How Network Orchestration Is Scaling Automation for Success

Networks aren't new to us.

Technology is changing the way people live and do business. And with technology, the nature of networks changes too.

The network infrastructure is an essential layer of connectivity in any organization. It’s the foundation for service delivery and business transactions.

Every organization’s goal is to deliver more and more services to its customers while reducing costs. With networks becoming fluid, users aren’t tied to one place. Businesses now need a way of working efficiently across mission-critical systems and devices.

This has led organizations to invest in network automation software, virtualization, and multi-cloud environments that help deliver services faster and more efficiently.

When it comes to these large complex networks, how can you keep up with the pace of digital transformation?

Innovative businesses recognize that network orchestration can help them adapt to these changes and capture new growth opportunities while making their business models more agile and efficient.

A quickly expanding enterprise is more likely to have multiple domains and cross-domain connections across various network and security zones. This leads to an increasing need for virtualization techniques to control network access, visibility, and modernization efforts.

Network orchestration has emerged as the next step in the evolution of network management of complex and heterogeneous networks. Orchestration is gaining traction among enterprises that need to automate network operations to meet advanced business requirements.

It has proven critical in solving the challenges network and IT operations teams face daily in a dynamic business environment by automating many network management tasks and processes.

Network orchestration is the next step in network automation. While automation entails a single operation run without human involvement, service orchestration is about automating entire processes or a series of interrelated tasks.

For example, the IT team needs to build a VLAN for a particular application. IT staff must log in to each router and configure it through CLI or GUI in the traditional method. On the other hand, network orchestration automatically detects the network topology and its requirements for constructing a VLAN. It sends API calls to each vendor's device and performs an automatic transaction across all devices.

Why do businesses need network orchestration?

The Internet of Things (IoT) is synonymous with the vision of an integrated, inter-networked, and unified environment that enables the coordination of devices, machines, and various systems throughout industries. The phrase describes the network architecture that connects everything from tiny sensors to huge industry machinery across the physical world.

This interconnectivity of physical systems creates immense opportunities for businesses to transform their services and operations. As current network services and protocols look insufficient to cope with the present-day demands, the networking industry is rapidly shifting toward network orchestration solutions capable of fully automating processes and providing secure connectivity to various business services.

It allows service providers to be more responsive to customer demands while maintaining the quality of service (QoS) and being cost-conscious. This helps service providers deliver secure and quick services to their customers while making their business models more agile and efficient.

Orchestration of network devices is vital for optimizing both security and operational efficiency. Network orchestration helps troubleshoot, monitor, and resolve problems faster. Orchestrating network functions helps remove potential human error from configuration tasks and allows for more automation to further improve network performance.

Network orchestrators can turn off silos of different systems and networks, which operate as independent islands within an organization. Network orchestration software acts as a glue that holds them together, resulting in a seamlessly integrated experience for all users.

Who needs network orchestration?

Network orchestration is often beneficial to businesses with 20 or more network devices or 250 or more consumers.

Businesses that are gaining IoT devices or are hosting a broad collection of users with different demands should look at how network orchestration can help them accomplish their goals and reduce time to deploy new services.

Orchestration can also be a savior for organizations that deploy applications in their data centers or need stringent data security standards.

How does network orchestration work?

A network can be complicated, especially when dealing with a multi-vendor environment, which may vary by market verticals and hardware types. Network orchestration helps standardize processes used to deploy services across an organization. It allows enterprises to efficiently implement many kinds of services, including scaling their network in new markets.

Network orchestration is a way of bringing network management together into an integrated system.

When we think about network orchestration, we imagine musical orchestras. It's like a conductor in an orchestra, waving a big baton and keeping everything in line. Just as an orchestra has different players, orchestrations also deploy a range of technologies – multiple distributed control systems and programmable switches, for example. Orchestrating the components is often made possible by network controllers.

A network orchestration solution uses network controllers and programmable network devices (such as SD-WAN) to systematically execute what's required, rather than having individuals or software take a stab at it.

Let's say there’s a lot of video traffic on the network. The solution should allocate more bandwidth to that portion of the network (in this case, to accommodate all that video traffic) without having the IT staff manually reconfigure things and perform application-specific coding along with business logic.

Network orchestration can be centralized or distributed, but at its heart, it's a way for network operators to optimize their networks and maximize their performance. Centralized network orchestration works by having one central controller responsible for ensuring the entire infrastructure runs as expected.

Distributed network orchestration, on the other hand, gives control of different parts of a network to individual controllers that communicate with each other through a network protocol (such as CANopen or UCP).

Network orchestration tools

Today, network orchestration has become a crucial tool for enterprise networks. Network orchestration tools help manage and optimize resources within the networking infrastructure (including virtual networks, network devices, and the cloud infrastructure).

