The Recipe for Network Automation Success: A Federated Source of Truth

Summers in Atlanta are hot, really hot, and around this time as the days start to turn the corner into the Fall season, I look forward to the cooling temperatures, the changing of the leaves, and the arrival of one of my family’s most beloved traditions – the Thanksgiving dinner. This holiday dinner is prepared by my mom and dad and the meal is made up of at least 10 different dishes, the true southern way.

I’m sure you’re wondering what this has to do with a source of truth, but hear me out. My mom is the holder of all recipes, knower of all ingredients, and creator of all tasty dishes while dad is the searcher and acquirer of all ingredients needed for every recipe, and each role is critically important and absolutely required for a successful family dinner. While it may sound easy, searching and acquiring all of the individual ingredients is no simple task, because every ingredient is very specific and where you can find the ingredients is spread out across multiple stores. I’m sure in times past, a much simpler time, all of these ingredients could have been acquired from a single local grocery store, but today that’s no longer the case. Everything is spread out across town, but dad will willingly go to 5 or 6 different locations to gather all of the correct ingredients needed so that mom can successfully create another incredible feast for our extended family to enjoy.

Do you see what I’m getting at now? It’s an analogy that makes sense in the light of today’s complex network environment and the many systems that comprise sources of truth. In the past, it may have been feasible to have a single source of truth that could accurately describe your network inventory, IP addresses, configurations, etc. It was a simpler time – there were fewer network devices, there wasn’t a lot of variation, so it was easy to make sense of CLI and configurations, and you could keep track of the IP address utilization in a spreadsheet (or even in your head, but don’t tell anyone that).

Today’s environment is very different, the network is much bigger and comprised of devices and services from different vendors, with different management methods, and may have little in common with each other (outside of performing a network function), and for automation to work in this environment, it needs to occur across every network domain — data center, campus, SD-WAN, cloud, and across the diverse types of network devices and services —physical, virtual, or cloud-native. But before you can automate network changes across infrastructure, you have to gather the data needed to make the changes correctly, and that inevitably comes from multiple sources of truth.

Why You Need a Federated Source of Truth

Think about what goes into a typical network change in today’s complex and distributed environments. Does this look familiar?

To make a single network change, it takes multiple people, multiple teams, and multiple systems. When IP addresses are needed for a network change, they probably come from an IPAM system. When you deploy a new device, those details may come from a different inventory system. The state of one part of the network may come by directly querying a device, but the state of another part of the network may come from a network controller. All of these ingredients are important for an automation recipe, because when you have bad data in your automation, you will get bad results on the network.

Regardless of how many sources of truth may exist today, tomorrow, or in a decade from now, your network automation solution should make it easy to integrate, access, and transform data between ALL of these sources. This federated approach allows automations to access data from any source in real time to provide the freshest, most accurate information to your automations so network changes can be made correctly, every single time.

How Itential Can Integrate a Federated Source of Truth

The Itential Automation Platform was purposefully engineered to support API integration into all of your IT systems and sources of truth, because successful network automation requires lots of data from different sources at various times. We created a solution that can allows network engineers to build network automations across any domain and acquire and utilize data from any IT system or source of truth. With our agnostic and integrated approach, your network changes can look a bit more like this:

If you want to see how we can help you successfully integrate a federated source of truth, check out our recent presentation at Networking Field Day 27, featuring a demo of how to integrate and utilize data from several sources of truth as part of a multi-domain network automation.