In recent years, we’ve seen a rapid expansion and distribution of networks across hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructure. If organizations stick to the traditional tools and methods for managing network operations, it will become prohibitively difficult to manage this distributed environment efficiently. As a result, organizations are adopting automation at scale—but they must ensure they can automate across every component of their network without prohibitive cost, training, or hiring.
To transform operations and adapt to modern network infrastructure, forward-looking organizations are adopting solutions like Itential that give networking teams access to a unified set of automation tools that take best practices from both NetOps and DevOps. That enables more efficient collaboration between these teams with a NetDevOps approach, improving processes on both sides. Modern business processes are increasingly reliant on both network resources and cloud resources, so making that collaboration as effective as possible is key.
At the most recent Networking Field Day (NFD 31) event, our CTO, Chris Wade, covered this topic in a presentation that detailed how to think about bridging the gap between these two teams to enable greater organizational efficiency. You can find the full presentation here, or keep reading to get an overview and some key takeaways.
Evolution of Network Automation Maturity Across the Industry
Historically, networking was somewhat disconnected from the rest of IT, existing in a silo of its own. As organizations automate their networks, however, they realize that’s not sustainable. To automate processes end-to-end across complex infrastructure, networking must be integrated with the rest of IT. So, as organizations mature in their automation efforts, they are required to further integrate NetOps with their DevOps ecosystem. Here’s a simple model of what automation evolution looks like:
Almost every network team is doing some kind of automation – no matter how big or how small. At a minimum, some individuals will write scripts to automate certain portions of their day-to-day job, even if the team does not have a unified approach. Over time, this can spread, and a team might start to take an ad hoc, scripts-based approach to automation. But without a larger strategy in place, automation is limited to saving effort and time for network engineers within a specific process. Things like pre-checks, post-checks, security processes, and change management/ticketing processes could still require manual inputs, limiting automation’s reach.
In a scripts-based approach, automation doesn’t scale well. An engineer might share a script with someone else on their team if they know what not to do with it. But they’re less likely to trust the idea of sharing a script with the entire IT organization.
A platform-based approach helps normalize, standardize, and scale automation so assets created by any engineer can be reused across the automation team. In some organizations and network teams, there is an overall automation plan, usually supported by a third-party automation platform and involving integrations between network automation and the organization’s network and IT systems. This allows change processes to be automated end-to-end, reducing manual network operations and accelerating service delivery overall.
The most advanced in the industry take it one step further. They’re aiming to deliver self-serve network automations via an integrated, organization-wide approach that leverages the powerful collaboration a NetDevOps strategy provides. End users have been trained to expect self-service and instant delivery due to public cloud providers, and it’s possible to deliver the same experience for enterprise network services.
New Infrastructure Means New Methods
If you’re finding the NetDevOps idea convincing, you may now wonder why the industry hasn’t moved in this direction already. However, it’s only recently that the technological conditions for NetDevOps have really solidified. Across the IT infrastructure landscape, tooling and approaches have expanded significantly in the last several years driven by new and evolving technologies that support programmability.
With all of this evolution comes greater automation support. Many of the systems NetOps and DevOps teams work with today have automation capabilities built in, and the standardization of API formats means modern systems can integrate with each other much more easily. These conditions help enable the NetDevOps strategy that is key to successful management of complex, distributed network infrastructure.
How Itential Enables NetDevOps Teams to Build, Test, & Deploy Automations
Itential’s unified tools for NetOps and DevOps take the best practices of both and put them together so there is a single way of operating, allowing both teams to leverage the best of the new NetDevOps model without asking for significant reskilling or swivel-chairing. The Itential Automation Platform integrates with all network and IT systems for easy automation using modular assets, helping network teams to implement a build, test, deploy cycle that mirrors software development. This makes automation more consistent and reliable while accelerating service delivery end-to-end.
API Integrations
The platform integrates with your network and IT systems by leveraging API standards to auto-generate integrations, in combination with hundreds of adapters published by Itential. This API-based integration ecosystem enables support for automations across all your systems — both NetOps and DevOps.
That’s crucial to end-to-end automation, since processes like ticket management, messaging, security changes, and testing can all be automated alongside a network change via several API integrations.
Automation Integrations
Automation resources and assets such as Python scripts or Terraform Plans can be onboarded and plugged in to API-based automation workflows, which enables teams to use what they’ve already built and share assets between NetOps and DevOps that previously didn’t scale.
Low-Code Orchestration
Orchestration of automated change processes enables teams to build truly end-to-end automations that touch both DevOps and NetOps systems without any friction.
CLI & API Config Validation
Network and IT infrastructure expanding and becoming more distributed could pose risks, since compliance would become more difficult to maintain manually. But leveraging automation with both API and CLI-based compliance capabilities built into the same platform makes it practical to manage compliance policies across a complex, hybrid environment.
Self-Serve Networking
The ability to both automate entire processes end-to-end and connect with external systems via API presents the possibility to deliver network services like cloud services, which is the big step in achieving seamless collaboration between NetOps and DevOps teams. If users can make network requests and see instant, automated delivery, then networking never slows down development, and if network engineers aren’t inundated with tickets and manual requests, they have time to continue building automations that generate real value.
At its core, that’s the promise Itential makes to our customers. Our SaaS-based solution provides the tools you need to transform your organization’s operations to adapt to modern networking infrastructure and achieve return on your network automation investment.
Learn more about NetDevOps and the future of networking from Itential’s CTO, Chris Wade, in this recording from this year’s Networking Field Day.
Tyler Lochan
Technical Content Specialist ‐ Itential
Tyler Lochan is a Technical Content Specialist at Itential. Tyler is a Georgia Tech grad who began his career as a technology consultant in financial services. He has a passion for bringing his technical expertise together with writing, and he focuses on creating content to support our customers as they navigate their network automation journeys.
