By Mark Kayser, Cox Communications
Service Providers face ever increasing levels of complexity in their networks to accommodate more advanced services for their customers. The management of once fairly simple networks with just a few hundred or maybe even a few thousand routers and switches has become a real challenge in complex networks with tens of thousands of network devices.
Configuration errors and security are also major factors in network reliability. In the "Annual outages analysis 2023" from Uptime Institute (Lawrence & Simon, 2023), the leading cause of network outages was configuration / change management failures and many of those were due to human error. Making configuration changes to thousands of devices manually is highly inefficient, taking a large commitment of man-hours to complete. Network Automation is really the only way to perform this kind of change activity. In addition to increased efficiency, automation removes direct human interaction with the network devices thus reducing the chance for human error.
Another significant cause of configuration errors is deviation from the standard (aka golden) config. Even with automation, if a device has a configuration that is different than what is intended based on company standards, it can lead to a configuration change that causes an unexpected impact on the device. A configuration compliance solution is important to report any deviations.
In this paper, we consider four functional areas needed to create a complete automation solution:• Network Design – to create the intended network configuration• Configuration Deployment – to apply changes to network device configurations• Network Status – to provide live network status and an inventory of active network devices• Configuration Compliance – to verify actual device configurations vs the intended configurationsMost vendors offer automation solutions, but not all these solutions support legacy hardware or legacy firmware. This paper will look at an approach to creating a complete automation solution from a mixture of open source solutions and in-house developed tools, with connectivity to existing vendor tools that provides the flexibility to be customized for whatever equipment makes up the network.