They manage the end-to-end life cycle of networking devices, deploying them in a virtualized environment and then optimizing their configurations per pre-defined policies. All of this is accomplished via automation, with vendors making their network orchestration tools available via APIs and using code to push software and configuration changes out to forwarding elements.

The success of these tools largely depends on how well they’re integrated with other processes and applications used by the organization. Many companies have recognized the importance of these tools and started deploying network orchestration tools to improve their network management and optimization capabilities for a better user experience.

What to look for when comparing network orchestration tools? 

NetOps teams can use network orchestration tools for public, private, and hybrid cloud service providers. They can also be used for physical or virtual workloads and work on various networks, including bare metal or virtualized mission-critical applications, containers, large data centers, and so on.

Here are the main characteristics and features to consider when looking for a good network orchestration software solution:

• Device inventory: The software should be able to retrieve device inventory data either directly or via an API. Information such as vendor, operating system, serial number, and so on are usually included in inventory.
• Device, vendor, and environment-agnostic: Since corporate networks are built on multi-vendor environments, the tools must be device, vendor, and environment agnostic.
• Context, config, and state aware: The application should verify these network parameters before performing any orchestration operation on a network. These checks ensure that network changes provide the expected result without introducing any inconsistencies.
• Logging, backup, and restore: The software solution must provide logs of every network activity to determine what happened for auditing or troubleshooting purposes. It should also support scheduled configuration backups and rollback capabilities in the event of a failure.
• Single pane of control: The orchestration tool should provide admins a centralized dashboard to direct and manage operations across the network infrastructure. To accomplish this, the tool should be able to integrate with other tools and management platforms using REST APIs.

Network automation vs. network orchestration

To increase the effectiveness of the network in accomplishing business goals, automation and orchestration are critical.

The terms network automation and network orchestration are frequently used interchangeably, but they’re very different in nature. Network engineers need to thoroughly understand automation and orchestration concepts to plan and grow their networks.

Network orchestration

Network orchestration is the automation of complex networking tasks using software that facilitates automated event-triggered orders and manual single or mass task orders. It requires a set of tools to work together to deliver complete automation functionality with human intervention capabilities.

It’s similar to software development because it covers the whole network lifecycle regardless of whether it’s local, remote, or cloud. Network orchestration platforms automate how organizations build, configure, monitor, and update their network. 

YANG, TOSCA, YAML, and Heat Orchestration templates are the most often used modeling or templating languages. This human-consumable vision enables centralized activity control, ensuring network efficiency and quality. Orchestration is more network-aware, initiating workflows depending on device statuses and configurations.

For example, provisioning new network services in the existing infrastructure is a process that can be easily handled using orchestration.

Network automation

Network automation as a process can describe a vast number of technologies and tools from different vendors being used to automate a specific or a narrow set of tasks with no human intervention. In this context, it’s one part of network orchestration. 

Automation uses scripting languages or network automation tools to automate repetitive tasks. This description suggests minimal human involvement until failure occurs, resulting in a fallout necessitating a network engineer's input.

For example, pushing new configuration changes into network devices is a frequent task that network engineers can automate to reduce errors due to human intervention.

Types of network orchestration

Networks are becoming increasingly complex.

Service providers are trying to offer various applications and services, and enterprises are deploying many virtual machines (VMs) with diverse applications. The resulting complexity increases the total cost of managing and operating these networks.

Network orchestration is about simplifying network operations (NetOps) by automating the network. There are three major categories of orchestration: policy-based automation, software-defined networking, and intent-based networking. 

Policy-based automation

Policy-based automation (PBA) is the most basic form of a network orchestration system that can be applied to multiple use cases for network optimization. It relies on a set of policies to make decisions about network traffic. In many cases, it’ll contain one or more network elements that include devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, wireless access points, and load balancers. A policy engine helps enforce these policies.

The policies define how the network elements should work together to reach the desired state for the network. Policies can be set at the data center level or with a defined scope, such as based on the type of workload they're handling or even where the workloads are located.

Large businesses can effectively bundle devices and services into logical categories that reflect important aspects of their business by creating rules. This contextualizes resource allocation at the business level while allowing IT teams to comprehend the underlying architecture that supports those operations.

This technique is superior to more primitive automation methods such as network change and configuration management (NCCM). Still, policies are frequently specified in a template style, which might pose additional difficulties. Policy-based automation is commonly done with GUI dashboards since it’s widely regarded as one of the simplest ways to deploy changes across devices.

Software-defined networking

Software-defined networking (SDN) is a relatively new technology that controls and routes network traffic under software control. It emerged as a response to the massive, complex, and static networks used in enterprises. Businesses are increasingly shifting to SDN and network function virtualization (NFV) platforms, which allows them to achieve higher levels of agility and rapid deployment.

It gives network administrators server-like control of their applications across a physical network. This differs from traditional hardware-centric networking because now you can move workloads across physical server hardware.

