Selecting the Right Network Automation Technology
Understand how to select the right network automation technology that can support and accelerate productivity, cost reductions, and efficiency.
Tools vs. Platform: How to Choose the Right Approach for Network Automation
So, do you choose to build the capability in-house using existing technologies and open-source components (otherwise referred to as a tools approach), or do you take a platform approach and implement a fully functional, pre-integrated automation platform?
Let’s look at which approach is right for your organization.
The Value of A Tools Approach
The initial decision point for tool selection is whether to build the capability in-house using existing technologies and Open-Source components (tools approach), or to implement a fully functional, pre-integrated automation platform (platform approach).
With a tool-centric approach most of the efforts are focused on automating repetitive tasks to gain efficiencies. Business processes remain largely unchanged, with tools being used to automate standalone tasks within the process. The impact of these efforts can be meaningful for individuals — an engineer can perform 100 assignments in the time it previously took to complete one.
But, here is where tools fall short:
- Does Not Impact the Overall Process: Automation focused on specific tasks does not impact the overall process, because this approach neglects handoffs and other activities that occur beyond these tasks. Automation that addresses individual tasks but not the idle time from handoffs between teams provides limited value.
- Relies on Human-Centric Paradigm: A task-centric automation approach still uses a “human-centric” paradigm for process execution. Most activities and processes are designed around how much time it would take an average engineer to perform a task – so the work and the Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are based on human limits.
For example, if an engineer only has enough time to perform 2 prechecks in a maintenance window, then 2 pre-checks become the standard. The standard isn’t driven by technical requirements, its driven by a human limitation. The technical requirement may be better satisfied with 10 pre-checks, but there is not enough time for 10 pre-checks. With automation, the automation system can perform a pre-check in seconds as opposed to tens of minutes or hours. By moving from a “human-centric” paradigm to an automation-centric model, the team can let the system run 10, 15, 20+ prechecks in seconds, enabling the process to execute more efficiently and safely. The only way to do this is to move away from a model that automates individual tasks, and instead automates the entire process.
The Value of A Platform Approach
For automation to become truly transformative it must have the ability to reflect a machine-centric paradigm, which is only possible by taking a platform approach to automation and moving away from a tools-centric model. By automating an entire process, not just individual tasks, users gain the flexibility to do much more in much less time with fewer resources — making innovation possible.
Here are some of the advantages of choosing a platform approach over a tools approach:
Platform: Build vs. Buy
Creating an in-house automation platform requires significant effort, both in terms of building the platform and then in terms of operating, maintaining, and updating the platform. Approaches that depend on a CI/CD toolchain require a high level of ongoing maintenance, and have challenges associated with their ability to scale without requiring additional resources for ongoing care and feeding of the toolset. This creates additional burden on the automation team, as they not only have to focus resources on the development and implementation of the automation use cases, but also need to invest significant time, energy, and resources to first build the environment, and then to perform ongoing maintenance and development of the environment.
The alternative is to select an existing platform that meets the requirements, while providing additional capabilities that can further extend the functionality and flexibility of the automation system to scale and to support new use cases and emerging technologies.
This alternative provides a much faster path, as it requires no development cycles to establish the platform capabilities, so the automation team can immediately begin to develop and deploy automations – driving a much faster time to value than through any other method.
When comparing the option of building vs. buying a platform, the option is clear:
Itential Network Automation Platform
One of the main advantages of utilizing the pre-integrated platform is its ability to expose and interact with capabilities that already exist within your existing network.
For example, the illustration below is a screen capture from Itential’s Automation Studio, the primary interface for creation of automation workflows. The workflow shown provides automation of DNS activities. This flow is designed as a modular component, so it can be called via an API, or an automation catalog entry, or from another workflow. Some boxes indicate interactions with the Infoblox DNS system. The creation and consumption of this automation requires no software code development. It can be created by network engineers quickly and easily, enabling those specialists to directly participate and contribute to the NetDevOps environment.
The Itential Automation Platform is able to provide this level of ease-of-use and functionality by providing the following benefits:
- Pre-Built Integrations with more than 100 systems, and the ability to auto-generate integrations for in-house developed systems.
- Integrated security model with ability to control access at a granular API-call level, eliminating the need for a separate process for managing access, and eliminating the risk of running untested scripts or unmanaged access.
- No-code development and execution environment allows non-developers to create automations based on their technology domain expertise.
- Ability to expose functionality via API or automation catalog.
- Robust logging capabilities to enable product owners to collect operational data and report on key metrics to demonstrate realization of business benefits.
