12 July 2019

Davin Hanlon, networking product manager at Puppet

Network managers in enterprise businesses are faced with a daily grind of repetitive, but vital, tasks.

Working with racks of devices including routers, firewalls and switches that must all be managed, configured and maintained is a hard graft, particularly as they are often managed manually or via an over-arching controller.

As it is unlikely that all the devices would have been purchased from the same technology vendor, especially when it comes to commodity devices that need replacing every few years, achieving consistency over device management, configuration and maintenance is especially difficult.

Whenever humans are responsible for management and maintenance tasks, there is the possibility of manual errors and drift over time.

When settings change without sufficient governance oversight, sometimes due to human error, it’s known by some in the industry as being ‘cowboyed’.

There can be a significant impact on a business from this – loss in agility as network management teams as slow to meet business requirements; an inability to service business needs, and the risk of security breaches.

In the world of DevOps, automation tools are used to address these challenges.

This is because in the DevOps space, you first define a configuration in code and then tell the automation tools to manage the set up thereafter – reducing the possibility of human-error.

Using the same principles, this approach and tools can be used to set up networking devices so that updates happen automatically, ensuring that any drift is remediated as soon as possible, and that devices remain in compliance according to the configuration as defined in code.

An example of a simple automation use-case for networking devices is ensuring that all NTP and SysLog settings are consistent across devices.

Network automation tools can be used to ensure settings are kept consistent across devices regardless of device type and vendor.

Using built-in templates, administrators can report when devices are drifting, what settings changed - who changed them - and if there is a variation, an alert can be sent to the network manager or the pre-set parameters automatically reset.

In addition, automation tools have the strength of the open source community behind them meaning they are well tested and benefit from rapid updates.

In network management, a DevOps-style automation approach can result in achieving consistency across whole estate plus agility, security and future-proofing.

It also means slow, repetitive ‘soul-crushing’ work is removed from the person.

Network managers who struggle under the weight of manual configurations should take a look at DevOps automation tools.

By Davin Hanlon, networking product manager at Puppet