Earlier this year, GigaOm Research released their annual Radar Report for NetDevOps, highlighting the rapid evolution of NetDevOps methods and tooling and its important role in enabling hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.
The report highlights the fact that organizations are turning to hybrid and multi-cloud architectures to “provide a platform for IT, network, and cybersecurity personnel to manage applications and assets across various environments, including on-premises, in the cloud, or across multiple clouds.” In today’s landscape, organizations are looking to accelerate application development and deployment across a complex web of network environments, including on-premises infrastructure, edge and SD-WAN, and public and private clouds. NetDevOps methods that bring network management and application development closer together enable IT organizations to accelerate fulfillment of requests coming from application development teams.
Why NetDevOps Is Critical
The pace and complexity of modern application development demands more efficient ways to deliver complex, customized network and infrastructure services to developers. IT organizations must find ways to scale network and infrastructure teams’ capabilities while enabling them to collaborate more effectively, since services will often touch multiple network and infrastructure components.
Due to multiple factors (different teams need different tooling, cloud costs balloon when using a single provider, etc.), there is a continuing move toward more distributed network and infrastructure ecosystems. Network and infrastructure teams require the ability to manage applications and assets across multiple environments. Adopting NetDevOps methods is seen as the best way forward for teams to succeed in this landscape.
NetDevOps is not a technology, and you won’t find a platform on the market that simply offers ‘NetDevOps.’ It’s more of a methodology, a set of practices and strategies that rely on a few key technologies. Key components include the ability to coordinate workflows across different infrastructure domains, the use of continuous integration, delivery, and deployment when shipping network automation code into production, and continuously monitoring and measuring network infrastructure to trigger automated remediation (or at least alerts) so that teams can efficiently manage a complex, distributed network.
To successfully implement NetDevOps methods, organizations must leverage a combination of tools and platforms to support the following key principles as listed in the GigaOm report:
- Automation
- Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
- Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD)
- Collaborative Workflows
The goal is to reach a target state where teams can take advantage of closer integration of networking best practices with DevOps methods and tools, ensuring configuration compliance and rapid, secure service delivery across complex, distributed infrastructure. Here’s how GigaOm’s report explains the target state of NetDevOps:
“Providing a more efficient and streamlined approach to network management, NetDevOps encompasses the abstraction, codification, and implementation of network IaC utilizing programmed, automated workflows to eliminate configuration drift, thereby embedding quality and resiliency within the network.”
Throughout the report, GigaOm analyzes a collection of different vendor solutions that solve key challenges in the NetDevOps space and help organizations achieve the above target state. They identify Itential as a leader in the field and an “Outperformer” according to their Radar plot due to unique strengths and Itential’s ability to solve multiple NetDevOps challenges for a variety of different target audiences.
Why Itential Is A NetDevOps Outperformer
GigaOm’s report describes the Itential Automation Platform as an ‘Outperformer’ for NetDevOps, with high scores for both maturity and innovation and a strong balance between specific feature plays and an orchestration-focused abstracted platform play. The report notes that Itential is well-suited for multiple target audiences — large enterprise, cloud service providers, network service providers, and managed service providers — with the only exception being smaller enterprises due to the platform’s focus on scale and integrating across large, complex networks.
In addition, the report gives Itential 5 stars for scalability, interoperability, configurability, and extensibility. These qualities are key to enabling a single platform strategy for managing multiple clouds, multiple network domains, and a variety of infrastructure.
Itential covers all bases listed in the report when it comes to enabling NetDevOps. Teams can easily collaborate on complex workflows and coordinate processes across anything in their environment. The platform is built to enable and accelerate automation and orchestration, and integration with pipelines enables teams to use tried-and-tested CI/CD methods for network changes.
The platform can generate integrations with any system that exposes an API if a user loads in any API document and follows simple steps in a GUI. To make integration even easier, we also provide a large library of pre-built integrations with commonly used network and infrastructure platforms so teams can start building multi-domain process workflows as quickly as possible.
“IAP’s architecture is flexible and open, delivering network automation and orchestration across multi-domain and multi-vendor networks. By federating data from multiple sources, IAP ensures that systems of record remain the source of truth, providing a unified real-time view of network and service components”
– GigaOm
In addition, GigaOm highlights that Itential is “one of the few vendors in the NetDevOps space to recognize the fundamental difference between orchestration and automation.” Orchestration is about coordinating multiple automated tasks to create end-to-end workflows that can move data and execute activities across any number of domains and systems, ensuring teams can minimize manual touches and maximize the potential of the automation tooling they adopt. See this page for a full breakdown.
Enabling the shift toward NetDevOps is critical for success in today’s multi-cloud, multi-vendor, multi-domain network infrastructure ecosystems. Teams need to be able to manage devices and services across a variety of environments and easily build and deploy automation across this complexity, while maintaining configuration compliance and security even as infrastructure becomes more distributed.
The Itential Automation Platform is the best solution on the market for enabling teams to fully adopt NetDevOps methods and level up their approach to managing networks and infrastructure. Click here to learn more about how the Itential Automation Platform delivers transformative benefits — or click here to dive into the full GigaOm Radar Report for NetDevOps.
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.
