Shulou(Shulou.com)06/03 Report--

In the deployment process of industrial digitization, Internet of things and 5G mobile network, network automation and intelligence become very important, but the two can not be confused. Network automation is the foundation, the embryonic form, and the primary stage of the future network, while the network intelligence is the advanced and advanced stage of the future network. It can be said that intelligence is the upgraded version of network automation. However, it is obvious that there is still a long way to go if the network is to fly from automation to intelligence.

Why Network Automation

Network automation refers to the process of automatic configuration, management, testing, deployment and operation of physical and virtual devices in a network. Under the blessing of this technology, the network can automatically perform the established tasks and functions every day. Through collaboration, automation, and network orchestration, network operations involving complex configurations and device management can be simplified to adapt to the business agility of a changing environment.

At present, for many enterprises, the adoption of inflexible networks has become a major bottleneck hindering the development of their business, because it reduces the possibility of deploying a strong and responsive data center infrastructure. For service providers, automation has long been a basic network strategy, because they also need to control operating expenses and capital expenditures as they focus on improving network flexibility and reliability. At this point, service providers must use automation to accomplish routine tasks that are time-consuming, repetitive, or error-prone, to improve operational efficiency, profits, and user satisfaction.

Because any network resource controlled by the command line interface or API can be automated, this enables network automation technologies to be deployed in data center networks, cloud networks, or wireless networks. In addition, with the decline in computing costs and the increase in the demand for virtual computing, current network automation technologies have become more available to many enterprises.

Three main reasons for the automation of the network

For the network management of small and medium-sized enterprises, the management of more than a dozen network devices may be more direct to manually configure the network or diagnose tasks. However, for large enterprises, the number of network devices may grow exponentially, when automated configuration is clearly fundamental. The following three reasons are also the key to the automation of the network.

The first is to reduce human error. A survey shows that 60% to 80% of the network failures found are caused by human error, even manual "CTRL C" plus "CTRL V". More importantly, this manual process obviously cannot be extended to large-scale network operation and maintenance applications.

Second, make the network more suitable for the IT server environment. Over the years, a large number of enterprise operation and maintenance teams have been using automation to create highly dynamic server systems. Given that automation provides the required connectivity and security in a timely manner, API is more supported, and openness and interoperability can be achieved based on standard protocols and open source automation frameworks such as Ansible, Saltstack, Puppet, and Chef. In addition, service providers and enterprises often use these automation frameworks to accelerate their network automation migration.

In addition, improve the efficiency of configuration. Because manual configuration is an one-to-one process, the side effect is that network configuration can only be applied to the current device. This makes it impossible for the configuration operation of the QoS flow control class to be consistently applied throughout the infrastructure. Fortunately, network automation can solve these problems, making it quite easy to distribute the same configuration across the network.

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