In today’s fast-paced and dynamic IT landscape, the convergence of development and operations has given rise to DevOps, a methodology that aims to enhance quality and agility by eliminating handoffs between teams. However, when it comes to large-scale network changes, traditional methods are no longer considered best practice. Instead, small, automated changes with frequent testing have become the preferred approach for rapid service delivery. This is where NetDevOps, a combination of network operations and DevOps practices, steps in to revolutionize network automation. By leveraging automation to monitor and adjust interactions between applications and network environments, NetDevOps streamlines network management, configuration changes, and more, providing five compelling reasons to embrace this transformative approach to network automation.
To eliminate handoffs between dev and ops teams and accelerate code to production, DevOps came to fruition to improve quality and agility. As with development, large-scale network change is risky and therefore, looked at as not best practice today. Small and automated changes and testing on a frequent schedule are the accepted practice for rapid service delivery; however, they must be automated to maximize efficiency. Automation also helps to dynamically monitor, adjust, and understand the interaction between the applications and the network environment.
NetOps is now adopting DevOps practices for network management configuration changes for several reasons. According to Gartner:
The issue is that NetOps is not managing modern network infrastructures using Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methods, but rather with manual and dated processes associated with traditional monolithic environments. This makes network infrastructure provisioning and operational changes slow and more error-prone when fast deployment of new services and applications is required. Due to these factors, as well as others, IT needed to find a way to apply DevOps practices to application development and deployment processes with NetDevOps automation. NetOps needs to understand every application’s unique infrastructure needs and then program the creation of networking resources on demand for scalability. Ansible and Terraform orchestration tools were adopted over the past decade and became mainstream for automating network configuration and orchestration as a result of the increase in cloud applications.
However, NetOps was still siloed from DevOps teams and dependent on developers to execute projects even as they began the adoption of application and network performance monitoring tools to add more visibility. The introduction of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) increased network programmability for applications. This brought on the NetDevOps cultural shift with network automation that is occurring now.
Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
Infrastructure as code is a DevOps concept for managing and provisioning infrastructure with automation for more repeatability in operations for network administration and management. This enables quicker changes and lowers risk in change cycles with a better understanding of good and known states and configurations. This allows IT to quickly deploy new systems and applications without breaking existing configurations. NetOps can leverage IaC now without slowing application engineers or the line of business. What’s more, IaC tools can provide a single source of truth by codifying network infrastructure into a set of documented configuration, design, security, and quality baselines that serve as the foundation for network automation.
Programmatic No-Code Automation
To automate network management, IaC leverages no-code and low-code automation and JSON and API programmability to streamline network workflows, including change management. No-code advancements have adopted Intent-Based Networking (IBN) concepts to automate CLI commands and reduce the need for Python and other coding projects. These advancements have shown that existing manual NetOps processes can be automated through understanding and codifying the network in its optimal or original design state as intents. Through the automation of intents, all aspects of the network can be continuously measured, tested, monitored, and assessed for optimal service and application delivery. The idea of network automation in NetDevOps brings NetOps processes in line with the production process and is commonly called “shifting left.” The idea is to streamline network operations processes to create a continuum of application delivery.
Reducing risk in application management while streamlining performance and delivery, requires a cultural shift in operations to embrace the goals and reap the benefits of automation.
Automate Change Management Workflows
One of the common goals of NetDevOps is bringing new services and offerings rapidly to market. As operational teams work together to advance this goal through NetDevOps, they can begin to benefit from more streamlined workflows including change management. Through network automation, change can become predictable, protected, and defendable. Through understanding of the network’s state, condition, topology, and performance, automation can build in validation network checks to ensure application flows are preserved and maintained across the network.
Repeatable Automation
Businesses need to craft a more intelligent, repeatable, and scalable operational approach, tightly aligned with the needs of the business. No-code intent-based network automation addresses this by improving service availability while significantly reducing business risk, operational costs, outages, and escalations. Democratizing existing subject matter expertise in NetOps along with a live digital twin of the entire hybrid network makes it easier to quickly adopt and benefit from automation. Platforms can also capture troubleshooting steps and make those resolutions repeatable and sharable across any organization without coding or developers.
Scalability and Agility
Developer-dependent, script-heavy approaches are no longer agile enough to scale with business needs. Automation scales network operations much more efficiently by leveraging programmable replication of intents. Looking at automation as scalable units in a modular system is a more logical way to structure operations needs for scale. This can be achieved readily by building template-based automation units and replicating them on demand across all devices that meet specific criteria in any hybrid multi-vendor network.