SDN provides a more advanced kind of network orchestration. Unlike PBA, it’s directly programmable and separates the application and controller layers, allowing more network flexibility and real-time changes.

Provisioning, monitoring, and configuration management are just a few management services businesses can programmatically manage with SDN controllers. This makes it more advanced than PBA but not as advanced as Intent-based networking systems. Most software-defined networks can be vendor-neutral, simplifying design and enabling a more dynamic ecosystem, thanks to the flexibility of virtualization and software.

Intent-based networking systems

In the world of network orchestration, intent-based networking systems (IBNS) use artificial intelligence (AI) to optimize the network for a human-specific intent. Instead of coding, network administrators define intent as an outcome or business objective that considers the people, devices, data, and applications and maps out which workloads can be moved to software-defined networks and which ones are better served across traditional networks.

For example, an intent might be to ensure that all IoT devices on the network are reachable and working correctly. Intent-based approaches allow network administrators to define these objectives without designing or coding when new devices are added to the network, thus making it easier to operate and maintain networks.

IBNS is the most sophisticated type of network orchestration since it does much of the technical work itself and allows network teams to adjust the machine learning (ML) algorithms to improve their performance. Most of the manual effort is made during the training of the ML algorithm and the intent translation.

The IBNS receives instructions, which the algorithm interprets as the network's overarching objectives. This might be particular service level agreement (SLA) levels for device groups and apps or specified QoS standards that the company wants to follow at all times.

Following approval, the AI implements the modifications it believes will best fit the instructions' purpose and establishes a feedback loop to monitor the network as time passes. Data will be made accessible to both the ML algorithm and administrators over time, allowing them to assess how effective the intent-based network is at executing any given set of instructions.

While this is likely the most efficient method of deploying orchestration at scale, it depends entirely on the pace with which machine learning algorithms reach new milestones, which might require more time depending on the intent.

Challenges of network orchestration

Network orchestration is a process that aims at allowing business network managers to work with dynamically changing topologies. In essence, it helps manage new devices and connections by automatically configuring them or installing the required software.

Compared to traditional manual procedures, the main advantage of this practice is the automation of a large part of work and speedy network management. On the other hand, as with everything in IT, network orchestration has its challenges.

Hybrid network

As a general rule, network orchestration solutions function well with equipment or software offered by the same vendor. However, if you leave the favored vendor environment, your multi-vendor capabilities are severely constrained.

As a result, it's not uncommon for suppliers to connect hardware sales possibilities to software sales. This is a hindrance to hybrid and multi-vendor networks. Customer migration to a single vendor network is the goal of this method, which is not practical for most businesses.

Security issues

Due to limited management control, the public interfaces that allow network programmability expose software networks to new forms of cyber attacks. This necessitates developing a unified multi-level security architecture that includes policies and procedures for software integrity, dynamic threat detection and mitigation, and user authentication.

Integration issues

In a move from standalone networks to integrated networks, the integration of network orchestrators presents a few technical challenges to implement. Organizations that have an existing framework in place might not be able to use the maturity of network orchestration with business networks since the two are fundamentally different concepts.

Targeting a heterogeneous distributed environment becomes a cumbersome task when it comes to network orchestration.

Benefits of network orchestration

Network orchestration is a method that helps organizations in the networking industry manage their networks and products. There are various benefits of network orchestration, helping businesses achieve their operations and other goals.

Increased workflow visibility

A better understanding of the physical components and workloads that transit a network is gained through the orchestration of the different network fabrics. Utilizing RESTful APIs also assists in gathering essential data from third-party management systems that provide a full view of the storage or network resource ecosystem for the NetOps team.

This provides the network teams a more accurate and comprehensive picture of how and where virtual demands affect the network infrastructure.

Better task management and control

Network orchestration plays a crucial role in fields such as security, where procedures can be automated and monitored, and DevOps, where numerous activities can be automated and simplified for quicker development. Since the tool would be managing all the different tasks and workflows, it would make network management much easier for network professionals.

Reduced time to market

Provisioning capabilities are made possible by real-time inventory data and optimal resource allocations. As a result, the infrastructure's service control complexity is substantially reduced. With network orchestration, services can be delivered fast, even in multi-layer, multi-vendor systems. Consequently, businesses can significantly reduce latency and provide high-quality services in a shorter time frame.

In this scenario, a shorter time to market helps companies provide more value to their consumers, including both corporations and individuals.

Optimize your network performance

For customers with changing needs, the ability to upgrade and modify service settings on the fly is important.

Network orchestration enables networks to expand as necessary, supply network services across different platforms, and deploy resources as required, all of which make the network more flexible and responsive. 

Containers allow businesses to run and deploy distributed apps without the need for a dedicated VM. Use container orchestration software to automate the process of running instances, provisioning hosts, and linking containers.