The Evolution of Intent-Based Networking
In the beginning, there was the CLI, and for a (long) time the CLI was good (enough). But networks have grown and evolved since those early days. Not only have they gotten larger and more complex, networks have also become ever more critical to our lives — and our businesses. This has ushered in an evolution of network operations as well.
The first glimmers of this evolution started in the service provider networks, which became larger and more critical earlier than other networks. In the internet service provider (ISP) and network service provider (NSP) world, it has been common to use scripts to manage portions of the network for at least a couple of decades. In many cases network devices lacked proper APIs and so the earliest scripts simply logged in and executed CLI commands. These scripts made the job of managing large networks much easier, but they were obviously not the ultimate pinnacle of NetOps technology.
SDN
Networks continued to evolve, and in parallel we saw the rise of server virtualization and the beginnings of cloud and hyper-scale data centers. Against this backdrop, OpenFlow was released in 2011. While that protocol was not quite the disruptive force many of us thought it might be, it did bring the concept of software-defined networking (SDN) into the fore. The basic premise of SDN is the separation of…
