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“R2-D2, you know better than to
trust a strange computer.” - C-3PO
The public Internet was not
purpose-built for the delivery of
real-time communications. How-
ever, delivering real-time com-
munications is essential for busi-
nesses, large and small, and it is
being done through the adoption
of modern software, network and
infrastructure paradigms. With the
ever-decreasing costs of these
technologies, the industry has
seen adoption from even the small-
est businesses in the most remote
parts of the world. An upstart oper-
ator can now leverage now general-
ly available technologies to provide
real-time communications services
alongside industry incumbents us-
ing more traditional paradigms.
Real-time communications can
be made ultra-reliable and high-
fidelity through combining network
automation, strategic peering
relationships and cloud-agnostic
points of presence (PoPs). Wheth-
er you are familiar with these
concepts or they’re something
that your company has not yet en-
countered, you will see why some
of the most forward-thinking firms
are driving adoption of and placing
their trust in these architectures
and technologies.
Network Automation
Network management has been
going through an evolution during
the past few years in which network
operators and organizations are
making automation a key driver in
their strategy for building and man-
aging their infrastructures. While
software-defined networking (SDN)
and network function virtualization
(NFV) tend to receive the most atten-
tion, there are a number of obstacles
that are making the transition difficult
and slowing adoption. In the interim,
however, there are intermediary steps
that operators can take to begin the
transition to more centrally managed
and automated networks. One such
step is the implementation of net-
work automation such as zero-touch
provisioning (ZTP).
A zero-touch network implies the
shift away from direct configuration
via command-line interface (CLI) of
network devices to the use of auto-
mation platforms. These platforms
come in a variety of forms, but have
the common goal of removing hu-
man interaction from the CLI by al-
lowing the creation of deterministic
environments through configuration
management. With ZTP, organiza-
tions can pre-determine everything
from baseline configurations to
more complex configurations such
as building configurations to imple-
ment a customer network that
spans a global IP backbone.
This can ensure that something
as simple as an interface descrip-
tion or a VLAN name follow the de-
signed naming conventions. We can
deterministically build everything
without concern over whether a BGP
(border gateway protocol) peering
was built correctly. Therefore, if your
BGP peers should always “send
communities,” then ZTP is your
best bet in being 100 percent de-
terministic. That’s compared to an
engineer who may mistakenly skip a
line of configuration due to manual
configuration from the CLI.
After provisioning is complete,
these same platforms can be used to
maintain networks. For example, using
tools like Ansible, network engineers
are beginning to build complex plat-
forms and create front- and backend
systems to manage an entire network
infrastructure. Imagine that the source
of truth of an environment now exists
within your automation platform’s
backend database instead of text files
of configurations that may or may not
be current and relevant.
Clearly, the benefits of this para-
digm are enormous. Engineers can
build platforms that routinely check
for changes in the live environment
and can take action against rogue
configurations that do not meet
By Ian
Reither
and
Jason
Craft
PTC
Corner
Smart
Architecture
INTERNATIONAL AGENTS
SECTION
The rise of network automation and shared
infrastructure in delivering real-time communications
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