Network Optimisation Archives

Navigating the technical challenges of cloud.microsoft

Posted on: 2 December 2024

Transitioning to cloud.microsoft is not just a superficial change; it requires intrinsic technical adjustments that may affect your network’s security and performance. So, according to CACI’s network security experts, what are the technical challenges that may arise with this transition and what solutions are available to businesses to ease it?

Identifying & resolving the technical challenges

DNS configuration and management: Transitioning to a unified domain requires meticulous DNS configuration. Therefore, you must ensure your DNS settings are correctly aligned with the new domain structure for uninterrupted access to Microsoft 365 services. This involves updating DNS records, modifying conditional forwarders, checking root hints, or even changing DNS resolvers in your network to cope with the new .microsoft root TLD and correctly route all subdomains.
Proxy and firewall adjustments: Adjustments to proxy settings and firewall rules are necessary with the new domain. This includes updating allow-lists and ensuring traffic to and from cloud.microsoft is filtered and monitored correctly. Implementing robust proxy configurations will be necessary to maintain secure and efficient access to Microsoft 365 services through the transition period.
Code and API integrations: The unified domain offers a more streamlined approach for businesses leveraging custom API integrations with Microsoft 365. Ensuring that all scripts, code, API gateway and native API calls are updated to reflect the new domain is essential for maintaining functionality and security in any collaboration integrations.
Security protocols and compliance: The cloud.microsoft domain’s enhanced security features necessitate a thorough review of your existing security protocols. This might include implementing advanced threat protection, ensuring compliance with industry standards and leveraging Microsoft’s security tools to monitor and mitigate potential threats.

Challenges and solutions

Firewall reconfiguration: Shifting to a new domain will cause existing firewall rules and policies to be updated, which can be a complex and lengthy process, particularly for large organisations with extensive firewall configurations. CACI can assist by conducting a thorough audit of your current firewall settings with our Firewall Optimisation Assessment, identifying necessary changes and implementing these updates to ensure seamless access to Microsoft 365 services.
Proxy PAC file updates: Proxy Auto-Configuration (PAC) file logic will need to be updated to reflect the new domain, which involves modifying the scripts that determine how web browsers and other user agents can automatically select the appropriate proxy server. CACI’s NetDevOps experts can help rewrite, optimise and test these PAC files to ensure they are correctly configured, minimising disruptions to your 365 network traffic.
DNS reconfiguration: Updating DNS settings to accommodate the new domain structure will be critical. This includes modifying DNS records, resolver chains, forward lookup zones and conditional forwarders to manage the new subdomain and root TLD routing. CACI can provide comprehensive DNS management and optimisation services, ensuring that all changes are correctly implemented and that your DNS infrastructure remains secure and efficient.
Network infrastructure adjustments: Beyond firewalls and proxies, other network infrastructure components such as load balancers, VPNs, SDCI (ExpressRoute) and intrusion detection systems may also require reconfiguration. CACI’s team of expert network security engineers can assess your entire network setup, identify areas that need adjustment and implement the necessary changes to ensure compatibility with the cloud.microsoft domain.
Compliance and security: Adhering to industry standards and compliance regulations will be paramount for your network. The transition to cloud.microsoft offers enhanced security features, but these must be properly configured and monitored. CACI can help you leverage these security enhancements, implement advanced threat protection measures and ensure that your network remains compliant with all relevant regulations.

How CACI can help

As a trusted advisor with deep network and security expertise across sectors from finance, through telco, media, and government, CACI is uniquely positioned to help your business leverage the full potential of Microsoft 365 and the new cloud.microsoft domain. With over 20 years of experience in cloud services and a deep understanding of Microsoft technologies, CACI can provide tailored solutions that meet your specific business needs. Our team of experts will ensure a smooth transition to the cloud.microsoft domain, minimising disruptions and maximising efficiency.

CACI offers a comprehensive range of services, from initial consultation to ongoing support, ensuring you get the most from your Microsoft 365 investment. Our Managed Network Services help maintain your network and security, all while prioritising compliance and utilising the enhanced security features of the cloud.microsoft domain. Book a consultation with us today to discover how CACI can support help your organisation navigate the Microsoft system change requirements here.

How building a network automation content library accelerates efforts

Posted on: 19 September 2024

CACI has a rich heritage in network engineering, IT infrastructure, delivery assurance and network automation, including NetDevOps practices such as network coding, CI/CD pipeline optimisation, network lifecycle management and more. Our network automation experts engage in a variety of activities for our clients, a few of which include:

Telco (ISP)

Build out of a NetBox NSoT (Network Source of Truth) and modelling of an ISP lab environment that allows for seamless network inventory management, such as VLANs, VRFs, IP linknets, cabling, chassis-to-blade mapping and more.

Telco (ISP)

Build out of a Python Flask-based application (including frontend, backend and API) “LabDash” to enable management of changing Telco inventory, such as line cards, SFP transceivers, patching – within a lab environment used for Telecommunications (Security) Act 2021 (TSA) testbed and network build-out activities.

Finance

Build out of a customised observability solution to complement in-flight NMS, OSS and BSS tooling, with customised metrics around specific values of SNAT count, TCP session count and related for a complex load-balanced application solution.

Defence

Build out of IaC blueprints to deploy complex NVA router, NVA firewall, Load Balancer ADC and other centralised infrastructure as part of an Azure landing zone deployment.

In everything we do, we always follow DevOps and software development practices, most notably being “DRY” (Don’t Repeat Yourself). As such, we are building a library of automations and network code that can benefit future clients through a faster delivery of NetDevOps solutions – leading to a flywheel of network affects, meaning the more we do for clients, the more we learn and can apply our shared learnings – and code libraries, modules and approaches – to accelerate network automation efforts for future clients.

Giving back to the network automation community

We know that we can’t do this alone, and equally to ensure we attract and maintain top-quality NetDevOps talent and network automation consultants, we give back to the wider network automation community by building several tools within our public GitHub Repository. These include:

PAC File Performance Comparer

PAC File Performance Comparer is intended to be run on an ad-hoc basis to allow for a quick comparison using the Pacparser to calculate both the time difference (i.e. performance optimisation gain of the JavaScript PAC code refactor) and conformity against a test set of URL behaviours (i.e. proxy or direct) for a “before” and “after” PAC (Proxy Auto-Configuration File) refactoring exercise.

