Introduction to Network Automation

As your company’s network increases in size, tasks that were once easy to perform by hand become much more challenging. Testing and deploying network configuration changes, routine maintenance and configuration auditing often become an ordeal, leaving network managers with the choices of expanding the team or to automate where possible

Luckily, modern network infrastructure (such as routers, switches, and firewalls) can be easily controlled through automated interfaces. In general, network administrators can make changes by clicking through web-based interfaces or by typing commands into a command-line interface. The latter method can be automated, allowing automation software to define the state of network infrastructure automatically instead of requiring human intervention.

By automating every repetitive process involved in network maintenance and management, IT professionals can not only save themselves time and save their companies money, but ensure they can continually demonstrate their disaster recovery and compliance readiness. In this article, we’ll explore the concept of network automation. You’ll learn how to get started with this powerful technique and how it can positively impact your organisation.

What Is Network Automation?

In a nutshell, network automation comprises the tools and techniques used to speed up repetitive tasks on a network. Network admins frequently need to change (and test!) infrastructure configuration, maintain compliance and verify the status of their systems. To achieve this, they use a variety of network automation tools.

Like network monitoring platforms, network automation solutions are available in many shapes and sizes. Many routers, firewalls, and other network hardware can be managed as part of a vendor-specific ecosystem. Third-party vendors also produce network automation software that can manage multiple vendors.

Benefits and Use Cases

Any company whose IT department spends lots of time managing their network can benefit from network automation. Network automation also brings a few other benefits:

Repeatability and Reproducibility

Manually performing network maintenance tasks can be error-prone and difficult to manage in multi-vendor environments. With network automation, the goal for companies is to take advantage of standard processes for managing every piece of equipment on the network.

Ease of Debugging

‍As a result of the last point, solving issues that crop up is much easier when using a multi-vendor network automation solution. Companies can get a centralised view of their whole network, and report on the processes they automate, rather than looking through log files to determine the success of multiple scripts.

Faster Deployments

‍Although it can take a bit of effort to set up automation for the first time, subsequent changes and configuration deployments are fast and easy.

Maintaining compliance

‍Manually achieving and maintaining compliance with regulations can be challenging requiring frequent checks of every device’s configuration. With network automation, it’s easy—if the automated configuration is in compliance, so is the actual infrastructure.

Disaster Recovery

Restoring configurations to routers, switches, firewalls, or other networking equipment can be complex and requires specialist knowledge. Some network automation vendors specialise in automated recovery, lowering the skills required and time to restore during an outage.

How to Get Started With Network Automation

Incorporating network automation into an existing network can be done in pieces. Many companies utilise a process roughly similar to this one, which you can adapt to your company’s particular needs:

1) Determine what areas can be automated. Are there manual tasks that IT specialists perform frequently? Pay special attention to anything particularly repetitive or error-prone such as configuration backup.
2) Find the right automation tool for the job. While some hardware ecosystems such as Cisco have their own integrated management solutions, these tools will be vendor-specific, and might not be right for a particular task or give you all of the information you need. You should determine the easiest way to guarantee that the tools you use can be used for specific tasks across all network vendor devices.
3) Repeat the process until the effort required to maintain the network is sufficiently low. Excessive automation is also possible—IT professionals should only invest the time to automate a procedure if it genuinely lowers costs, or helps meet a compliance objective which can’t always be measured as a return on investment.

Eliminating Scripts

Scripts are one of the first steps that companies take when looking to automate their networks. However, they aren’t perfect. In particular, scripts are imperative, not declarative. In other words, they specify a list of changes or actions to execute instead of the desired state of the network infrastructure.

This presents a problem: if you run a script multiple times on the same hardware, the state of the hardware might be different after each run. For network admins looking to maximise reproducibility and minimise errors, scripts aren’t the right solution.

Scripts also depend entirely on the knowledge of the engineers who wrote them to achieve the desired outcome, and frequent maintenance as infrastructure changes or when system commands are changed by the network vendors.

Fortunately, most network hardware configuration options and many software-based network automation tools simplify the automation possible. In many cases, removing the need for scripts entirely.

Configuration and Change Management

At its simplest, network automation comes down to encoding the configuration of multiple devices in a single format and managing changes to this configuration. Network automation helps make changes easier to test in a reproducible way. Additionally, if something goes wrong, some automation tools have automatic rollback features.

Automated Load Balancing and Failover

Bigger networks in medium and large businesses benefit from redundancy. At this scale, businesses can’t rely exclusively on a single piece of equipment being functional. Instead, they use load balancing and redundancy to spread the load over multiple machines that can continue working even in a partial failure situation.

To make this setup work well, automation is crucial. Without automating the setup and failover processes, human administrators will be left scrambling when something goes wrong.

Using Network Automation Tools and Software

Since network automation tools and software come in multiple styles, they can be used in different ways:

‍General-purpose automation software uses its access to the configuration interfaces of network infrastructure. Whether this is SSH, a different protocol, or an API, the automation software can run commands to verify and standardise the state of the infrastructure following its configuration.

‍Vendor-specific tools often use proprietary software and protocols to manage hardware from that vendor. This approach might include a web dashboard or a custom API.

Summary

As companies move to larger networks with more moving parts, the human cost for network upkeep continues to rise. To combat this issue, the majority of enterprise companies move to automate their network operations.

Network automation solves many problems, providing centralised visibility and control of multi-vendor network devices, making configuration changes and upgrades easier, and putting repeatable processes such as configuration backup, or compliance auditing on auto-pilot.

About Restorepoint

Restorepoint provides script-free network automation for more than 100 network, security, and storage vendors.

Deployed in less than an hour, Restorepoint helps organizations to substantially lower their exposure to often unforeseen security, compliance, and availability risks. Take a look at the Restorepoint features here.