While we’re officially Networking Field Day veterans, our team is still just as excited to present at each new event. We love sharing what we’re seeing in the networking world, hearing from the delegates, and discussing how our customers are leveraging automation to scale their network management.
Networking Field Day 31 (NFD 31) was no exception – our session focused on the capabilities of Itential’s suite of network automation products that enable NetOps and DevOps teams to work together more effectively. They’re able to leverage each other’s assets and tooling for a NetDevOps approach to automating hybrid, multi-cloud network infrastructure.
We’re happy to have had the opportunity to present to 12 delegates including the likes of Snehal Patel, Steve Puluka, Lexie Cooper, and others, along with, of course, the live viewers who joined us online. The team had a great time discussing and demoing how Itential supports NetOps and DevOps teams by integrating with network and IT systems and providing robust build, test, and expose capabilities for network automation.
Missed the live demo session? Here’s a breakdown of each section to watch on-demand:
Defining NetDevOps & What it Means for the Evolution of Network Automation
NetDevOps is about applying both NetOps and DevOps principles to how we manage and operate networks and infrastructure, bridging the two teams’ ways of working to enable greater organizational efficiency. To kick off our session, our CTO and Co-Founder, Chris Wade, introduced us to how the Itential Automation Platform is enabling NetDevOps teams to deliver network automation and orchestration at scale. He led a great discussion around the evolution of network automation and orchestration and the progression from task-based automation toward a vision of delivering self-service networking.
Then, he moved to the ways network infrastructure has evolved to support modern, cloud-first network services, moving from LAN controllers and firewalls to SD-WAN and SSE, from Perl and Bash scripts to Python and pipelines, from cloud consoles to cloud formation, ARM, Terraform, and more. Chris dove into the convergence of NetOps and DevOps that’s necessary as the industry moves toward hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure, and laid out how Itential’s platform architecture, with capabilities to integrate, build, test, and deploy automations for self-service, can make NetDevOps a reality.
The Importance of Integration for Scaling Network Automation
Integrations are the building blocks of a successful automation strategy, yet integrating with all the various IT and network systems you use can be challenging. In this session, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, gave a demo showcasing Itential’s codeless integration with both APIs and non-programmable CLI interfaces. Rich started by looking at the Pre-Built Library, with over 300+ open source integrations, adapters, and data transformations for easy use within Itential, before moving on to the Adapter Builder, where users can easily generate and build their own codeless integrations with network and IT systems.
To highlight the CLI side, Rich onboarded an example CLI-managed network device and demonstrated how it could be used within the API-based workflow builder. And for the coders out there, he also walked through Itential’s JSON script decoration features that allow automation scripts to become API-callable assets for reuse in any future automations.
Building Low-Code, End-to-End Network Automations
For NetDevOps teams, building automations is a foundational process. In our third session, Dan Sullivan, Principal Solutions Engineer at Itential, demonstrated how Itential’s low-code automation canvas enables rapid creation of end-to-end network automations across multi-vendor and hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure. He picked up where Rich left off, demonstrating how the assets Rich integrated with are now available in the low-code visual canvas for building automation workflows.
To make the workflow work, Dan needed to include a data transformation step between two API calls, translating data from one format to another between tasks in different systems. He showcased how to easily build transformations, and incorporated both command templates and Jinja2 templates, features that allow for easily reusable custom assets for tasks like constructing configurations and API payloads. To cap it off, Dan walked through the simple process of building a dynamic JSON form that will provide a layer of data input validation when the automation is eventually exposed to an end user.
Building Trust & Confidence in Network Changes Through Testing & Validation
NetDevOps teams must ensure that every automation is validated and tested before production deployments. In this demo, Joksan Flores, Senior Solutions Engineer at Itential, showed how NetDevOps teams can manage configurations with Itential’s Configuration Manager application and utilize both NetOps and DevOps practices for testing and validation. To kick off, he used command templates to generate reusable pre- and post-check processes and demonstrated their outputs along the way. He then showed how to incorporate testing into the automation workflow itself and implemented a comparison between pre- and post-checks for further validation.
Moving to configuration management, Joksan showcased Itential’s Golden Configuration templates, which allow a hierarchical structure such that one template can apply to all configurations of a given type, and then an additional sub-template can apply to only configurations of a certain sub-type, and so on. And after building and testing the Golden Config, Joksan walked through the ways that Itential enables similar processes for DevOps teams using API-driven processes and explained how the combination of all these capabilities allows for more proactive validation.
Expanding the Use of Automation Through Exposure & Self-Service
Expanding the use of trusted automations to end-users and platforms is key for delivering self-service networking. To cap off our demo series at NFD 31, Rich Martin, Director of Technical Marketing at Itential, showcased some different ways Itential users can expose automations for wider use and discussed ways to address some of the security concerns that come with exposure. He started with the Operations Manager application within the Itential Automation Platform, in which a user can publish any automation workflow and define a method by which to run it.
From there, Rich demonstrated exposure to a CI/CD pipeline, which enables network automations to be consumed as services in a DevOps environment just like any other IT asset. After verifying this example, he moved to event-driven automations, in which an automation can be triggered by a specific change on an integrated system such as NetBox, and scheduled automations, which run at specific intervals. And, last but definitely not least, he switched over to a ServiceNow tab to showcase the Itential ServiceNow Application, which leverages northbound API exposure to present published automations within the ServiceNow platform. This makes network automations available as services for any ServiceNow admin to select and run, entirely self-serve.
Each time we’ve had the opportunity to participate in a Networking Field Day, our team has come away excited and grateful to have had thoughtful, progressive, innovative conversations around networking and automation with some incredible delegates. This year was no different, and we’re especially excited by the NetDevOps conversations – a topic that once might have drawn blank stares was this year our central focus, a sign of the evolution that’s happened and is continuing to happen in our industry.
Check out full highlights of the day here, and keep an eye out for future Itential NFD presentations. If any of our demos sparked your interest and seem useful for making progress with automation, you can take our interactive platform tour and/or trial the platform for free today.
Kristen H. Rachels
Chief Marketing Officer ‐ Itential
Kristen serves as Chief Marketing Officer for Itential, leading their go-to-market strategy and execution to accelerate the adoption and expansion of the company’s products and services.