Azure JSON IP Feed to Juniper SRX Checker

Azure JSON IP Feed to Juniper SRX Checker is intended to be run on a periodic (i.e. daily) basis to check for updates, changes or deletions made by Microsoft to their Azure IP Address Ranges as per the Microsoft-published Azure IP Ranges and Service Tags – Public Cloud JSON feed and convert into Junos SRX-compatible security policy syntax/configuration.

Adding to our sandpit

Whenever we develop a module, code, artefact or solution for a client, we always ensure that we contribute any non-sensitive elements of this network code back to our “sandpit”, which is a growing area of internal “scraps” of code and approaches that we use internally to accelerate our development of solutions for clients. This enables our NetDevOps engineers to accelerate their developments into clients’ environment and build on shared learnings within our wider network automation practice.

Below is just a small sample of some of the things we’ve already done and can do faster again – perhaps to help you if your NetDevOps is feeling more like NetDevOops:

ajax-code-snippets
azure-f5-bigip-ha-cluster-cfe-do
azure-natgw-azlb-stress-tester
azure-zscaler-ip-lookup-csv
caci-ns-employee-profile-tools
certificate-automation-python
credly-certs-badging
cytoscape-network-topology-viewer
gartner-market-vendor-scraper
hostnames-geoip
megaport-api-provisioner
network-weathermap-visualiser

Ready to turn your NetDevOops into NetDevOps?

At CACI, we’re well-versed across all areas of IT infrastructure – be that IT, delivery assurance, cloud, network or DevOps and systems administration. Our expert consultants have worked across a large spectrum of clients in varying stages of digital transformation, some with adherence to more agile-led delivery lifecycle, others with adherence to more waterfall-led delivery lifecycle – and have experience across a plethora of industry frameworks, from TOGAF to SAFe to more traditional ITIL deployments.

Get in touch and let us help you assure and stabilise your cloud, IT or network infrastructure to fulfil the four key DORA DevOps metrics in your company (or ask us what they are if you don’t already know) and accelerate your NetDevOps and SRE success!

How to successfully navigate the opinionated NetDevOps stack

Posted on: 17 September 2024

Getting to NetDevOps and network automation is hard – sure, there may be plenty of free tools and resources available, but knowing which tool to use in certain situations can complicate the process. The often-complicated naming conventions of these tools and resources don’t exactly make matters easier. See for yourself whether you can spot the fake tool or protocol among these:

gNMI
Batfish
Parafidgeon
Pandas
BaHalmAI
Nornir
Flask
DuncanO
Suzieq
Pytest
Scrapli
BookPie
pyATS
Netmiko
AutoM8

(Answer: Keep reading to find out!)

Building with Open Source also has its risks – do you want this to be your network automation stack when it’s in production supporting your mission critical, CNI or other network Infrastructure concern?

Opinions, we’ve got a few

At CACI Network Services, we’ve been doing everything from network infrastructure, telco, delivery assurance, cloud and DevOps infrastructure and more for nearly two decades – just enough time to formulate some opinions on what is good, what actually works, and when to use it in your technology stack. Our mission as a trusted advisor is ultimately to benefit your IT network infrastructure to grow greater than the ever-growing sum of our deep network engineering expertise – where we’re increasingly finding the best way of conveying this to be through articulating which technology to use in which aspect of NetDevOps, depending on a client company’s size, maturity, culture and budget.

Enter the “opinionated stack”, or more concisely, one of the below DevOps mobius loops, with some added context on which tool to use, in which situation and why:

Profiling isn’t always a bad thing

To help direct our clients to the right opinionated stack, we’ve found that profiling our customers across the following three dimensions has helped us gain deeper insight into their network operations behaviours:

Size

Small – <100 nodes (routers, switches, NVAs, firewalls, etc.)
Medium <1,000 nodes
Large >1,000 nodes

Maturity

Nascent – mostly ClickOps, box-by-box, limited or no CI/CD or network automation ecosystem
Developing – pervasive ClickOps, box-by-box with some or trialling CI/CD or network automation ecosystem
Practicing – ClickOps by exception, box-by-box in emergency with strong CI/CD and growing NetDevOps ecosystem

Culture

Engineering-led – organisations that value in-house engineering as a primary driver
Financial-led – organisations that value minimisation of OpEx as a primary driver
Risk-led – organisations that value minimisation and risk mitigation as a primary driver

Want a preview of our work for your organisation? Take a look at our IP Fabric Partnership and forthcoming announcements in this space to see how we can help.

Getting answers

We did promise we’d tell you which were the real tools in network automation, so here goes:

Batfish
Pandas
Nornir
Flask
Suzieq
Pytest
Scrapli
pyATS
Netmiko

How CACI Network Services can help

If you’d like to know more about these tools, what they can do for your network infrastructure and how we deploy, operate and maintain them for our clients in finance, defence, government, utilities, media and beyond, get in touch to see how we can help demystify them into actionable insights for your IT network infrastructure estate.

How to determine whether your network is ready for AI

Posted on: 13 September 2024

You’re busy, and so is your network. Or if it’s not, it’s about to be. AI workloads are coming for your network, and to remain competitive in a world where AI-enabled applications and workflows become the norm, it must be embraced.

Networks are collectively facing their next pivotal moment of transformation and must therefore equip themselves with the necessary network automation and NetDevOps practices to sufficiently operate and enable AI.

What steps can be taken to prepare a network for AI?

As organisations strive to control the power of AI, it’s crucial to ensure that their network infrastructure is prepared to support these advanced technologies.

In our experience, AI has two key implications to network environments:

Changing the operation of the network

AIOps fundamentally changes some monitoring approaches such as the Network Management System (NMS) trap and poll of yesteryear towards observability approaches, leveraging streaming network telemetry
Finding signal in the noise of network alarms shifts from “hard” to “impossible” without the assistance of AI that AIOps brings.

Changing the deployment of the network

AI workloads are fundamentally different to traditional IT workloads, requiring network topologies that can sustain low flow entropy, high flow burstiness, elephant flows and near-100% bandwidth utilisation
Stock Ethernet isn’t the only player on AI networks, often utilising RDMA-approaches and protocols such as RoCE and InfiniBand, which require differing abilities to design, deploy and operate.

