As network automation matures, a new breed of hybrid professionals with network engineering and software development skills is emerging. But for enterprises, landing these IT pros isn’t about finding unicorns. It’s about evolving existing teams and changing how networks are operated.
As network automation evolves beyond scripts to a more sophisticated approach to network operations, a new skill set and role are emerging across enterprise environments: NetDevOps.
NetDevOps can mean different things across organizations, but generally, it is about automating networks in ways that align with DevOps principles. Those principles include continuous improvement (CI), continuous deployment (CD), and other application development approaches applied to network infrastructure. In more advanced environments, organizations start to treat networks as applications, making them more programmatic so that services can be accessed without deep networking know-how.
Fueling these advances are the IT professionals who are cultivating their own automation expertise.
“It’s usually network engineers who teach themselves coding as they get more sophisticated,” says Shamus McGillicuddy, research director for network management at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA). “They evolve into NetDevOps architects.”
The urgency for these specific skills is growing, according to a report from Broadcom on the state of network operations. Broadcom’s data shows that 95% of organizations indicated they had visibility gaps, 37% cited a lack of modern networking expertise, and 27% said their automation maturity is stuck.
“Network teams are being asked to support AI and multi-cloud initiatives without the visibility or staffing required to do it confidently,” says Jeremy Rossbach, chief technical evangelist and lead product marketing manager at Broadcom. “The next generation of network leadership will be rooted in NetDevOps—engineers and architects who understand automation frameworks, observability pipelines, cloud networking, and AI-enhanced triage.”
What NetDevOps looks like
Most enterprises begin their NetDevOps journey modestly by automating a limited set of repetitive, lower-level tasks.
Nearly 70% of enterprises pursuing infrastructure automation start with task-level scripting, rather than end-to-end automation, according to theCUBE Research’s AppDev Done Right Summit. This can include using tools such as Ansible or Python scripts to standardize device provisioning, configuration changes, or other routine changes. Then, more mature teams adopt Git for version control, define golden configurations, and apply basic validation before and after changes, explains Bob Laliberte, principal analyst at SiliconANGLE and theCUBE.
A smaller group of enterprises extends automation efforts into complete CI/CD-style workflows with consistent testing, staged deployments, and automated verification, Laliberte adds. This capability is present in less than 25% of enterprises today, according to theCUBE, and it is typically focused on specific domains such as data center fabric or cloud networking.
NetDevOps usually exists with the network organization as a dedicated automation or platform subgroup, and more than 60% of enterprises anchor NetDevOps initiatives within traditional infrastructure teams rather than application or platform engineering groups, according to Laliberte.
“In larger enterprises, NetDevOps capabilities are increasingly centralized within shared infrastructure or platform teams that provide tooling, pipelines, and guardrails across compute, storage, and networking,” Laliberte says. “In more advanced or cloud-native environments, network specialists may be embedded within application, site reliability engineering (SRE), or platform teams, particularly where networking directly impacts application performance.”
Transforming work
At its core, NetDevOps isn’t just about changing titles for network engineers. It is about changing workflows, behaviors, and operating models across network operations.
The pressure to transform network operations and the skills needed to optimize NetOps is driven by today’s operational realities. For instance, the number of network devices to be managed continues to climb while the number of engineers on staff stays flat or shrinks.
“Long-term success depends on making automated, code-driven workflows the default for designing, reviewing, and deploying network changes,” Laliberte says. “When NetDevOps becomes isolated to a small group of specialists, organizations often create bottlenecks and limit broader transformation.”
For Greg Botts, a senior network engineer who has spent more than 18 years with Intel, moving the organization from manual workflows to a data-driven automation model built for resilience and scale was necessary. The pressure to automate increased as Intel’s network footprint grew and staffing levels didn’t keep pace. Manual configuration just couldn’t scale.
“In 2019, we had 20 network engineers managing just over 3,000 devices. By 2025, it was 13 engineers managing 5,500 devices,” Botts explains. “That scale and that shift—you have to automate to keep up. That’s too many devices to copy and paste configs. You have to keep the network robust; you have to automate.” (Read more about Intel’s network automation efforts: ‘Too many devices to copy-paste configs. Automate or die’)
For individual engineers, transitioning into NetDevOps shifts daily work away from manual device configuration and toward designing, reviewing, and validating changes through code and automation pipelines. According to theCUBE Research, high-performing infrastructure teams spend more than 40% more time on design, testing, and verification activities than on reactive troubleshooting.
