APIC-EM Update: SDN Automation for the Enterprise Network
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This document discusses Cisco's Enterprise SDN solution and APIC-EM. It notes that digital business demands operational efficiency and agility, but that installing network circuits is still a manual process. It then introduces Cisco's Digital Network Architecture and APIC-EM, which provides automation, abstraction, policy control, and open programmability. APIC-EM applications can configure and provision network infrastructure in minutes rather than months through zero-touch deployment, accelerated roll-out of routers/switches/APs, and automated provisioning of solutions like IWAN with Cisco best practices.
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APIC-EM Update: SDN Automation for the Enterprise Network
- 1. Cisco Enterprise SDN APIC-EM Update: Configure and Provision Network Infrastructure in Minutes, Not Months Paul Liesenberg Product and Solutions Mgr, Enterprise Networks pliesenb@cisco.com March 2016
- 2. Digital Business Demands Operational Efficiency and Agility Time IT spends on operations CEOs are worried about IT strategy not supporting business growth80% 57% 0 100% Source: Forrester CAPEX OPEX 33% 67% 0 10 100 1000 Computing Networking Seconds Source: Open Compute Project “…While other components of the IT infrastructure have become more programmable and allow for faster, automated provisioning, installing network circuits is still a painstakingly manual process...” —Andrew Lerner, Gartner Research Network Expenses Deployment Speed
- 3. Cisco Digital Network Architecture www.cisco.com/go/dna Automation Abstraction & Policy Control from Core to Edge Open & Programmable | Standards-Based Open APIs | Developers Environment Cloud Service Management Policy | Orchestration Virtualization Physical & Virtual Infrastructure | App Hosting Analytics Network Data, Contextual Insights Insights & Experiences Automation & Assurance Security & Compliance Network-enabled Applications Cloud-enabled | Software-delivered Principles
- 4. Applications SDN Applications Abstract the Network to Business Intent Policy SecurityOrchestration Automation Collaboration SOUTHBOUND ABSTRACTION LAYER CATALYST NEXUS ASRISR WIRELESSASA REST API OTHER SDN Ideal: Controller as the Application Platform SDN Controller as the Application Platform for Policy Automation Virtualization
- 5. APIC-EM Application Overview & Use Cases Public Cloud Enterprise Network Day 0 Plug-and-Play App Zero touch deployment of routers / switches / APs Accelerated roll-out: Eliminates tech visits and shrinks deployment from months to minutes Day 1 Cisco IWAN App Cisco Easy QoS App Cisco ESA App Guided, fast auto-provisioning of IWAN solution with Cisco experts’ best practices From 1000 CLI commands to 10 GUI clicks per branch Day 2 Path Trace App Discover path between two end points based on 5 tuple Rapidly troubleshoot congestion and ACL issues and lower OPEX for trouble ticket processing by 98% BRANCH
- 6. What Cisco Enterprise SDN Delivers Simplicity Network-wide abstraction supporting both Greenfield and Brownfield Automation OPEX reduction through adoption of Cisco best practices Business Outcomes Dynamic network that adapts to business intent policy Open Programmability Open NB REST API’s with agnostic SB interfacing
Editor's Notes
- Good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are. I am paul liesenberg, and I work cisco’s in cisco’s enterprise networking team, specifically looking into sdn and enterprise network automation. Quite honestly, the original presenters for this webinar had to cancel, but if you have been following the news, our enterprise networking team announced last week cisco’s new architectural vision for the enterprise network, called DNA for digital network architecture, and hence the timing would have been awful to cancel this webinar and this opportunity to give you a few updates around dna and the new applications in apic-em, and hence i am pleased to take over the webinar. I should also note – I don’t have a question manager. So what I’ll do is try to keep the presentation to 30-35 minutes and then take it to your q&a. This webinar will give you a high level overview of DNA, the new applications that APIC-EM includes with the latest release, v1. I repeat – high level, my intention is not to go into the application in depth, just to show what’s new. in future webinars –please check the schedule- we will delve deeply into the individual applications to show in some depth how automation is changing enterprise networks. Over the next months and year you will see a lot of innovation in the area of DNA and, specifically, apic-em. Oops, acronyms, right there in the title – let me spell that out .. application policy infrastructure controller, enterprise module, apic-em. It’s our enterprise sdn controller that supports both our legacy infrastructure –and propels it into the sdn age- and future products. Oh – a very very important clarifitaction about what “enterprise networks” means in this context… if you think an enterprise has everything from a data center to a campus and branch and even managed services from a service provider… you are right. But for us internally in cisco, somewhat confusingly, enterprise networks –what I shall talk about- is about the campus, branch and wireless infrastructure. We’re talking –product wise- catalyst, asr, isr and wireless controllers… a very healthy multi-billion dollar chunk of our infrastructure, but nevertheless not all of it. Keep that in mind.
