Network Automation 101 – Everything You Need to Know

As networks continue to evolve from traditional stand-alone networks to software defined networks to cloud networks, the burden for network teams has continued to grow too.

Network teams continue to fight fires every day, tackling problems like misconfigurations caused by human error decreasing reliability, not to mention managing networks manually device by device, which compounds the issues even more. In order to solve these types of problems, more and more companies are turning to network automation.

Businesses see the value of automation and understand the role DevOps has had in the worlds of systems and applications, and they are starting to apply it to their network management processes too. Hence the rise of NetDevOps–managing networks following the tenets of DevOps, such as iterative releases, version control everything, “early and often” tests, and shared responsibility between teams. But without network automation, this shift into iterative, efficient network operations is simply not possible.

In today’s ever-changing network environments, automation is becoming less and less of a suggestion and more of a requirement. This is because, without it, your team will continue to be reactive managing outages, performance degradations, and security vulnerabilities. And in a fast-paced, competitive world, this can make or break your business’s success.

As your software development teams probably already know, the key to staying ahead of the competition is creating more agility without compromising quality. This mindset has been fundamental to software development practices for a while now.

But it’s time to bring it into the network world.

What Is Network Automation?

Network automation, in essence, means transforming the menial, monotonous tasks that your network teams perform on the daily into efficient, automated workflows. Going one step further, it is providing self-service functionality for the workflows, exposing them to both internal and external customers.

This transformation leads to better time management for your network ops team, less human error, and quicker remediation when security issues arise. A few examples of automated tasks could include…

• Automatically adding or updating network information on trouble tickets
• Automatically creating baselines for network availability and performance
• Automatically perform compliance across your network device configurations
• Automatically read circuit maintenance notification emails from carriers and dynamically update Source of Truth and ticketing systems
• Automatically turning monitoring tools on or off during a network change
• Automatically making configuration changes and remediating, when necessary, across routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers

As we can see from these examples, network automation isn’t about replacing your NetOps personnel, but instead, enabling them to do their jobs better and create an overall more reliable system for your entire organization to use.

Network Automation Challenges

But, network automation doesn’t come without difficulties.

Many teams don’t realize the type of heavy lifting that’s required to establish automation for your networks. It’s often a highly complex and enormously scaled project that can take at least three to five years to complete. This is because enterprise networks can include thousands of devices from multiple vendors across multiple network domains, and even stretch into the cloud. Moreover, it is converting hundreds to thousands of manual processes into automated workflows.

To automate, you need to standardize first. And this proves to be a huge challenge, with so many places to look for network data. You may need to rethink network designs to streamline automation so you aren’t managing unique snowflakes.

Plus, today’s network automation industry is pretty convoluted. Industry vendors offer fragmented, incompatible tools that usually just lead to confusion. And it’s difficult for companies to figure out which tools they need because of the lack of architectural and solution experts in this field.

Many enterprises also have the misconception that once you find the perfect network automation tool, then you’re set. This simply isn’t how it works. The truth is that it is never about one tool. Network automation takes dedication from the right people, organization around the right processes, and investment in the right technology. It’s a multifaceted endeavor that takes expertise, patience, and critical thinking.

Network Automation Solutions

Fortunately, there are solutions to the challenges of network automation.

Again, it’s important to realize that it takes the right people, technology, and processes to create a great network automation program. Here are a few steps that your organization can take to establish this foundation:

1. Focus on data first

A lot of teams fall into the trap of starting their network automation efforts with tools. They purchase various solutions that end up sequestering them to limited data models and products, and not allowing them to scale up their program over time. Instead, your team should gain a thorough understanding of the data inside your networks and then go from there. After all, you don’t know what you don’t know. Until you understand what the landscape of data and networks inside your organization looks like, any type of tool purchase that you make will just be a point-solution.

2. Build a Source of Truth

But what does a data-first approach look like in practice? Well, it starts with a Source of Truth (SoT). A network SoT allows users to define the intended state of the network. It provides the baseline to compare actual devices against and is quite the opposite of where we’ve been as an industry for twenty-five years (only actually ever looking at actual running configurations without knowing, “what should be there?”). Using a Source of Truth is key to achieving excellent data hygiene and setting big-picture goals that actually make sense with your organization’s current state. This data can then drive the actual network automation, independent of the tool.

We’re proud to have Nautobot in our corner.

At its core, Nautobot is an extensible Source of Truth and Automation Platform that defines the intended state of the network. Nautobot enables strict adherence to data standards allowing users to define business rules on the network data that is stored within Nautobot. Nautobot also allows organizations to add custom fields and custom data models, and to create their own unique relationships between data stored in Nautobot, showcasing its flexibility specifically for being a data platform to power network automation.

3. Create a NetDevOps approach

After implementing an SoT, it’s important to focus on creating best practices around your network operations. This is where NetDevOps comes in. It takes many of the basic tenets of DevOps and translates them into a network operations context.

Here are a few examples of how this works:

• Version control. Just as with traditional DevOps cycles, NetDevOps relies on strong version control: versioning every software artifact within the network systems (data files, templates, scripts, configs, tests). This adds traceability and accountability, and it enables collaboration between the engineering teams.
• Frequent testing. DevOps has taught us the importance of testing “early and often”, and NetDevOps follows the same principle. Teams need to test and validate everything stored in their network projects’ repositories at every point of the production cycle. Going one step further, testing should also happen before and after every change.
• Open source tooling. Open source has been a key driver of innovation in the DevOps community. In the same vein, NetDevOps relies on your team’s openness to trying open source options and learning from the communities surrounding them. Open source is used in basically every architecture or solution deployed, so being exposed to what open source can offer is more important than ever. Keeping your teams flexible and adaptable through the use of open source leads to a much more scalable network automation program that is going to last well into the future.

Introducing Network Automation as a Service

In theory, everything we’ve covered in this blog post is a great way to build a strong foundation for your network automation efforts. In reality, it’s extremely difficult to do without support.

This is why Network Automation as a Service (NAaaS) can be a game changer for organizations who want to transform their network operations with an end-to-end Source of Truth and well-built automation workflows. Instead of deploying disparate tools that could limit your team’s growth, NAaaS focuses on bringing the right expertise, open source solutions, and step-by-step processes, making your network automation initiatives a reality.

Network to Code provides Network Automation as a Service by offering a fully managed network automation platform built on top of Nautobot, an open and extensible Source of Truth. We deploy the SoT and use it as a baseline and platform to deploy automated workflows and integrations, all while giving your teams as much flexibility and control as possible.