By taking the following proactive steps, businesses can not only enhance their operational efficiency, but also position themselves as leaders in the AI-driven future.

Evaluate the current infrastructure for AI compatibility

To ensure your network is ready for the AI era, start by thoroughly understanding and evaluating your current infrastructure for AI compatibility. This includes assessing the following areas:

Link bandwidth utilisation
Average end-to-end latency
Interconnect and Edge capacity
SFP compatibility with known GPU and TPU hardware
Consideration for Smart NIC and DPU offload.

Just because your current network topology can run an AI workload or cope without AIOps doesn’t mean it will when your business starts deploying AI workloads at increasing pace.

Modify IT operations practices

AI comes from a world of software engineering backed by DevOps practices which might be at odds with your current IT service management approaches. Ensure cultural differences of AI workloads and tooling have been considered, such as:

Continuous Integration with Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines for end-to-end infrastructure operation and deployment
Governance via self-service approaches such as pull request (PR) and merge
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for self-documenting infrastructure, topologies and design validation
Observability against proactive KPIs to replace reactive capacity management processes
Automated remediation based on categorised risk tolerance levels of network change activity, removing humans from the loop where possible.

AI isn’t going to wait for an RFC before swamping a poorly-configured uplink with a deluge of elephant flows that exhaust your “deep” packet buffers. Controllerless networks are going to feel more strain, so software-defined networking (SDN) approaches should be considered to remove the need for high-touch human interaction in sustaining network operations.

Consolidate your current IT operations tooling

In our experience, it is not uncommon for clients to have a multitude of monitoring systems that have collected over the years. No business ever intends to have more than one, but you may have:

Started a proof of concept (PoC) using PRTG for some of your network estate
Implemented SolarWinds for your IT server and virtualisation equipment
Spun up Cisco Prime Infrastructure for your mainly-Cisco network environment
Added Tufin for your firewall and network security appliances
Forgotten the small Juniper Space deployment for your Juniper SRX Firewall data centre edge.
Purchasing yet another monitoring tool that introduces AIOps will not help here.

Now is a good time to reassess each monitoring tool from the perceived benefit against the actual benefit it gives you.

AIOps in conjunction with a comprehensive review of what you want your monitoring tools to add aligned to Observability pillars such of logs, metrics, and traces – and crucially aligning these to who is going to do what with each outcome – almost certainly will.

Provide AI-oriented training

Not every team member has to be—or will be—a full-fledged engineer, and that’s okay. There must, however, be at least a basic awareness of some of the nuances of how AI operates and some common pitfalls. For example:

Think in terms of context and having the outcome you want in mind at all times
Work with Large Language Models (LLM) context windows
A PDF export of a NMS device inventory is likely to be bigger (in data storage terms) than a comparable CSV export – therefore use more context window “tokens” when fed into an AI prompt engine.
Sanitise sensitive data from network configurations
When using network vendor configurations across device families, the act of find-replacing a SNMP username/password might not be as easy as looking for “snmp-sever username…” due to syntax differences of the same configuration across vendors and even within similar devices from the same network vendor.
Ensure you take extra time in sanitising sensitive data such as IP addresses, hostnames, SNMP username/passwords, PKI (SSH/SSL) certificate fingerprints and the like
Consider AIOps an integral API that is central to your observability stack
- How will it process southbound data from network devices and element managers, and what protocol(s) will it utilise?
Define the business logic that will help it understand the context of network deployment in your organisation
Consider common fault scenarios and how these are codified into the AIOps tooling.

The key to both AIOps and AI workloads is ensuring the upfront work is taken to assess how these will change both technology and culture within your organisation before adding them to the potentially already-full pile of half-used monitoring tools on the organisational shelf.

How CACI can help

CACI understands the importance of data and streamlined processing. Our team possesses over 20 years of experience in every network engineering undertaking imaginable, from architecture, design and operations to managed networks and network automation. We are trusted by some of the UK’s most successful companies in finance, telco, utilities, government and public sector to innately understand their systems, culture and industries.

Talk to our Network Automation experts today and let us get you from network automation to NetDevOps to assure, run and manage the increasing velocity of AI workloads that are coming to network infrastructures on a wider scale.

How NetDevOps transforms network management for AI applications

Posted on: 11 September 2024

AI – more specifically, GenAI (Generative AI) – is continuously making its presence known through embedded integration into various network applications and workloads. First, there was DevOps – a grassroots initiative to unite the fractured worlds of development and operations. Then there was NetDevOps, where network engineers joined in to complete the trifecta:

AI workloads with disparate and sprawling protocol interdependencies mandate something new: AIOps. Humans could previously keep pace with FCAPS processes such as SNMP Traps, Syslog Alerts, NMS Alarms and more. Now, however, the network is evolving in such a pace that manual processes won’t cut it.

The future of network engineering is clear: network automation through NetDevOps is the only viable way to achieve a semblance of sanity in obtaining signal to noise (SNR) in the demanding, high throughput, zero-loss network utilisation that AI workloads demand.

What roles do NetDevOps and network automation play in business operations?

High-performing networks are now vital for business operations, as digital transformation becomes a reality for most enterprises – enabled perhaps most notably by the pandemic and compounded by technological innovations such as GenAI and the “GPT” conversational interface to the Large Language Model (LLM). In a climate of recessions, tightening budgets, decreased human workers and increased AI agents, the network simply can’t continue to look like:

Ticket-led troubleshooting slowly finding the Resolver Group in Servicenow
Ad-hoc configuration changes driven via vendor syntax in notepad.exe
Failed firmware upgrades caused by inaccurate human knowledge of HA architectures
Fragile underlays, circuits and protocols with high provisioning times driven through paper request processes and Word documents
Static network architectures focused more on artificial tiers that only help network vendors sell their quota for the month.

Where network automation focuses on the changes required to the network engineering discipline itself, NetDevOps builds on this by uniting the teams required to achieve this, turning network engineering from mastering the dark arts to coding against the well-trodden software engineering path.

