Network Operations Automation at DE-CIX#

Lucas Immanuel Nickel · Network Operations Engineer — DE-CIX

• Why: One of the few talks treating network automation itself as production infrastructure with SRE discipline — reliable delivery, observability, safe failure — at an interconnection platform whose fabric is the product.
• What: DE-CIX (3,700+ connected networks, 100+ routers, hundreds of circuits) runs 15+ production web services, 20+ cron jobs and 500+ executions/day from one shared library. Two shipped patterns: a gNMIc config-generation job driven from Zabbix + NetBox, and a geospatial network view service; both deploy via GitOps in under 10 minutes.
• How: All workloads (cron jobs and web services) run in Kubernetes behind a single standardized CI/CD path (Kaniko → Harbor → Helm → K8s, Renovate for deps). The gNMIc generator turns Zabbix host/proxy and NetBox device data into proxy configs exposing device telemetry as Prometheus metrics. "Geo" correlates NetBox + Zabbix into a live geographic view, inferring relationships from imperfect data and preferring "incomplete but honest output" over silent success. 1 in 3 deploys is rejected before production — failure moved deliberately left.
• Where applicable: The GitOps delivery and defensive-automation patterns are broadly applicable; the scale and IXP workflows (route servers, FPU fiber switching) are DE-CIX-specific. The Kubernetes investment assumes you already run a container platform for network tooling.