NANOG 98
26 picks from the NANOG 98 program: 16 core · 7 adjacent · 3 wildcard.
Operator#
AutoCon 5 (Munich) — Operator Program
AutoCon 5 is a network-automation operator conference, so nothing here touches optics, RDMA/lossless fabrics, eBPF/Cilium, or FIDO/SPIFFE directly. The value for this PM is in the physical-fabric and WAN automation war stories (EVPN/VXLAN, SRv6 backbones, an 800G pan-European migration), one genuinely strong network-security automation case, and the agentic-AI governance debate that dominated the leadership track. Picks below are grouped accordingly.
NANOG 97
18 picks from the NANOG 97 program: 9 core · 6 adjacent · 3 wildcard.
NANOG 96
20 picks from the NANOG 96 program: 11 core · 5 adjacent · 4 wildcard.
AutoCon 4 (Austin) — Operator
An operator-focused network automation program. Note up front: this cycle is heavy on automation practice, Day-2 operations, and the first wave of agentic-AI-in-production stories — lighter on the deep datapath/optics/identity material than a SIGCOMM or OSNA program, but the DC-fabric and WAN operator case studies below are directly on-target.
AutoCon 3 (Prague) — Operator
A network-automation operator conference. Little here is directly about DC fabrics or identity protocols, but a strong subset is: two unusually candid optical-transport automation stories, a BGP telemetry build, a large-scale datacenter Terraform migration, EVPN service migration at a global telco, and several security/identity-flavored automation sessions. The rest is a clear field-wide shift from "automate operations" toward "design-driven, durable-execution, trustworthy automation" — worth skimming for where the networking discipline is heading.
SREcon25 Americas
Program source is the expanded schedule (titles, speakers, and abstracts; no PDF/slide/recording links were present in the pasted program text, so no Links field is included below — every write-up is grounded in the abstract only). This cycle's program skews heavily toward observability tooling, incident-response process, and organizational/human-factors content, plus a large AI/ML-infrastructure-operations cluster (safe model rollout, ML training governance, AI-assisted ops) — none of which is core to the PM's stated interests. The pick count below is intentionally small: it reflects genuinely thin coverage of DC/WAN networking, cloud-native networking, network security, and identity this cycle, not aggressive filtering of a networking-heavy program.