- If you have been following the news, all the talk in enterprise architecture is about digital transformation. A hot topic with the press and analysts. Basically what this means is… companies have to find ways to constantly innovate. We have all been exposed to the term devops, or I hear in Europe it’s often called bimodal IT, that is, an IT model that keeps up with business needs constantly, nay, it actually constantly innovates and improves upon business models and business processes. Perpetual betas at the application layer, omni-channel models that provide customers with improved physical and virtual experiences. I am not a business consultant, hence I’d just like to go into what this means for the network, and where the network may have lagged… and the verdict is in: the perception is that the network can not keep up with the needs of digital business. I think if we’re honest about the way we’ve build enterprise networks, we have to admit that our modus operandi is, more or less – to truly thoroughly design a network that is super reliable and eminently fair to all traffic… and that should do right? Then we try to keep change away from it. Let’s have planning meetings if change is required, but that will take some time. But that’s not the way the computing infrastructure has evolved, right? It’s virtualized and moving all around us, spinning up application capacity where it’s most convenient at any point in time. Users have self-service portals to spin up and scale up their apps within seconds. And let’s face it, we have to support this environment more effectively. We have to operate more efficiently, and innovate faster. But how do we do that?
- As I mentioned, we made a major announcement last week, and if you haven’t yet, I urge you to check it out. Go to cisco.com/go/dna and check out our digital network architecture. if you’re thinking “oh no, not another networking marchitecture” let me put your mind to rest – this is not one of those complex, 5 layered and 50 box architectures that exemplified our traditional network mindset to never try to hide complexity. We network engineers are proud of complexity and our ability to master it, right? I say rightly so, but honestly, if there’s one thing successful software engineering has taught the world is that complexity should stay within its very own domain. Successful architectures these days are simple and thrive on abstracting complexity to the upper layers, and as you can see here that’s what our digital network architecture is all about. Only 4 functional boxes, so let’s start at the bottom: at the infrastructure layer, that is, how and where we run services, DNA acknowledges that virtualization is king. It allows you to run functions where it suits you best – on a dedicated device or cpu, or anywhere in a private or public or hybrid cloud. That’s how application services run, and that’s the choice network customers also need to establish for themselves, and we’re aggressively rolling that out. On top of these virtualized network functions, there are 2 things that are of vital importance – first of all automation. The whole point of doing this all is so that we can spend less time on the trivial, and more time on the essential, that is, we need to transition from just being busy to being effective, if you know what I mean. Repeatable stuff needs to be streamlined and up-levelled and automated. And you will see that later in this presentation we will talk about several application that do that – automate what used to be manual configuration of complex features, based on a streamlined workflow and established best practices. We simply need to make networks easier to configure and troubleshoot, so we can spend more time doing… …what the other box says … it reads analytics but I read it as innovation. I think network data is easily one of the least used sources of business intelligence. Think about it – the network sees everything, the network touches everything, and it doesn’t even need invasive browser cookies to see who and what does exactly what when and where. I think as network engineers, and with the rise of data engineering, we truly need to focus far more into how the data we gather can contribute to the information capital of the enterprise. Network analytics goes 2 ways I think – the first one is a huge contribution to innovation in the customer and user experience, and the other one is in security. Meaning, we can use network analytics to both see how users/customers can be better served, but also to detect when certain endpoints act in suspicious ways. Finally on top of automation and innovation/analytics, you have cloud service management, meaning orchestration functions. This is where business intent is coded in policies, and the policies arte pushed to the automation layer for consistent, end-to-end implementation across the network. You could basically draw a closed-loop feedback mechanism through these – and that will be the reality eventually – where the virtualized infrastructure layer pushes data to the analytics function, the analytics function sends those to cloud service management, which in turns checks on SLAs and pushes new updated business policies to the automation layer. The communication patterns between the layers are simple RESTful apis and standards based data models such as netconf-yang or RESTconf, and where those aren’t supported we should interface with the legacy infrastructure via CLI or established protocols such as SNMP.
