Networking has progressed more slowly than some other aspects of technology. It’s often largely manual work, still. Network automation brings networking up to par, making networking easier, quicker and more robust. For any organisation that relies on media or network traffic to any significant extent, it’s a must-win battle.

The key tenet of DevOps is achieving velocity and better quality through automation, but networking remains largely unaffected. Many companies are still updating dozens of devices manually – without a single source of truth, good monitoring, fallback plans, or clear network management tools. This is expensive to scale, requires a larger team, and brings additional business risks when dealing with failures, documentation, etc. Network automation takes networking to the next level by using DevOps principles to introduce automation, predictability, and robustness to networking.

Even small companies have some networking gear somewhere to allow access to the internet. If networking is crucial to what you do – you have a person in charge of your network devices, servers, connections, etc. They manage devices manually, ensure servers run smoothly, handle issues by troubleshooting on the spot, and install security updates when they get around to it.

What happens when the company scales up to a 1000-person company? In many instances, it is still the same thing, only scaled up:

A networking team sets up and wipes switches and routers manually. They all need to know the configuration language of a brand of products – Cisco, Juniper or similar – that’s a prerequisite for managing the network. This also means you’re locked into a specific vendor. If a box starts acting funny, they need to connect to that device, see how the person before them has it set up and make sense of the configuration to be able to fix it.

Level up networking

It’s no wonder, then, that the networking field is taking more and more cues from DevOps. The more networking you need, the more acute the need for automation, observability and unified practices – and the less you want to be locked in, either with a certain vendor directly or by only being able to recruit people who have studied how to operate that vendor.

Network automation, or NetDevOps, brings networking to the cloud age. Large corporations, media producers or consumers, and other organizations with networks and a lot of internet traffic benefit the most.

Network automation removes the need to update dozens of hardware devices manually. It does away with needing to know proprietary configuration languages. Here’s the quick version:

Network automation helps you model and document your network environment. You use standardised networking parameters, so the need to understand the networking fundamentals is there, but it translates across systems and manufacturers.

This has major implications. An organisation’s entire network setup has a single source of truth, eliminating the guesswork from configuration or troubleshooting. Like in the cloud, you modify the infrastructure code to make changes; in Network automation you update the source of truth, and updates get pushed to all your devices. No more plugging console cables into various boxes and digging for clues about their configuration.

Tools are more visual, too, which helps do the work. They’re extendable with plugins like monitoring solutions or alerting, both of which are natural candidates for any network configuration’s network automation stack.

Netbox, an open-source tool, takes care of most of the abovementioned things. We’ve used Netbox with numerous clients, and the results have been excellent.

Network automation is how it should be

As mentioned, networking is adopting a lot of DevOps principles, and for good reason. Networking is less and less about configuring individual devices, and about managing systems and making good practices and tooling that eliminates manual work and brings workflows and monitoring up to par with other segments of the tech world. That’s the reason Polar Squad is increasingly taking on network projects, too – there’s a distinct need for cross-competence experts and a lot of our DevOps specialists come from a networking background.

As a takeaway: organisations that have the need for good, definable networking, you need to go beyond network engineering. Modern networking is a cross-competence affair and the goal should be a systemic, automated, observable and robust approach, where manual work is kept to a minimum. That’s the essence of network automation for us.

How Network automation and NetDevOps help you – Case: adding new devices to a site

Device Onboarding and Architecture Management: When you receive new network devices for a specific site, NetDevOps allows you to define the architecture of these devices within a central system, such as NetBox. This architectural information serves as a blueprint for the entire network setup. You don’t have to manually configure each device separately.

Configuration Management: NetDevOps leverages version control systems like Git to manage configurations. With version control, you can track changes, revert to previous configurations, and collaborate with team members effectively. Changes to device configurations are stored in a version-controlled repository, providing transparency and accountability.

Automated Deployment: NetDevOps employs CI/CD pipelines to automate the deployment of network changes. When a change is made to the network configuration or architecture (e.g., adding a new site or device), a pipeline is triggered. This pipeline automates the rollout of changes to all affected devices, ensuring consistency and reducing the risk of human error.

Site-to-Site VPN Setup: Setting up a site-to-site VPN tunnel can be complex and error-prone if done manually. NetDevOps simplifies this process by using predefined templates and automation. When a new site-to-site VPN is needed, NetDevOps automatically generates the necessary configuration parameters and deploys them to the involved devices. This eliminates the need to configure each device individually.

Centralized Cloud Storage: NetDevOps often integrates with cloud-based solutions to store network configurations securely. This cloud storage provides a centralized repository for configuration backups and serves as a single source of truth for network documentation. It ensures that configurations are readily accessible, even in case of device failures.

Consistency Across Devices: When making changes to the network, NetDevOps ensures that these changes are applied consistently across all relevant devices. For example, when adding a new site-to-site VPN tunnel, the automation process ensures that the tunnel is properly configured on both the new and existing devices, maintaining a consistent network state.

DevOps Beyond Deployment: The benefits of NetDevOps don’t stop at the deployment stage – centralized control over your devices and their setups, monitoring, logging, disaster recovery and other matters all become easier and simpler to manage.

In summary, NetDevOps simplifies network setup by automating device onboarding, configuration management, and deployment processes. It ensures consistency across devices, reduces manual configuration efforts, and provides transparent oversight through centralized version control and cloud storage. This approach greatly improves network agility, reliability, and scalability while reducing the potential for human error.

Mathieu Devos
DevOps Advisor
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If you want to get going with better networking, get in touch!