Mark Robert Coleman – Keeping the Network Honest: Design Models, Drift, and Reconciliation
Mark Coleman is co-founder and Chief Product Officer of NetBox Labs, the company behind NetBox, the widely used open-source network source of truth. He works across product strategy and technical architecture, focused on how operators model their networks and turn that model into reliable, automated change. He has spoken on automation topics at events around the world.
At BalticNOG 2026, Mark will bring this work to the stage with his talk, “Keeping the Network Honest: Design Models, Drift, and Reconciliation.”
What Design-Driven Automation Actually Means
Design-driven automation treats a network’s design, its topology, roles, relationships, and constraints, as an explicit model that exists independently of any device’s running configuration. That model becomes the thing operators reason about: the source of intent that configuration, validation, and change all refer back to.
Mark’s talk looks at what this means once you’re running a real network, not sketching one on a whiteboard.
The Lifecycle: Intent, Configuration, and Drift
Mark will walk through the full lifecycle: expressing intent as a design, turning that design into configuration, and keeping the two in agreement as the network drifts, as tickets land, and as people make changes out-of-band.
He will dig into how drift gets detected and interpreted, why reconciliation is harder than simply pushing configuration, and how a design model changes the way operators handle refactoring and unplanned change.
Why This Matters for the Next Wave of Automation
The same property that makes design-driven automation work for humans, an explicit statement of intent to check reality against, is what keeps the next wave of automation honest, whether that next step is a script or something more advanced. Mark will touch on this, but the focus stays on the mechanics operators deal with today.
Grounded in Real Systems
Mark will ground these concepts in real declarative provisioning systems, including open-source NetBox, using them as concrete examples of where design-driven approaches pay off and where they still struggle in production.
The talk is built for network engineers and operators, not just automation specialists. No prior familiarity with any specific tooling is assumed. While examples are drawn from NetBox, the session is about the underlying pattern: modeling intent, detecting drift, and reconciling the two. The final section gives a practical framing for introducing AI-assisted change safely on top of a design model.
Why You Shouldn’t Miss This Talk
If you’ve ever dealt with a network that quietly drifted from what it was supposed to be, this talk names that problem and gives you a framework for thinking about it. You’ll leave with a clear mental model of design-driven automation, a realistic view of the reconciliation problem, and a sharper sense of where these approaches earn their place in day-to-day operations.
đź“… When: 23-24 September 2026
đź“Ť Where: BalticNOG 2026, Riga, Latvia
đź”— Don’t miss BalticNOG! Register today: https://balticnog.org/tickets/