- With this slide I just want to emphasize the critical role that apic-em has in the dna architecture. applications, here on top, directly touch the business layer, and the business layer is ultimately where the money is made for the enterprise, the IT infrastructure has to unconditionally serve it, and the enterprise network serves the application and business layer through an sdn controller. Our enterprise sdn controller, again, is apic-em. Its role is abstraction – expose basic and abstracted network capabilities to the application layer in a language the latter understands, that is, RESTful apis, which basically is a web service you can invoke and that that any web programmer know how to reuse. Apic-em then acts as a master translator, it holds the magic decoder ring to the complexity and specifics of the underlying infrastructure. It resolves business intent into far more complex network wide configuration instructions, using whatever language the underlying network elements understand – snmp, cli… or increasingly netconf yang or restconf going forward. That allows apic-em to deliver on a key advantage – you can deliver the benefits of sdn on your exisiting infrastructure, and you don’t have to gamble on which southbound protocol will eventually win out.
- Ok, so we’re a good number of minutes into this presentation and we have talked at an abstract level about emerging enterprise architectures, sdn, automation, abstractions and policies… but what does this all mean in a practical way? Ok, let’s put our network engineer hats back on, and think about how we handle day 0 that is installation, day 1 for configuration, and day 2 for ongoing operation. As of right now, most of us are still caught up in the CLI era, right? We have some scripting, sure, but we still interface with network elements on a per device level and via the command prompt as we go about many tasks. So bring in apic-em and a couple of the automation apps, and this is what happens, a streamlined, effective workflow to deal with device bring-up, feature configuration, a dtroubleshooting, namely… Day 0 – you’re bringing up a branch router, you know the drill. You need an expert. You need to make sure the router comes up and connects. The apic-em PnP app automates that. All you need is someone that plugs in an Ethernet port into the router, power it up, and voila, the branch router reaches out to get its basic configuration file, and basic connectivity is established. Day 1 – now it’s time to configure the many, advanced and complex features in a network device. It could be the specifically iwan features dealing with a choice of transport options, application optimization options or ensuring security given pervasive basic broadband connectivity in branch designs… it could be defining a more all encompassing set of network services, virtualized or not. It could be configuring QoS. Qos is a killer app for networking, but we have always made it complex –and hence slow- to deploy. We have now 3 day 1 apps that tame the complexity of network features – the iwan app, the easyqos app, and the enterprise services automation app. They provide you with a user friendly gui and recommendations based on cisco validated designs. Instead of having to plough through hundreds of cli commands, you can simply click through a few screens and get the job done much faster. More consistently. Less error prone. Feel free to fine tune later, but get stuff done like 10 times faster. Day 2 – I’ll say it right away – you’ll see us and our development partners spending a lot of time here, when it comes to troubleshooting tools. Especially in these days of renewed interest in machine learning a lot of stuff is bound to happen here. But the apic-em path visualization app is popular for a good reason – enter your 5-tuple connection identifier and, instead of having to identify the connection hop by hop, the app will show you an intuitive, end to end view. In a nutshell, you get automated initial deployment, automated advanced feature configuration, and finally simplified troubleshooting. And this is just the beginning.
- Typically these presentation wrappers are about a lot of chest thumping, but I’d like to wrap it up just rationally driving home 4 generic value propositions that I think are key to a next generation network infrastructure, and that in some way or the other I have emphasized through the presentation First of all, simplicity is the greatest virtue. Simplicity is about abstraction. One thing I found striking years ago, as I watched videos from the sdn luminaries, and I urge you to watch the presentation about sdn scott shenker from berlkely university provided about sdn, was that it was all about the fact networking had failed to provide useful abstractions, which is what well desgined software arhcictectures should do. well, now we are getting there. Sdn controllers prvide abstractions. the difference in scope is about how much of the exisiting infrastructure they include in those abstractions, and I think that is where apic-em excels. It includes the exisiting infrastructure. Automation – this is the primary goal. You could say it’s step one. Through automating traditionally manual workflows, we’re freeing up time we can use to innovate. Let’s stop being just busy, let’s be relevant to the business. The network brings underutilized elements to the table – like network analytics. If we spend less time being busy, we can innovate around that. Business outcomes – definitely, the days of the plain vanilla it infrastructure for everybody are over. As engineers, we have to start becoming business process engineers as well, and think about how our stuff can enrich, enable and drive business processes and outcomes. Technology by itself is less and less relevant. Finally programmability is the door to innovation. Whether you do it yourself, or check out our solution partners or our own applications… without programmability through the entire stack, and I mean from orchestration layer through controllers all the way way down to model driven network devices… this is the magic of abstraction – when you abstract complexity, people reuse things and create new stuff, just think of the way google maps api. It’s eminenty easy to reuse, and in enterprise networking we are moving in that direction, very quickly. Making networks easier to manage and configure, and using that time we save to innovate. I said it before, and I repeat it now – you will see a lot of innovation happening around apic-em, around netconf-yang enabled network devices, so keep watching this space. Keep looking for new webinars. A lot is going to happen very quickly. And with that, let me wrap it up and take it to q and a