Intent-based networking (IBN) promises to deliver great efficiencies for application service delivery. This same intent-based philosophy can also be applied to IT operations, enabling the teams responsible for managing the daily onslaught of problems and investigations to improve service uptime, says Chris Villemez, senior technical marketing engineer, NetBrain.
Network Intent Hype and Reality
Over the past few years, we’ve seen many solutions within the IT industry attempt to leverage or deliver on the promise of intent-based networking (IBN). Some hardware vendors offer IBN approaches to manage and deliver services across their hardware. Others provide ways to abstract and automate policy-driven configurations across multi-vendor, multi-platform Frankenstein’s monsters of network infrastructures that are the norm today.
Really though, the ideas behind IBN methodologies all drive one objective – the need to do what Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) teams are already doing to deliver digital services to users, with the improved speed, efficiency, accuracy, and consistency needed to match today’s increasingly more complex and diverse networks.
Improving network operations with ideas learned from IBN methodologies is, therefore, a very appealing idea given continuously rising network complexities. COVID-19 has further accelerated infrastructure changes and shifts to remote work, creating increasing complexity and challenges for operations teams. Cisco’s 2020 Networking Trends ReportOpens a new window found that the average cost of a network outage is more than $400,000, and network engineers spend 70% of their time finding and diagnosing network issues. The good news is our industry is responding with new and clever tools to tackle the increasing demands placed on network operators.
Today’s intent-based solutions strive to fulfill this ever-growing and urgent need to deploy business services with greater speed, flexibility, security, and agility.Â
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Intent and Infrastructure
While there’s always some hype, the idea behind an intent-based networking approach to managing infrastructure is sound. Can these same approaches be applied to the full infrastructure lifecycle and day-to-day operations?Â
Infrastructure deployment is a combination of three things:
- Network device physical layout (topology)
- Network device features to obtain desired behavior outcomes (configuration)
- Verification of intended behavior (assurance)
You can’t have a network without the underpinnings of metal boxes made of silicon and copper with fiber optic cabling cobbled together to carry data from one area to another. The gear won’t do anything until we tell it to, using command-line or API methods to deploy configurations to each device. Lastly, without measurement, monitoring and reporting, how can we know with everything we’ve done that those devices and algorithms executed our intended actions?
Intent-based networking strives to solve this dilemma, taking the operationally complex structure of today’s network infrastructures and giving teams provisioning scalability, consistency in delivery, and ultimately the ability to directly map business objectives to outcomes the infrastructure can reliably deliver.Â
This helps network teams in the trenches keep the lights on every day.
Intent-Based Operations
While we may see IBN as being composed of automation plus infrastructure, for the day-to-day operations, intent-based operations, or IBO, equals automation plus data, specifically, infrastructure data.
To accomplish the lofty operational goal of increasing infrastructure autonomy throughout its life cycle, the IBO system would need to have two intertwined things:Â
- First, it must have access to network insights that are always up-to-date and contextual. Good insights require historic, baseline, and current information about how the network is behaving.
- Second, the automation system must be able to execute rapid scale diagnostic checks against those key aspects of the network that enable good performing applications — reachability, resiliency, performance, and security.Â
These combine to provide an intent-based operations approach that can perform proactive network assurance and catch network behaviors going awry before they become a bigger problem.Â
The Importance of Platform
From a software architecture perspective, achieving our desired functions provides some challenges. Putting this all together requires a flexible software platform that can be adapted to a multitude of use-cases and environments.
Starting with the need to consume and analyze comprehensive and varied data, an intent-based operations system must be able to sort and view these varied chunks of data and then assemble it relative to the contextual problems facing network operations teams each day.
But it’s more than a data repository needed here; a flexible automation engine needs to sit on top. A system that talks to different network vendor devices and platforms needs to be able to not just speak the language of the device but to track commonalities of data across these diverse devices that have many different OSs and ways of operating. For example, a BGP router being in an “established†state with another BGP router is an open standard concept and core function of BGP; yet, each vendor and device will report this “established†state differently. We need to be able to track such characteristics equally across a dynamic network landscape.
Lastly, the deployment also needs to be flexible. Beyond data acquisition and automation, the system requires abstracted means of searching for, tracking, and monitoring these infrastructure outcomes and building the diagnostic procedures. No-code mechanisms that implementers can use to parse interesting pieces of data within the sea of IT big data are key to the proper deployment of our desired intent-based operations.
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Benefits of Network Intent for Network Operations
The pieces of an intent-based operational architecture described here are scaled forms of what network operations teams do already with more manual processes:Â
- Collect and analyze dataÂ
- Diagnose and investigate the network, andÂ
- Monitor and measure to know it’s performing well.Â
Applying intent-based methodologies to this process flow greatly scales these efforts and magnifies their effectiveness at preventing problems without needing as much direct involvement from network operators.
To implement an intent-based operations strategy for network operations teams warrants a solution that can handle decoding infrastructure complexities to measure service-affecting things in an automated, repeatable way.
This intent-based system would proactively and continuously validate assurance, catch problems before they impact our services, and increase our time between failures.
When problems do strike, automated device-level intent validations help quickly isolate root cause and resolve problems, working to decrease time-to-repair for every network problem.
In the end, all our efforts within IT operations are made to increase service uptime. In learning from ongoing efforts to apply intent-based networking for service delivery, operations teams can apply a similar data-driven and purposeful approach to tackling the diagnosis and investigation of today’s complex hybrid network infrastructures.
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