about…

Configuring and Monitoring the Next Gen Network

In Intent-Based Networking – A Must for SDN, an article published on this site, Faisal Khan makes the very valid point that “SDN is about making networking more flexible and agile through programming…

The Five Commandments of Tomorrow’s Network

Recently, I’ve been giving some thought  to the roadblocks I discover when I attempt network automation and orchestration, and how those roadblocks affect the software-defined data center idea as a whole. As a result,…

Looking Backward to Look Forward

“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past” -unspecified “wise men” quoted by Niccolò Machiavelli With so many articles out there telling me how SDN will change the…