Jun 28, 2022

The Future of Network Automation at CENIC

The CENIC Network Operations Center implemented a hotly anticipated enhancement to its customer service functions: targeted network announcements. With this new enhancement, authorized contacts at connected sites throughout California will receive tailored email announcements should a planned or unplanned outage specifically impact their service.

The behind-the-scenes work that made these announcements possible has implications for further enhancements to CalREN monitoring, maintenance, and services.

Fundamental to all of these enhancements is the concept of network automation, the creation of a set of network maintenance tools that free CENIC’s Operations engineers from as much repetitive manual work as possible so that we can provide our customers with the responsive high-performance network capacity and services that you need.

There are two main keystones to this network automation toolset. The first was the creation of an exhaustive relational database containing full, standardized network circuit, equipment, and site contact information for the many thousands of complex components that comprise the CalREN backbone and all customer connections to it, from end to end. Thanks to this database and CENIC’s custom-created Cobber software which maintains up-to-date awareness of the device components in the network, rapid automated calculation of impacted sites in the case of unplanned outages becomes possible. With Cobber, CENIC’s Operations engineers are also able to propose outages as part of planned maintenance events and with a handful of clicks, automatically create a list of the sites that will be impacted by the event and prepare the needed email announcements to ensure that our customers remain aware at all times of the state of CalREN and their connection to it.

The second major keystone is the adoption of Cisco’s Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) software platform. This platform allows for the encapsulation of device configurations for customer connections and backbone device infrastructure into packaged extensions to NSO. These extensions can then be created and maintained via NSO’s built-in Web UI (user interface) and from external tools via its various Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

The platform also provides the ability to make changes simultaneously to multiple devices inside of transactions, with the ability to automatically roll back changes in the case of errors encountered on any device. These capabilities will enable many benefits, including automated service deployments, enforcement of standardized device configurations, incorporation of the device config change control process into future configuration management tools, integration with configuration-related data maintained in various external sources, and periodic audit reporting for the device configurations.

The possibilities created by network automation don’t stop there. “Ultimately CENIC’s goal is to become CLI (command-line-interface) free, where engineers only interface directly with network devices during problem troubleshooting or other urgent needs,” said Senior Vice President of Engineering and Chief Information Officer Tony Nguyen.

These are only part of our plans to ensure that CalREN remains as future-facing as possible for California’s research and education communities. We’ll be sure to keep you aware of ongoing developments toward this end, and more information about targeted network announcements can be found at cenic.org.

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