network orchestration
What is network orchestration?
Network orchestration is the use of a software-defined network controller that facilitates the creation of network and network security services to achieve business goals.
Network orchestration tools use an end-to-end centralized management plane, and network administrators can input high-level business requirements into the tools. The centralized controller automatically converts those business requirements into network configuration commands. It then pushes the configurations to the appropriate switching and routing hardware on the administrator's behalf.
Because network orchestration relies on centralized control and management, it delivers an end-to-end view of the network. This view includes health, performance and security information that administrators can use to monitor corporate networks proactively from a single source. This network overview does the following:
- Simplifies network observability.
- Improves operational efficiency.
- Empowers NetOps and NetSecOps teams to identify and remediate network security and performance issues quicker than with a series of disjoined monitoring and management tools.
What are the benefits of network orchestration?
Before network orchestration tools came to the market, administrators had to research the business requirements of new network service moves, adds or changes. Admins then proceeded to translate those business needs into network configuration syntax that enabled the necessary traffic flow, prioritization and security. Not only was this a time-consuming process, but it also led to misconfiguration errors and unexpected changes in data flows that commonly led to poor performance and gaps in security.
Modern orchestration tools have built-in intelligence about the network, including information about the following:
- Configuration.
- Infrastructure.
- Users.
- Devices.
- Traffic patterns.
Network administrators input the business intent into tools, as opposed to network-specific configuration commands. The tools proceed to translate that intent into configurations based on standards-based best practices.
Additionally, many tools go one step further to alert if proposed changes will negatively affect existing configurations. This enables network administrators to implement complex configurations at a faster rate and with a higher degree of success.
What's the difference between network automation and orchestration?
Network automation tools create configurations and push them to network devices on the administrator's behalf. Network orchestration relies heavily on automation, but with the added benefit of intent-based networking (IBN).
At its core, IBN enables administrators to inform the orchestration tool which devices it needs to configure based on business goals. Network administrators perform this with the orchestration tool's graphical user interface and a series of high-level dropdowns and input boxes.
Once administrators place this high-level information into the orchestration tool, it creates the appropriate configuration syntax and deploys those network service policies to the necessary network components. Network orchestration takes network automation capabilities and wraps IBN intelligence around it. This shortens the time it takes to create, validate and push configurations into production environments.
What is a network orchestration platform?
Enterprise Wi-Fi and software-defined WAN (SD-WAN) network management tools have long used centralized controllers to build and deploy 802.11-based networks and intelligent wide area connections. The controllers centrally manage network policies and uniformly push them to wireless access points and remote SD-WAN routers.
Network orchestration uses a similar concept but applies it to wired campus networks and data centers. The process ensures that policies are uniform from end to end and adhere to best practices.
The network orchestration process is as follows:
- Network administrators input high-level business objectives into the tool.
- The tool validates the business intent and triggers the necessary network configuration syntax required to meet those objectives.
- The tool identifies and remediates any deviations or service conflicts automatically or with the assistance of NetOps teams.
- The tool implements changes and continuously audits them to ensure the changes maintain the original business intent.
Because the network orchestration platform manages all network devices, it can also work as a centralized repository to collect vital network information on the health, performance and security of the entire network. NetOps teams can view this information directly on the platform or send the raw network telemetry data to external monitoring and alerting tools via a northbound application programming interface.
Who needs network orchestration?
Most network outages within enterprise organizations are due to manual configuration errors. Network orchestration is a must for mid- to large-sized organizations that need to reduce the risk of business outages that manual configuration mishaps create.
Because network orchestration tools have built-in intelligence, network administrators can also make changes with reduced staff headcount and less technical skill rather than manually configuring each network change on a hop-by-hop basis. This can free up critical network staff resources to work on more important matters, as orchestration tools eliminate much of the network change research and provisioning through intelligent automation.
