The document summarizes perspectives from business stakeholders on automation and software-defined networking (SDN). It notes that businesses want new technologies like SDN implemented quickly to gain competitive advantages. However, they often request new technologies without understanding why or having clear goals in mind. The document advocates for network automation and APIs to help businesses reduce costs, improve quality and productivity, and cope with complex networks and systems in the same way that system administrators have used automation tools like configuration management.
DevOps is a methodology and mindset of combining the efforts of the operations team with development. This is a means automating servers and operating systems in conjunction with development efforts, and programming all repeatable tasks. This results in higher consistency with development, less fires to fight, and a faster development cycle with less back-outs and stalls.
For us networking folk, this is good and bad news. The good news is they have a large tool set and experience doing this, and there are a lot of shared components for us to work with. Unfortunately this also can accelerate the requirement of network programmability, and even potentially cause a false sense of confidence with a different domain. In order for Network Operations to truly integrate with DevOps it will take people from both sides to collaborate and share experience. This is where it’s critical to ‘know the language’.