NetDevOps is essentially the enabler that speeds up automation within a network engineering department through cultural reinforcement and moving the network towards an “as a service” offering. It also aligns deployment, change and provision of the network towards platform engineering and self-service approaches as seen elsewhere in IT Service Management (ITSM) and software development. Through NetDevOps, you can achieve:

Version control for network state through mature configuration management that escapes the bureaucracy of the CMDB
Abstracted intent-based network configuration to achieve network vendor independence, deduplication of network coding and cross-team collaboration on previously opaque network vendor settings
Operational state verification through testing approaches to bring the rigour of software development practices to the previous discipline of network engineering
Expedited mass deployment using sequential means of network configuration via API rather than CLI
Self-documenting infrastructure provision using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to consistently, efficiently and universally bring complex multi-vendor NVA routing, firewall and security solutions into reality.

What will the impact of AI be on traditional network engineering?

NetDevOps supplies one key component that traditional network engineering has fallen short on: reliable infrastructure velocity. AIOps gives operations one key component that network management has fallen short on: expedited network remediation. Finally, AI workloads give the network one key problem that previous IT workloads have not: high-throughput, lossless utilisation.

Essentially, the impact of AI on network engineering will be twofold, becoming the cure to the problem it creates:

The problem: Super-high utilisation of network capacity through continuously-bursty elephant flows, requiring near-lossless network throughput.
The solution: Instantly intuitive insight, observability and remediation of network faults and capacity exhaustion through AIOps.

AI is not just a passing trend, it is a transformative force that will reshape the way networks operate and evolve. As AI-driven applications and workloads become more complex, your network will need to handle unprecedented levels of data traffic while maintaining optimal performance and security.

How CACI can help

We understand that every network is unique and have worked on some of the most unique and well-known network architectures deployed from Critical National Infrastructure (CNI), through to telecommunications, data centres, hybrid cloud and service provider.

Whether you are looking to integrate AI into your existing ITSM tooling, CI/CD pipelines or overhaul your network deployment scripts, we have over 20 years’ experience across a breadth of network technologies to support you.

Benefits of our NetDevOps services include:

Eliminating manual network provisioning and troubleshooting tasks
Codifying understanding of network topology in a structured data format
Integrating network provisioning workflows into IT Service Management (ITSM) tooling
Expediting network troubleshooting through assisted alarm and event correlation
Reducing the risk of network deployment mistakes and rework
Minimising costs through modularisation of network configuration approach
Increasing ROI through reuse of codified Network Functions as Code.

We understand that the network is a piece of the wider infrastructure that underpins your business. CACI manages and delivers entire technology transformation programmes – from programme management, business analysis, service design, managed services and more, we offer the full stack of IT network expertise for your business.

Contact CACI Network Services today to find out more about how our team of experts can guide you through the disruptive AI network wave.

How AI is rewriting the rules of network engineering

Posted on: 4 September 2024

AI is coming for your network… but not as you expect

Seasoned IT professionals are no strangers to technology transformations and weathering the storms associated with them. Artificial Intelligence (AI), however, presents different, unique challenges to your network. Everyone is talking about the changes that AI will bring to your work, but few are talking about the changes AI application workloads bring to the design, architecture and operations of your network.

What changes are coming to network engineering and automation due to AI?

The advent of AI means that now more now than ever before, the architecture, design and operational excellence of your network matters. Network automation is coming to the fore to deal with the changes AI requires of networks, including:

High throughput transactions facilitated via features such as RoCE Adaptive Routing (AR)
Parallelised datagram transmission through AI network protocols such as RoCE, InfiniBand and other RDMA-based approaches
Dense port connectivity to interconnect numerous distributed GPU and TPU processors required for generative AI (GenAI) training and model processing
Lossless packet transmission to optimise LLM training runs and prevent the need for costly retransmission that can lead to AI training data corruption
Extreme bandwidth utilisation from bursty elephant flows which can flow up to the line-rate of the connected NICs.

AI workloads such as GPT, LLM and ML have different requirements of your network to traditional IT workloads. Legacy ITSM approaches also won’t cut it for AI-enabled business applications. It isn’t just routers, switches, firewalls and cables – it’s the 24/7 backbone of your organisation’s competitive advantage.

This is FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) all over again; only this time it’s not going away – AI is here to stay. Humans driven through ITIL don’t work 24/7 at 100% capacity like AI does, which is where automation comes in. Specifically, network automation facilitated through expert NetDevOps practices and tooling.

How CACI can help

Embracing the power of automation will lead to a robust and agile network infrastructure for your organisation. With over 20 years of experience with all aspects of network engineering – data centre, service provider, hybrid cloud and beyond – including complimentary offerings in delivery assurance and DevOps, CACI has networked, designed automated some of the UK’s most successful companies in financial services, telecommunications, utilities, government and public sector.

Our renowned network automation and NetDevOps services revolutionise your network infrastructure by leveraging advance technologies required for AI workloads. From configuration management to network monitoring and troubleshooting through observability, we streamline your operations, improve efficiency and maximise your network performance.

A few of the many benefits of CACI’s network automation services include:

Automating network provisioning and troubleshooting: Eliminating manual network provisioning and expediting network troubleshooting through assisted alarm and event correlation
Enhancing network understanding and management: Codifying an understanding of the network topology in a structured data format and integrating network provisioning workflows into IT Service Management (ITSM) tooling
Improving efficiency and cost-effectiveness: Reducing the risk of network deployment mistakes and rework and minimising costs through a modularisation of network configuration approach
Optimising resource utilisation and talent management: Increasing ROI through reuse of codified “Network Functions as Code” and retaining in-demand network engineering talent through use of modern network deployment working practices.

Don’t let your network get left behind by the AI network revolution. – Contact CACI today to navigate AI and bolster your network ready for the AI-enabled, LLM-led, ML-fed future.

How to craft a network automation strategy aligned with C-suite goals: A blueprint for success

Posted on: 10 April 2024

In the first blog of this two-part series, we assessed the impact of network automation on a business and ways in which a successful business case can be created. In this blog, we’ll look at strategies for keeping the C-suite interested in pursuing network automation and mistakes to avoid when developing strategies.

