The Day Two Problem: Examining Decades of Infrastructure Automation Evolution#

Yair Etziony, Engineering Manager at AMBOSS

• Why: A strategic/historical framing of why every generation of automation tooling (Puppet → Chef → Ansible → Terraform → Pulumi → Crossplane) hits the same post-deployment wall — directly relevant to how you position network lifecycle management versus one-shot provisioning.
• What: A historical analysis of the recurring Day-Two blind spots across tool generations: drift correction, decommissioning, mystery infrastructure, and the persistent disconnect between automation state and observability, argued from 30 years of systems experience (from abstract only).
• How: Comparative analysis across tooling generations — how each handles state management vs. distributed coordination, and what treating infrastructure as dynamic systems rather than static code would imply.
• Where applicable: General industry analysis, no specific stack; it's a perspective talk rather than a technique talk, so its value is in framing (especially the automation/observability separation argument, which network teams feel acutely) rather than actionable mechanics.