Network Automation at Scale

Chapter 1. Introduction

Network automation is a continuous process of generation and deployment of configuration changes, management, and operations of network devices. It often implies faster configuration changes across a significant amount of devices, but is not limited to only large infrastructures. It is equally important when managing smaller deployments to ensure consistency with other devices and reduce the human-error factor. Automation is more than just configuration management; it is a broad area that also includes data collection from the devices, automatic troubleshooting, and self-resilience—the network can become smart enough to remediate the problems by itself, depending on internal or external factors.

When speaking about network automation, there are two important classes of data to consider: configuration and operational. Configuration data refers to the actual state of the device, either the entire configuration or the configuration of a certain feature (e.g., the configuration of the NTP peers, interfaces, BGP neighbors, MPLS etc.). On the other hand, operational data exposes information and statistics regarding the result of the configuration—for example, synchronization of the NTP peers, the state of a BGP session, the MPLS LSP labels generated, and so on. Although most vendors expose this information, their representation is different (sometimes even between platforms produced by the same vendor).

In addition to these multivendor challenges, there are others ...