The Power of Network Automation: A Cisco Book Sprint

Network automation is crucial for efficiency and scalability. In order to help customers to leverage the potential of network automation, a group of nine Cisco professionals came together in a Book Sprint. They created a guide book titled “The Power of Network Automation – Using Cisco DNA Center.” Over the course of five days, this group of engineers and architects convened at the Cisco Campus in San Jose. Facilitated, illustrated, copy-edited, and layouted by the Book Sprints team, this collaborative effort resulted in a comprehensive 180-page guide. It was timed for release during Cisco Live in June 2023 in Las Vegas. 

From clustering sticky notes on the first day to a fully drafted, edited, and illustrated guide book on the fifth day.

Bringing Together Cisco’s Network Automation Specialists

The success of a Book Sprint hinges on the collaboration and expertise of its participants. For “The Power of Network Automation – Using Cisco DNA Center,” Cisco’s Engineering Product Manager Shai Silberman assembled a diverse team. It comprised engineers and architects from various domains, including sales, marketing, and product management. This diversity of backgrounds ensured a comprehensive treatment of the subject matter, offering insights to technical decision-makers and architects alike. The resulting guides covers concepts, use cases, and best practices to get started, with the goal of empowering readers to understand network automation and to effectively utilize Cisco DNA Center.

The introduction gives an overview of the book chapters:

This book primarily focuses on network automation capabilities using Cisco DNA Center. The book’s opening chapters provide a high-level overview of Cisco’s vision and strategy for transforming digital networks and the benefits of NetOps within the context of Cisco DNA Center. The following chapters provide more technical details into Cisco DNA Center’s network automation capabilities for NetOps, with product examples and real-world use cases followed by API capabilities for network automation. Finally, the closing chapters provide a journey map, recommendations, and additional resources and references.

The Book Sprints team facilitated the workflow, turned sketches into dozens of diagrams and illustrations, and copy-edited the content. They created print-ready PDFs and ePUBs. The guide “The Power of Network Automation – Using Cisco DNA Center” was released during Cisco Live 2023 in Las Vegas.