Hot off a “beat and raise” quarter last week, Arista Networks Inc. Nov. 3 announced its continuous integration or CI pipeline for improved network as a service automation.
The new service is built on Arista’s recently announced EOS Network Data Lake. NetDL brings together its Network DataBase information and combines it with other data sources such as internet, application and user data.
That creates a broader and larger set of data for Arista to analyze and derive operational insights from. One of the founding principles of Arista was to have a single operating system and software stack across all of itx products and it has maintained that as it has grown.
This most recent CI announcements brings cloud and developer principles to the network to deliver a data-driven change management process to the network. The concept of CI is commonplace with cloud developers, but the network has lagged. Most businesses still operate using a traditional command-line interface model where changes are made in production environments with the ability to roll back the configuration if any error occurs.
The problem is that errors still occur in great quantities, causing companies to roll back often. In fact, my research shows that human error is still the No. 1 cause of unplanned network downtime. If changes are done correctly, rollback would be something that is rarely needed.
Years ago, this was the case with application development, but businesses put processes in place where coders could no longer make changes to production systems. Instead, code changes would require several levels of approval and testing and then pushed into a continuous integration/continuous development or CI/CD pipeline. In this case, only validated and authorized code changes can be implemented, cutting down the likelihood of a human error.
It’s worth noting that it’s inaccurate of me to say that no businesses have changed their approach to network operations. Many of the webscalers and global organizations have adopted modern software and cloud principles to run their networks, primarily out of need, since any outage can cost millions of dollars. These businesses happen to be Arista’s sweet spot when it comes to customers and the company has taken the lessons learned from this audience and made it broadly available to all its customers.
Arista’s new CI pipeline consists of three components:
Continuous design, where the company will create Arista Validated Designs or AVDs, which are continuously evolving best-practice network designs delivered as infrastructure-as-code. The AVDs enables customers to transform their operating model while de-risking it, since Arista has done much of the heavy lifting to ensure the quality of the code. That should improve network reliability.
The models are designed to be multidomain and work across the data center, campus or wide-area network. The AVDs can be executed through Arista’s CloudVision management portal or through third-party automation tools, such Red Hat’s Ansible Platform.
Continuous testing, where networks can be tested without requiring any physical hardware. What Arista has built is essentially a digital twin where networks can be tested in software, like the way digital twins are used in other industries such as manufacturing and aerospace. During his keynote at GTC, Nvidia Corp. Chief Executive Jensen Huang predicted that eventually anything that is software-based will eventually have a digital twin of it created and this is an excellent example of a new use case.
