Something we’re always focused on here at Itential is the automation journey, the way that needs and goals evolve as teams and organizations make progress with network automation and orchestration. In my view, one of the most important things a network automation solution can do is meet you where you are today. Whether a team is just getting started or an organization is actively implementing NaaS and self-service capabilities, they can get value out of Itential’s products.
With the latest release of the Itential Automation Platform, IAP 23.2, we’re focused on driving the complexity out of managing distributed infrastructure, allowing our customers to focus on maximizing their investments around orchestration and automation initiatives. The new features and enhancements are aimed at streamlining and accelerating how NetDevOps teams can build, manage, and deploy automated services at scale, especially when infrastructure environments are large and complex.
It’s about giving teams the tools they need to keep evolving. With enhanced, secure collaboration capabilities, new ways to maintain configuration compliance, and a powerful new application to leverage state information when managing distributed network services, IAP 23.2 transforms the way NetDevOps teams can operate and helps keep your network agile and secure.
Automation Collaboration, Amplified
IAP 23.2 is bringing a comprehensive suite of new features designed for teams to collaborate on building automation and orchestration workflows.
Projects: Share & Collaborate with Ease
The headline addition is Projects, dedicated workspaces for teams to consolidate assets so they can be accessed from a central location even when they’re distributed across hybrid infrastructure. Network engineers can group together Itential workflows, data transformation elements, JSON forms, CLI automation scripts, and more under a single umbrella.
Projects can be shared in a number of ways. Within Itential, users in your organization can be assigned access with different permission levels depending on role, allowing some people to edit and add new assets to the Project while others will only use assets or view them. On top of that, Projects can be exported as a single file that’s compatible with Git and other version control systems, allowing Projects to easily integrate into existing development processes. Watch this demo for a deep dive on how (and why) to use Projects.
Automation Marketplace: Accelerate Automation & Orchestration
With IAP 23.2 we’re launching Itential Automation Marketplace, where our customers can access hundreds of modular assets built by Itential and by partners in our ecosystem. Integrations with common network and IT systems, workflows for standard processes, crucial data transformations, the list goes on. It’s designed to facilitate the saving, sharing, and repurposing of proven automation practices, all to fast-track network automation and orchestration efforts. Check out Automation Marketplace here.
Workflow Canvas Enhancements: Build Automations Faster Than Ever
New search and indexing features allow network engineers to find the tasks and workflows they need lightning quick. SAML SSO integration enables organizations to leverage their existing sign-on solutions with Itential, eliminating extra steps. And Git support for Itential Automation Gateway allows engineers to feel confident that others can only access the most up-to-date versions of their Python scripts, Ansible Playbooks, and Terraform plans.
Compliance Capabilities & Lifecycle Management: Deploying & Managing Services at Scale
On top of the new capabilities to help teams build network orchestration workflows, 23.2 also comes with a whole host of improvements and features to manage and deploy them as services. The updates help scale and streamline crucial activities: configuration compliance and service lifecycle management. As a result, 23.2 enables NetDevOps teams to accelerate everything they do, before and after a service is delivered.
Compliance for Ordered Lists: Automate Config for ACLs, Route Policies, & More
The vast majority of compliance solutions out there have a hard time with ordered lists. If you’re making changes to configuration with ordered elements, such as ACLs, IAP 23.2 ensures you don’t need to waste time manually making sure you didn’t change the ordering and break something. And best of all? This applies to both CLI-managed and API-managed configuration (we use JSON objects to represent API-managed config). Powerful ordering and restriction features help you stay focused on what really matters — watch this demo for a closer look.
Compliance Plans: Gain Insight Across Complex Infrastructure
New Compliance Plans enable infrastructure teams to craft custom compliance reports by aggregating multiple Golden Configuration templates and querying devices of different type, vendor, and network domain, all in one Plan. It’s a powerful way to assess complex infrastructure and deliver actionable insights to people and applications who need them. You can see some examples in this demo.
Lifecycle Manager: Track, Manage, & Change Service Resources & Data
This brand-new application is designed for teams to be able to easily track and manage the resources and data associated with a service. With today’s complex, multi-domain network services, it can be complicated to try to make changes and updates when the data a service requires changes.
Lifecycle Manager eliminates time spent manually hunting down data and removes the risk of missing things — teams can define resource models for a service, then build actions that can perform CRUD operations to update a service instance based on state information and the defined resource model. Top use cases for Lifecycle Manager include keeping complex or long-lasting services up to date and optimizing resource allocation across a hybrid environment to keep costs under control. There’s a lot to Lifecycle Manager, so to fully explore its capabilities be sure to watch this demo.
IAP 23.2: Transforming Network Automation & Orchestration for Speed & Scale
I’ve split the features and enhancements coming in 23.2 into two groups here, those that accelerate the way teams build workflows and those that streamline the way teams manage their infrastructure and deployments. In practice, though, these are two sides of the same coin. IAP 23.2 is about giving NetDevOps teams what they need to keep growing and evolving, accelerating work on both sides without compromising on security or flexibility.
We continue to focus on simplifying how network teams manage complex infrastructure at scale by maximizing their existing orchestration and automation investments. With this latest release, we’re proud to elevate our customers’ experience by amplifying and transforming their automation capabilities for collaborative delivery of vital network services and ensuring agile and secure networks.
Explore everything that’s in IAP 23.2 on this page. Or click here to take an interactive tour.
Tags: Configuration Management Itential Automation Platform Network Automation Network Orchestration
Peter Sprygada
Vice President, Product Management ‐ Itential
Peter Sprygada serves as the Vice President, Product Management at Itential after serving as the Chief Technology Officer at Pureport where he was responsible for their multi-cloud network as a service interconnect platform. Prior to Pureport, Sprygada was a Distinguished Engineer for Red Hat, where he played the role of Chief Architect for the Ansible Automation Platform. Sprygada also held senior technical and leadership positions at Arista and Cisco, as well as several networking startups.