How to keep C-suite interested

Long-term network automation strategies will only be successful if the C-suite has consistent buy-in on its implementation and maintenance. This can be achieved through:

Providing progress updates: Sharing network automation progress updates with C-suite staff will help quantify its impact on the business and keep momentum high in terms of maintaining it.
Highlighting ROI for the business: Cost reductions, increased capacity or resources and overall performance are all high interest to C-suite staff. Ensuring the C-suite is aware of how network automation affects these will be critical.
Demonstrating alignment with the business’ strategic goals: Highlighting the ways in which network automation consistently aligns with the business’ strategic goals will help C-suite staff visualise the long-term business outcomes.
Adapting to changes: C-suite members’ business priorities are likely to change over time. Remaining flexible and willing to re-align to changing priorities as needed will ensure long-term success of network automation within the business.

It is often the case where organisations’ focus on network automation, while well-intended, results in them biting off more than they can chew rather than breaking down more tactical, low-hanging fruit. Despite this having an immediate impact, it can be less visible to senior executives. In general, network automation should be applied to try and achieve two key areas for immediate impact:

Improve the consistency of network deployment
Reduce noise within network operations.

4 common mistakes to avoid when developing a network automation strategy

Some of the common mistakes we see that diverge these two key aims include:

Trying to do too much too soon

The key with any automation in winning over detractors is incremental consistency over widespread adoption. We often find that small, tactical, lower-level automations with well-scoped outcomes for low-hanging fruit can exceptionally impact the overall consistency of deployment for this element and kickstart the incremental flywheel of trust. This is due to lower-level engineers and operations staff seeing the immediate benefit of automation and beginning to organically adopt these approaches within other higher-value, business-impacting tasks.

Successfully adopted and maintained automation efforts nearly always look like bottom-up, grassroots endeavours, where buy-in through adoption and proven time efficiency or consistency outcomes have been recognised by low-level engineering resources closest to the network who can advocate for the approach to other peers on their level to the wider organisation. Quantifiable results which prove IT’s ability to deliver are key in achieving grassroots adoption which flows up the organisational hierarchy, rather than trying to mandate this as a top-down approach. Human psychology is as big a factor in network automation’s success in an organisation as technical prowess, given the personal friction many engineers will have to automation as something which could affect their personal wellbeing or circumstances.

Focusing on the wrong use cases (selection bias)

Use cases which resonate with the business context faced by your organisation are pivotal in creating network automations that are immediately impactful and reap actual business rewards. Executive-led automation efforts can focus too intently on senior IT leaders’ specific issues that may be perceived as higher-affecting but are often more niche and low-scale than more commodity – but wider-scale – issues as seen by engineering and deployment resources.

Network automation should focus on the daily toil rather than the aspirational state. For example, more dividend will be yielded by automating a firewall rule request process which several of your engineers unknowingly gatekeep as a bottleneck to your application development and implementation projects than would be from, for example, automating network configuration backups, which will likely already be catered for by a disaster recovery process, no matter how human-intensive that may be.

Tool-led strategy adoption

Network automation is a complex area of abstractions and principles built atop chains of other abstractions or fundamentals. For this reason, it can be tempting to lean on the lowest common denominator within the field – often the “lingua franca” of the tooling and framework buzzwords such as Terraform, Ansible, IaC, YAML, YANG and so on.

While countless types and competing network automation tools exist, this doesn’t always mean they’re developed for or relevant to your business’ specific issues. It’s also worth being mindful of “resume-driven development” here– while the “new shiny” might look great to your engineering and architecture teams, it doesn’t always mean it’s best for your business context, budget or other regulatory constraints.

Automation in isolation of process review and improvement

There’s a reason “garbage in, garbage out” is a phrase– automating the garbage to go faster doesn’t get rid of its existence. Automation often lives in the space between process and technology, so improvements in one can feedback into the other. Automation tends to inform improvements to existing business processes through its installation than for static business processes that were perfect all along.

The mere act of undergoing an automation journey can also be an exponential value-add when focusing on and improving business processes which would otherwise not have been explored. This ensures a double win from both optimising the business process itself and enables an extended reach of that into the network and IT plane, speeding up the process and improving its efficiency. This virtuous flywheel can often become a force-multiplier that tremendously benefits the organisation for relatively little upfront effort.

How can CACI help?

CACI’s expert team comprises multidisciplined IT, networking infrastructure and consultant and automation engineers with extensive experience in network automation. We can support and consult on every aspect of your organisation’s network from its architecture, design and deployment through to cloud architecture adoption and deployment, as well as maintaining an optimised managed network service.

To learn more about the impact of network automation and how to sell its value to the C-suite, please read our e-book “How to sell the value of network automation to the C-suite”. You can also get in touch with the team here.

Network Automation and NetDevOps

Top network automation trends in 2024

Posted on: 15 February 2024

Network automation has become increasingly prevalent in enterprises and IT organisations over the years, with its growth showing no signs of slowing down.

In fact, as of 2024, the Network Automation Market size is estimated at USD 25.16 billion (GBP 19.78 billion), expected to reach USD 60.59 billion (GBP 47.65 billion) by 2029. By 2028, a growth rate of 20% is predicted in this sector in the UK. Within CACI, we are seeing a higher demand for network automation than ever before, supporting our clients in NetDevOps, platform engineering and network observability.

So, how is the network automation space evolving, and what are the top network automation trends that are steering the direction of the market in 2024?

Hyperautomation

With the increasing complexity of networks that has come with the proliferation of devices, an ever-growing volume of data and the adoption of emerging technologies in enterprises and organisations, manual network management practices have become increasingly difficult to uphold. This is where hyperautomation has been proving itself to be vital for operational resilience into 2024.

As an advanced approach that integrates artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), robotic process automation (RPA), process mining and other automation technologies, hyperautomation streamlines complex network operations by not only automating repetitive tasks, but the overall decision-making process. This augments central log management systems such as SIEM and SOAR with functions to establish operationally resilient business processes that increase productivity and decrease human involvement. Protocols such as gNMI and gRPC for streaming telemetry and the increased adoption of service mesh and overlay networking mean that network telemetry and event logging are now growing to a state where no one human can adequately “parse the logs” for an event. Therefore, the time is ripe for AI and ML to push business value through AIOps practices to help find the ubiquitous “needle” in the ever-growing haystack.

Enterprises shifting towards hyperautomation this year will find themselves improving their security and operational efficiency, reducing their operational overhead and margin of human error and bolstering their network’s resilience and responsiveness. When combined with ITSM tooling such as ServiceNow for self-service delivery, hyperautomation can truly transcend the IT infrastructure silo and enter the realm of business by achieving wins in business process automation (BPA) to push the enterprise into true digital transformation.

