Virtualisation advances have created a flexible and dynamic infrastructure that networks will leverage to enable new and more flexible service offerings. Therefore, the complexity of managing such an extensive set of services will grow exponentially. The new customer-facing services, such as online gaming, AR/VR, intelligent transport systems, smart cities, etc., require communication service providers (CSPs) to optimise their operational efficiency and reduce costs while meeting customers’ requirements. Comprehensive adoption of network automation capabilities that minimise human intervention is necessary to achieve this high-efficiency level. In this scenario, zero-touch operations take full advantage of automation to create management processes that continuously optimise resource allocation to keep the whole network optimal while meeting all functional and non-functional requirements, says Santiago Gonzalez, product evangelist, Intraway.
One of the significant differences in the provisioning of these new services is that the operating requirements are increasingly dynamic, which translates into the need for agility in the decisions and actions taken in the network. Instead of policies and other forms of imperative communication, high-level abstractions should be used to translate requirements across layers of management and multiple domains that compose the end-to-end (E2E) service.
Managing complex services
According to the TM Forum, “Autonomous systems are governed according to specified objectives known as intents.” By identifying their business intent, operators can define service and network intents and support those intents through management functions that guarantee quality of service. These intents should work inside autonomous domains and across the three layers intents at the business layer, which will get cascaded down to the service, and resource layers.
Intent-driven network management has been developed to cope with the complexity of services management. Intent is designed to deal with escalating network complexity, born of both technical maturity and the transition from physical to virtual to cloud-native networks. Intent-based networking improves on the traditional telecommunications model (physical architectures with rigidly defined service provisioning processes) By using intent-based networking, instead of provisioning services procedurally, agents within an intent manager translate a service’s requirements into executing the best delivery strategy at that time, driven by factors such as latency, capacity, security, and cost, based on available resources.
Service providers are motivated to pursue this type of network automation because it can positively impact both cost and revenue. Intent-based networking optimises network resources at every step. As a result of higher and more efficient network utilisation rates, service providers can reduce capital expenses because they no longer need to overprovision their networks for peak traffic periods. In addition, the intent-based network aids service providers to more efficiently design and roll out new services, allowing them to concentrate more on differentiation and customer experience.
What problems does intent-based networking solve?
Intent-based networking allows network managers and engineers to focus on desired behaviors at a higher level than port-by-port and device-by-device configurations, thus:
- making the network autonomous, requiring no human intervention;
- scaling up the network without adding staff;
- lowering the number of performance issues; and
- reducing risk of misconfiguration-related errors.
It is now possible to deploy commercial, intent-based network systems for mission-critical and scaled deployments due to modern network orchestration systems. With intent-based networks, reliable services can be delivered within minutes instead of days or weeks, and operational challenges can be addressed once the infrastructure is in place.
Managing intent-based networks requires a sophisticated orchestration system. An orchestrator simplifies the design, build, deployment, and operation of networks by integrating intent-based networking and analytics into a unified solution. CSPs also need a solution that unifies their network architecture and operations teams, working to eliminate human error and reliability issues while decreasing deployment and service activation times.
Intent-based network automation solutions will be essential to deliver a seamless customer experience where complex service requests are made and fulfilled immediately without the customer experiencing any problems. Service providers and suppliers such as Intraway can work through the enormous complexity involved in provisioning, activating, and orchestrating it, all while reducing capital expenditures and giving service providers new, enhanced revenue opportunities.
The author is Santiago Gonzalez, product evangelist, Intraway.
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