The drive to automate an increasing number of community operations is an efficient factor, but it surely exposes a necessity for community groups to make sure their change-management processes are so as.
Networks are doing extra, changing into integral to zero-trust safety architectures, for instance, and to end-to-end enterprise optimization endeavors. Networks are additionally connecting extra issues than ever: Cellular gadgets and IoT nodes proceed to proliferate exterior information facilities and IaaS environments, whereas contained in the enterprise, VMs and containers and separate environments segregating teams of them from one another for safety functions proceed to proliferate.
Sadly, community groups aren’t rising as quick because the community’s footprint or scope of features. Automation at each degree, from deeply embedded “autonomous networking” performance all the way in which up by way of the ad-hoc automation community groups write themselves, presents community professionals the lifeline they should sustain.
On this context, the place automation is crucial and unavoidable, community groups want to ensure all the great they’ll do with automation shouldn’t be executed on the expense of or in battle with one of many different pillars of enterprise IT: change administration. They want to ensure automation is managed by change administration, and that they’re maintaining change administration processes consistent with their rising reliance on automation.
One facet is to implement change administration on the automation, together with the scripts, config information, and playbooks, used to handle the community. The usage of code administration instruments helps with this: check-out and check-in occasions assist workers bear in mind to comply with different elements of correct course of. Making use of change administration at this degree means describing the supposed modifications to the automation, testing them, planning deployment, having a fallback plan to the earlier known-good code the place that’s relevant, and figuring out particular standards by which to guage whether or not the change succeeded or must be rolled again. (Learn extra: Find out how to handle scripts that handle community automation)
One other facet, typically ignored, is to ensure that the presence and operation of automation is accounted for within the change administration course of.
Think about an instance. A community engineer brings a deliberate configuration change by way of the change administration course of, to permit a brand new type of HVAC sensor the services workforce is trialing to speak with its administration platform. Throughout an permitted change window, a community tech efficiently makes that change, manually. The management panel sees the sensor, huzzah! However a couple of minutes after that testing, the management panel loses contact with the sensor once more. The tech revisits the change and finds the configuration has reverted to its earlier “gold” template, re-executes the change, and the controller sees the sensor once more. Rinse and repeat, till the tech and the engineer understand that an automatic “sweep-and-correct script” meant to stop configuration drift is the issue.
Failure to make sure that the configuration change obtained correctly wired into the automation resulted in a failed change occasion and signifies a niche within the course of.
There are a number of implications:
Setting up automation to lock-in a community state is a change administration occasion, and in a way, a change to the structure; creating it and placing it into manufacturing must undergo the entire approval and deployment course of, and all future adjustments have to be made with its presence and operation in thoughts—contemplating it must be a part of future change administration evaluations.
As well as, altering something within the setting means both altering the script to make and keep that change itself, or constructing into it a mechanism for tagging a deviation from regular configurations as being recognized and permitted.
This consideration of change administration is equally vital whether or not your setting is constructed round a central community controller, SDN model, or round staff-written crucial automations in no matter language, or declarative automation, or (as is more and more frequent) a mixture of all these mechanisms. Following correct course of is the one approach to construct a fairly full and correct image of what’s on the community (they’re by no means going to be 100% full and correct for most folk). And, it’s the solely approach to hold workers and software program all getting into the identical course, working collectively as a substitute of working at odds with one another.
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