Increasing dependence on Network Source of Truth (NSoT)

With an increasing importance placed on agility, scalability and security in network operations, NSoT is proving to be indispensable in 2024, achieving everything the CMDB hoped for and more.

As a centralised repository of network-related data that manages IP addresses (IPAM), devices and network configurations and supplies a single source of truth from these, NSoT has been revolutionising network infrastructure management and orchestration by addressing challenges brought on by complex modern networks to ensure that operational teams can continue to understand their infrastructure. It also ensures that data is not siloed across an organisation and that managing network objects and devices can be done easily and efficiently, while also promoting accurate data sharing via data modelling with YAML and YANG and open integration via API into other BSS, OSS and NMS systems.

Enterprises and organisations that leverage the benefits of centralising their network information through NSoT this year will gain a clearer, more comprehensive view of their network, generating more efficient and effective overall network operations. Not to mention, many NSoT repositories are much more well-refined than their CMDB predecessors, and some – such as NetBox – are truly a joy to use in daily Day 2 operations life compared to the clunky ITSMs of old.

Adoption of Network as Service (NaaS)

Network as a Service (NaaS) has been altering the management and deployment of networking infrastructure in 2024. With the rise of digital transformation and cloud adoption in businesses, this cloud-based service model enables on-demand access and the utilisation of networking resources, allowing enterprises and organisations to supply scalable, flexible solutions that meet ever-changing business demands.

As the concept gains popularity, service providers have begun offering a range of NaaS solutions, from basic connectivity services such as virtual private networks (VPNs) and wide area networks (WANs) to the more advanced offerings of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV).

These technologies have empowered businesses to streamline their network management, enhance performance and lower costs. NaaS also has its place at the table against its aaS siblings (IaaS, PaaS and SaaS), pushing the previously immovable, static-driven domain of network provisioning into a much more dynamic, elastic and OpEx-driven capability for modern enterprise and service providers alike.

Network functions virtualisation (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN)

A symbiotic relationship between network functions virtualisation (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN) and network automation is proving to be instrumental in bolstering agility, responsiveness and intelligent network infrastructure as the year is underway. As is often opined by many network vendors, “MPLS are dead, long live SD-WAN”; which, while not 100% factually correct (we still see demand in the SP space for MPLS and MPLS-like technologies such as PCEP and SR), is certainly directionally correct in our client base across finance, telco, media, utilities and increasingly government and public sectors.

NFV enables the decoupling of hardware from software, as well as the deployment of network services without physical infrastructure constraints. SDN, on the other hand, centralises network control through programmable software, allowing for the dynamic, automated configuration of network resources. Together, they streamline operations and ensure advanced technologies will be deployed effectively, such as AI-driven analytics and intent-based networking (IBN).

We’re seeing increased adoption of NFV via network virtual appliances (NVA) deployed into public cloud environments like Azure and AWS for some of our clients, as well as an increasing trend towards packet fabric brokers such as Equinix Fabric and Megaport MVE to create internet exchange (IX), cloud exchange (CX) and related gateway-like functionality as the enterprise trend towards multicloud grows a whole gamut of SDCI cloud dedicated interconnects to stitch together all the XaaS components that modern enterprises require.

Intent-based networking (IBN)

As businesses continue to lean into establishing efficient, prompt and precise best practices when it comes to network automation, intent-based networking (IBN) has been an up-and-coming approach to implement. This follows wider initiatives in the network industry to push “up the stack” with overlay networking technologies such as SD-WAN, service mesh and cloud native supplanting traditional Underlay Network approaches in Enterprise Application provision.

With the inefficiencies that can come with traditional networks and manual input, IBN has come to network operations teams’ rescue by defining business objectives in high-level, abstract manners that ensure the network can automatically configure and optimise itself to meet said objectives. Network operations teams that can devote more time and effort to strategic activities versus labour-intensive manual configurations will notice significant improvements in the overall network agility, reductions in time-to-delivery and better alignment with the wider organisation’s goals. IBN also brings intelligence and self-healing capabilities to networks— in case of changes or anomalies detected in the network, it enables the network to automatically adapt itself to address those changes while maintaining the desired outcome, bolstering network reliability and minimising downtime.

As more organisations realise the benefits of implementing this approach, the rise of intent-based networking is expected to continue, reshaping the network industry as we know it. The SDx revolution is truly here to stay, and the move of influence of the network up the stack will only increase as reliance on interconnection of all aspects becomes the norm.

How CACI can support your network automation journey?

CACI is adept at a plethora of IT, networking and cloud technologies. Our trained cohort of network automation engineers and consultants are ready and willing to share their industry knowledge to benefit your unique network automation requirements.

From NSoT through CI/CD, version control, observability, operational state verification, network programming and orchestration, our expert consulting engineers have architected, designed, built and automated some of the UK’s largest enterprise, service provider and data centre networks, with our deep heritage in network engineering spanning over 20 years.

Take a look at Network Automation and NetDevOps at CACI to learn more about some of the technologies, frameworks, protocols and capabilities we have, from YAML, YANG, Python, Go, Terraform, IaC, API, REST, Batfish, Git, NetBox and beyond.

To find out more about enhancing your network automation journey, get in touch with us today.

What is Network Automation?

Posted on: 23 January 2024

Network Automation and NetDevOps are hot topics in the network engineering world right now, but as with many new concepts, it can be confusing to decipher the meaning from the noise in the quest to achieving optimal efficiency and agility of network operations.

A useful starting point would be to first define what network automation is not:

Network automation is not just automated configuration generation or inventory gathering
It is not just using the same network management system (NMS) as today but faster
It is not just performing patching and OS upgrades faster, or network engineers suddenly becoming software developers
Network automation is not going to work in isolation of changing lifecycle and deployment processes, nor is it a magic toolbox of all-encompassing applications, frameworks and code.

At CACI, we view network automation as both a technology and a business transformation. It is as much a cultural shift from legacy deployment and operations processes as it is a set of tools and technology to implement speed, agility and consistency in your network operations. Infrastructure is changing fast, and with Gartner reporting 80% of enterprises will close their traditional data centres by 2025, the only constant in networking is that change will persist at faster clip.

