One of the major impacts of the dynamic nature of DevOps and the software-based economy is how network services are delivered. Not long ago, whenever there was a need for new applications or systems, the applications, infrastructure and network ops teams would sit together and create an elaborate plan for the project.
Network engineers would provide a blue print for the network changes and connectivity requirements, an estimate for the new load on the network, and an update to the traffic policy. All the planned changes would go through manual testing cycles before the physical effort would begin to get the new services into production.
This is all about to change.
Welcome to the era of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). These technologies help eliminate a lot of the manual intervention for deploying new applications and infrastructures. With software defined infrastructure, network ops teams can provision applications and infrastructure automatically based on a repeatable set of policies. Depending on how the policies are defined, network and L4-L7 services can be deployed with little or no manual intervention or conference room committee meetings.
While flexibility and automation have many benefits, SDN, SDDC and NFV can increase the complexity for network monitoring teams. As new applications and infrastructure are deployed, this dynamic inventory can create blind spots that weren’t anticipated or outlined in an elaborate blue print. Network ops teams may only become aware of the new apps or infrastructure when an issue occurs that impacts the user experience.
As such, network asset discovery, topology mapping and monitoring must also be automated and dynamic. Integration with the orchestration layers for SDN, SDDC and NFV is paramount to empowering the flexibility and reducing the complexity. The CA Spectrum product team is proud of the ecosystem we have embraced with the likes of Cisco, Juniper, VMware, Nuage and Viptella and open source projects like Open Daylight, OpenShift and Open vSwitch.
Engineering lockstep with these leaders and industry efforts ensures that new dynamic inventory technologies can deliver the requirements of DevOps and the software economy and your CA network monitoring solution is ready.