Uploaded February 2026 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
Abstract
Over the past decade, intent management in network automation has gone from simple config templates and one-off scripts, to storing “source data” in YAML, to adopting SoTs like NetBox — each step solving real pain while revealing new limits. Along the way, many of us learned the same lesson: storing data is necessary, but it’s not sufficient to make intent reliable, collaborative, and safe at scale. This talk shares the practical wins and the failure modes we kept hitting (brittle assumptions, drift, and intent that isn’t reviewable or reproducible). We’ll close by outlining what the next era of intent management needs to look like — and why the toolchain has to evolve again.
Damien Garros:
Damien is the co-founder and CEO of OpsMill, a company focused on building infrastructure automation tools, including Infrahub, a next generation Source of Truth.
Damien has been involved with the automation community for 10+ years as product owner and chief architect for infrastructure automation platforms with a specific focus on data management, mainly around Source of Truth and Telemetry. Damien was the main architect and core contributor to dozens of Open Source projects that are actively being used by many companies today Prior to OpsMill, Damien led the technical direction of Network to Code, where he was a founding member of the nautobot team and contributed multiple major features to Nautobot, including GraphQL.
nanog.org/events/nanog-96/content/5730
Abstract
Over the past decade, intent management in network automation has gone from simple config templates and one-off scripts, to storing “source data” in YAML, to adopting SoTs like NetBox — each step solving real pain while revealing new limits. Along the way, many of us learned the same lesson: storing data is necessary, but it’s not sufficient to make intent reliable, collaborative, and safe at scale. This talk shares the practical wins and the failure modes we kept hitting (brittle assumptions, drift, and intent that isn’t reviewable or reproducible). We’ll close by outlining what the next era of intent management needs to look like — and why the toolchain has to evolve again.
Damien Garros:
Damien is the co-founder and CEO of OpsMill, a company focused on building infrastructure automation tools, including Infrahub, a next generation Source of Truth.
Damien has been involved with the automation community for 10+ years as product owner and chief architect for infrastructure automation platforms with a specific focus on data management, mainly around Source of Truth and Telemetry. Damien was the main architect and core contributor to dozens of Open Source projects that are actively being used by many companies today Prior to OpsMill, Damien led the technical direction of Network to Code, where he was a founding member of the nautobot team and contributed multiple major features to Nautobot, including GraphQL.
nanog.org/events/nanog-96/content/5730