So, how does Network Automation work? What differentiates network automation from NetDevOps? What difference can it make to modern IT operations, and which best practices, technologies and tools should you be aware of to successfully begin your network automation journey?

How does Network Automation work?

Network Automation implements learnings from DevOps developments within the software development world into low-level network infrastructure, using software tools to automate network provisioning and operations. This includes techniques such as:

Anomaly detection
Pre/post-change validation
Topology mapping
Fault remediation
Compliance checks
Templated configuration
Firmware upgrades
Software qualification
Inventory reporting.

In understanding how these differ from traditional network engineering approaches, it is important to consider the drivers for network automation in the post-cloud era – specifically virtualisation, containerisation, public cloud and DevOps. These technologies and approaches are more highly scaled and ephemeral than traditional IT Infrastructure, and are not compatible with legacy network engineering practices like:

Using traditional methodology to manage infrastructure as “pets” rather than “cattle”
- Box-by-box manual login, typing CLI commands, copy-pasting into an SSH session, etc.
“Snowflake networks” which don’t follow consistent design patterns
Outdated (or non-existent) static network documentation
Lack of network validation and testing.

Network automation aims to change all this, but to do so, must overcome some obstacles:

Cross-domain skills are required in both networking and coding
Some network vendors do not supply good API or streaming telemetry support
Screen scraping CLIs can be unreliable as CLI output differs even between products of the same device family.
Cultural resistance to changes in both tooling and practice
Lack of buy-in or sponsorship from the executive level can compound these behaviours.

What differentiates network automation from NetDevOps?

You may also have heard of “NetDevOps” and be wondering how – or if – this differs from network automation. Within CACI, we see the following key differences:

We often see our clients use a blend of both in practice as they go through the automation adoption curve into the automation maturity path, from ad-hoc automation, through structured automation, into orchestration and beyond:

What difference can network automation make to modern IT operations?

Network automation aims to deliver a myriad of business efficiencies to IT operations. This has proven to be transformational across our wide and varied client base, with improvements demonstrated in the following ways:

Increased efficiency

Much of networking is repetition in differing flavours – reusing the same routing protocol, switching architecture, edge topology or campus deployment. A network engineer is often repeating a task they’ve done several times before, with only slight functional variations. Network automation saves time and costs by making processes more flexible and agile, and force-multiplying the efforts of a network engineering task into multiple concurrent outputs.

Reduced errors

Networking can be monotonous, and monotony combined with legacy deployment methodology can cause repetition of the same error. Network automation reduces these errors – particularly in repetitive tasks – to lower the chances of reoccurrence. When combined with baked-in, systems-led consistency checking, many common – but easily-avoidable – errors can be mitigated.

Greater standardisation

Networks are perhaps uniquely both the most and least standardised element of the IT stack. While it is easy to have a clean “whiteboard architecture” for higher-level concerns such as application development, the network must often deal with the physical constraints of the real world, which, if you’ve ever tried to travel to a destination you’ve not been to before, can be messy, confusing and non-sensical. Network automation ensures the starting point for a network deployment is consistent and encourages system-level thinking across an IT network estate over project deployment-led unique “snowflake” topologies.

Improved security

Increased security often comes as a by-product of the standardisation and increased efficiency that network automation brings. Most security exploits are exploits of inconsistency, lack of adherence to best practice or related – which ultimately pivot around “holes” left in a network (often accidentally) due to rushing or not seeing a potential backdoor, open port, misconfiguration or enablement of an insecure protocol. When combined with modern observability approaches like streaming telemetry and AIOps, network automation can help enforce high levels of security practice and hardening across an IT estate.

Cost savings

Given its position as the base of the tech stack, the network is often a costly proposition – with vertically-integrated network vendors, costly telco circuit connectivity, expensive physical world hosting and colocation costs, and so on – the network is often a “get it right first time” endeavour which can be cost-prohibitive to change once live and in service. Network automation encourages cost savings through the creation of right-the-first-time and flexible network topologies and in performing design validation which can minimise the amount of equipment, licensing, ports and feature sets required to run a desired network state.

Improved scalability

As both consumer and enterprise expectations of scale are set by the leading web scalers of the world, the enterprise increasingly expects the flexibility to scale both higher and lower levels of the IT stack to larger and more seamless sizes, topologies and use cases. Network automation aids in achieving this through the enforcement of consistency, modularisation, standardisation and repeatability for network operations.

Faster service delivery

IT service delivery is increasingly moving away from being ticket-led to self-service, with the lower-level infrastructure elements expected to be delivered much faster than the traditional six-to-eight-week lag times of old. As telco infrastructure moves through a similar self-service revolution, so too does the enterprise network require the ability for self-service, catalogue-driven turn-up and modularised deployment. Network automation enables this by optimising network performance to the required parameters of newer services and applications in the modern enterprise.

What are the best practices for network automation?

Network automation is as much a cultural transformation as it is a technology transformation. Much as DevOps disrupted traditional ITIL and waterfall approaches, NetDevOps similarly disrupts current network engineering practices. We find the following best practices to be beneficial when moving towards network automation:

Choose one thing initially to automate

Pivot around either your biggest pain point or most repetitive task
Don’t try to take on too much at once. Network automation is about lots of small, repeated, well-implemented gains which instil confidence in the wider business
People love automation, they don’t want to be automated. The biggest barrier to adopting automation will be keeping colleagues and stakeholders on-side with your efforts by showing the reward of that they provide to them and to the wider business.

Choose tooling carefully

Stay away from the “latest shiny” and pick open, well-used tools with large libraries of pre-canned vendor, protocol and topology integrations, and human-readable configuration and deployment languages
Maintain your specific business context during tool selection
Think ahead for talent acquisition and retention – writing custom Golang provisioning application might be handy today, but you could struggle to get others involved if the author decides to leave the business.

Optimise for code reusability

Build and use version control systems such as Git, GitHub and Azure DevOps from day one and encourage or even mandate their use
Advocate for the sharing of functions, modules, routines and snippets written within code, runbooks, IaC and state files within scrapbooks and sandpits. The flywheel of productivity increases exponentially within NetDevOps as increasingly more “we’ve done that before” coding and practices accelerate the development of newer, more complex routines, IaC runbooks and functions
Code should be written with reuse and future considerations in mind. While it may be tempting to “save ten minutes” so as to not functionise, modularise or structure code, this will catch up with you in the future.