The data problem
Successful NetDevOps implementations can come down to data. Organizations that have matured their automation practices emphasize the principle: Start with the data, and everything else follows.
“Start with your data, and everything falls out of that,” Botts says. “Network config is a byproduct of the data.”
This represents a shift in thinking. Instead of maintaining documentation to reflect what’s in the operating environment, organizations make changes in the data first, then push those changes to the network through automation.
TheCUBE Research shows that organizations with a clearly defined source of truth are nearly three times more likely to achieve consistent automation outcomes. Yet according to EMA’s McGillicuddy, most enterprises still struggle with this foundational step.
“A lot of times, the network source of truth is undermined by data quality,” he says. “All the data they need to do some sort of workflow is scattered and is of dubious quality.”
Many organizations spend a year or two just establishing their network source of truth: going through all their sites, documenting what’s there, how it’s configured, what’s connected physically, and identifying what’s missing. Information that lives in 10 silos needs consolidation into a unified system with API access.
“Network source of truth—getting better data, where is it, and is it good—that’s the beginning of a mature automation and NetDevOps strategy,” McGillicuddy says.
The challenge extends beyond just data collection. Organizations need to generate 100% of their network configurations from that authoritative source. When enterprises compare their intended configurations against what’s actually running on devices, many are surprised by the amount of configuration drift, even in environments where most configs are automated. “It’s about controlling the drift,” Intel’s Botts says.
NetDevOps skills: Build, don’t buy
Enterprise organizations don’t necessarily have to find the rare “unicorn” who has both network engineering and application development training and skills.
TheCUBE Research shows that enterprises prioritizing internal upskilling outperform those relying primarily on net-new hires in both automation success and operational stability, according to Laliberte. Most organizations pursue a hybrid approach: combining upskilling of existing network engineers with selectively hiring individuals who have software or DevOps backgrounds.
“Enterprises that succeed tend to invest heavily in training experienced network engineers while bringing in fewer DevOps-oriented hires to improve tooling, pipelines, and automation quality,” he says. “Teams that rely too heavily on software engineers without deep networking knowledge often struggle to operationalize automation in real-world production environments.”
Network engineers don’t necessarily need to become expert programmers. Today’s network automation platforms with intuitive UIs and accessible APIs lower the barrier to participation, according to McGillicuddy. Engineers who once spent their time manually configuring devices can learn to write automation jobs.
“To the developer, the network is abstracted,” McGillicuddy explains. “To the network engineer, the development is abstracted.”
The skill requirements for NetDevOps roles are evolving rapidly. Laliberte says that NetDevOps positions increasingly require fluency with Git-based workflows, structured data formats like YAML and JSON, automation tools such as Ansible and Python, and a working understanding of APIs.
Familiarity with testing and validation concepts, as well as streaming telemetry and observability, is also becoming essential. TheCUBE Research shows that teams lacking automated validation are more than twice as likely to experience configuration-related outages.
Traditional networking expertise remains essential, particularly in routing protocols, failure-domain design, congestion management, segmentation, and security fundamentals. “NetDevOps enhances networking expertise rather than replacing it,” Laliberte emphasizes.
NetDevOps in 2026
NetDevOps adoption is still emerging across the industry. According to EMA’s McGillicuddy, it’s very grassroots and community-oriented, not driven by products.
“There aren’t vendors that sell products that take you into that NetDevOps world,” he says. “But it has become very mature in a small number of companies that have been doing it for three or four years and are pretty mature in their approach.”
AI will play a growing role in NetDevOps, but not in the expected ways. With network data centralized and accessible, teams can use natural language to query information, analyze configurations, and identify optimization opportunities. The focus with AI is on augmentation rather than replacement. “I think AI is going to enable us to uplevel our workforce,” Intel’s Botts says. “It’s not going to take these jobs away; it’s going to help us do our jobs better.”
The transition to NetDevOps is an opportunity for network engineers worried about their role in this era of AI. The demand won’t be for rare unicorns who can do everything; it will be for professionals willing to expand their skills incrementally, embrace new tools and workflows, and think about networks as code and data rather than CLI commands. Organizations that succeed with NetDevOps will start with data quality, focus on incremental wins, build internal capabilities (rather than waiting for perfect, unicorn hires), and emphasize standardization and validation.
There’s no turning back, Broadcom’s Rossbach says.
“2026 is the year where the shift becomes permanent: Network operations will be defined not by hardware tasks, but by data, automation, and intelligence.”
