Network Automation Challenges and the Cloud
Published: 2020-06-16 17:46:33


With the advent of cloud computing, the promise of huge cost savings, big data processing, new security and networking needs... network automation has become a mandatory solution to allow interaction between services and customers. First, companies' data centers shifted to Infrastructure as a Service. Hence, customers were looking for a self-managed hosted environment and readily available solutions installed automatically on top of an automated infrastructure (Platform as a Service).

We cannot overlook the importance of Network as a Service on use cases such as network parameters, service-level agreements, bandwidth aggregation, redundant and secure connections, BGP on large-scale networks... While the NaaS (Network as a Service) model is gaining momentum, there is still a need for even more simplicity in the data center cloud facilities. These automation requirements still face challenges providing higher scale and availability:

- Mostly uses basic and common networking features and capabilities
- Highly focused on data center hosting services use cases
- Requires highly flexible networking service, and highly scalable, reproducible protocol capabilities

Among the most important Network automation requirements we find:

- Automatic configurations of data center service appliances such as Layer 2 switching services (overlay networks), layer 3 routing services, traffic protection through firewall and authentication services, load-balancing, and IP services such as Network Address Translation (NAT), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Domain Name System (DNS), and so on
- Interconnection of virtual appliances to form a data-center virtual topology. For instance, load-balanced networks, network routing according to firewall requirements...
  -CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete) operations for all data center resources to provide the ability to scale, provide multitenancy, monitoring...

Long story short, the Virtual Data Center Service nowadays can be summarized with network automation requirements that satisfy a VDC (Virtual Data Center) hosted in the cloud that:

- Dynamically provisions network service appliances and configurations.
- Establishes the required interconnects for end hosts and network services
- Manages and monitors all resources demanded and consumed by users.

In contrast to On-Demand services in the cloud which offer great flexibility, cloud network capabilities are more rigid in nature and prevent the offering of more complex applications and VDC requirements. As a matter of fact,VDCs are known as the collection of virtual machines, their compute resources, their applications, but also their networking resources. The success of networking service providers will be measured by the number of end-customer deployments on their infrastructure, which means that in order to attract customers, service providers will need to support all the end customers' variety of application needs and underlying VDC types.

To conclude, Network automation challenges span the service configurations, interconnections, and the resource management of both physical and virtual resources. To overcome those challenges a cloud services facility should
consider:

- Predictable and replicable PoDs (Point of Delivery)
- A flexible object-based virtual data center model
- Network Service Interface of preference
- A replicable and stable Network Systems Corporations