Use templating for configuration generation

Templating programmatically generates the vendor-specific syntax for a network device based on a disaggregated, vendor-neutral input format (such as Jinja2, Mako or Markdown) which is later combined with data (such as specific VLANs, IP Addresses or FQDNs) to generate the vendor-specific syntax (such as Cisco IOS, Arista EOS or Juniper Junos) for the network device
The act of creating the templates has an added by-product of forcing you to perform design validation. If your design document doesn’t have a section covering something you need template syntax for, it could well be due for an up-issue
Templates become a common language for network intent that are readable by all network engineers regardless of their individual network vendor and technology background, aiding in time to onboard new staff and ensuring shared understanding of business context around the IT network.

Which tools, frameworks and languages enable network automation?

There are a myriad of network automation tools, frameworks, languages and technologies available today. Deciphering these can be confusing, but a good starting point is categorising the distinct types of network automation tooling available:

Network Configuration and Change Management (NCCM)

Enable patching, compliance and deployment (rollout)
Often align to network management systems (NMS) or BSS/OSS (Telco space)

Network Orchestration

Enable programmatic device access (CLI, API, SSH, SNMP)
Often align to DevOps engineering usage

Policy-based Automation

Abstract network device box-by-box logic into estate-wide, policy-driven control
Often align to industry frameworks and controls (SOC2, HIPAA, CIS, PCI/DSS)

Intent-Based Networking Systems (IBNS)

Translate business intent through to underlying network configuration and policy
Are starting to become the “new NMS”

It would be exhaustive to list all possible tools, frameworks and languages available today, but these are some of our most seen within our client base today. Our current favourites can be seen in What are the most useful NetDevOps Tools in 2023?:

Tools

Terraform – An open-source automation and orchestration tool capable of building cloud, network and IT infrastructure based on input Infrastructure as Code (IaC) code via HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) that defines all attributes of the device and configuration blueprint required. Terraform is highly flexible and has a vast array of pre-built modules and providers for most network engineering concerns via the Terraform Registry.
Ansible – An open-source automation and orchestration tool typically used to configure within the device rather than provision the underlying Baremetal or cloud infrastructure the cloud, network or IT device sits atop, which is based on input IaC code via YAML that defines the attributes and device configuration required. Ansible is versatile and has a large cache of pre-built runbooks and integrations for network engineering concerns via Ansible Galaxy.
NetBox – The ubiquitous, open-source IP Address Management (IPAM) and Data Centre Infrastructure Management (DCIM) tool, which acts as the Network Source of Truth (NSoT) to hold a more detailed view of network devices, topology and state than could be achieved via alternative approaches such as spreadsheet or CMDB. NetBox is highly customisable, with a rich plugin ecosystem and customisable data models via YANG to adapt around business-specific topology data models.
Git – The de facto version control system, which is the underlying application that powers GitHub and GitLab and supplies a mechanism to store IaC, configuration and code artefacts in a distributed, consistent and version-controlled manner. Git is pivotal in enabling the controlled collaboration on network automation activities across a distributed workforce while maintaining the compliance and controls required within the enterprise environment.

Frameworks

Robot framework: A generic test automation framework allowing network automation code and IaC runbooks to run through acceptance testing and test-driven development (TDD) via a keyword-driven testing framework with a tabular format for test result representation. It is often used in conjunction with tools such as pyATS, Genie, Cisco NSO and Juniper NITA.
PEP guidelines: Short for Python Enhancement Proposals (PEP), these are to Python what RFCs are to network engineering, and provide prescriptive advice on setting out, using, structuring and interacting with Python scripts. The most commonly known of these is the PEP8 – Style Guide for Python.
Cisco NADM: The Cisco Network Automation Delivery Model (NADM) is a guide on how to build an organisation within a business around an automation practice, addressing both the human aspect as well as some of the tooling, daily practices, procedures, operations and capabilities that a network automation practice would need to take traction in an IT enterprise landscape.

Languages

Python: The de facto network automation coding language, utilised as the underlying programming language in tools from NetBox, Nornir, Batfish, SuzieQ, Netmiko, Scrapli, Aerleon, NAPALM and more, popularised by its extensive network engineering-focused library within PyPi. Python is the Swiss army knife of NetDevOps, able to turn its hand to ad-hoc scripting tasks through to full-blown web application development using Flask or API gateway hosting using FastAPI.
Golang: An upcoming programming language, which benefits over Python in terms of speed via a compiler-based approach, parallel-execution, built-in testing and concurrency capabilities when compared to Python. On the downside, it has a significantly steeper learning curve than Python for new entrants into the realm of development and has far fewer network engineering library components available to use.

What does the future of network automation look like?

The demand for network automation and NetDevOps professionals is undoubtedly on the rise, a trend that we at CACI expect to continue as budgetary pressures from the macroeconomic climate accelerate and trends like artificial intelligence (AI) begin to challenge the status quo and push businesses to deliver seamless, scalable network fabrics with more expectation of self-service and less tolerance of outage, delay or error. We see more of our clients moving up through the automation maturity path towards frictionless and autonomous network estates and expect this to accelerate through the coming years with ancillary trends such as NaaS (Network as a Service), SDN (Software Defined Networking) and NetDevOps set to continue and embed the NetEng Team firmly into the forthcoming platform engineering teams of tomorrow.

How can CACI help you on your network automation journey?

With our proven track record, CACI Network Services is adept at a plethora of IT, networking and cloud technologies. Our trained cohort of high calibre network automation engineers and consultants are ready and willing to share their industry knowledge to benefit your unique network automation and NetDevOps requirements. We are a trusted advisor that ensures every team member is equipped with the necessary network engineering knowledge from vendors such as Cisco, Arista and Juniper, along with NetDevOps knowledge in aspects such as Python for application Development, NetBox for IPAM and NSoT, Git for version control, YAML for CI/CD pipeline deployment and more.

Our in-house experts have architected, designed, built and automated some of the UK’s largest enterprise, service provider and data centre networks, with our deep heritage in network engineering spanning over 20 years across a variety of ISP, enterprise, cloud and telco environments for industries ranging from government and utilities to finance and media.

Get in touch with us today to discuss more about your network automation and NetDevOps requirements to optimise your business IT network for today and beyond.