2/10/2019 Why Orchestration Does Not Equal Automation | IT Infrastructure Advice, Discussion, Community - Network Computing

Orchestration is often used interchangeably with automation. The reality is these terms
are very different. Understanding the distinction is important. It’s time to set the record
straight.
Patrick Moore
NOVEMBER 30, 2018

Network orchestration is a policy-driven approach to network automation that coordinates the hardware and
software components required to run a software application or service. An orchestrator functions to arrange and
organize the various components involved in turning up a network service.

For example, a cloud orchestrator manages the configuration of storage, compute, and networking resources within
the cloud to provision a virtual machine or virtualized network device. The critical point being that orchestrators
typically manage a single domain, such as the cloud, access network, core network, or data center. The primary
exception to this single domain management scenario is when an orchestrator is used to orchestrate other
orchestrators. This orchestrator of orchestrators performs end-to-end, cross-domain orchestration by federating
each domain orchestrator involved in a service.

(Image: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock)

Orchestration is important as we move to the modern network because the devices and services provisioned, at the
scale required, have become too complex for manual interaction. Orchestration enables a network engineer to have
ease of visibility into this complexity by abstracting it into templates or models. The most common modeling or
templating languages used are YANG, TOSCA, Heat Orchestration Templates, and YAML. This human
consumable view provides centralized management of activities to ensure network efficiency and quality.

What is automation?

Network automation is a methodology in which software automatically configures, provisions, manages, and tests
network devices. This description implies no human interaction unless errors occur that produce fallout requiring
corrective action by a network engineer. In many cases, automation can remediate fallout issues by launching child
processes that are defined to handle known error cases. It’s important to note that effective network automation is
vendor agnostic to an extent that all equipment can be managed fully. Many vendor-centric solutions claim vendor
agnostic capabilities but favor their own equipment or a small subset of equipment offered by partners.
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There are a number of reasons why network automation is important including:

Today’s networks are complex puzzles comprised of many different segments including access networks,
data center networks, core networks, LANs internal to a physical location, WANs spread across the country
and world, virtualized networks, and more. Managing these segments is too heavy a load to maintain with
direct human interaction. For small networks, you can scale your workforce to manage the complexity, but
this is an expensive solution that has a limited lifespan of viability.

The network is constantly evolving. The introduction of new technologies further complicates things due to
the mixture of old and new components. Migrating from one technology to the other can often take years of
manual work by scores of engineers, versus months with automation.

Companies are constantly looking to cut costs, or, at a minimum, do more with the resources they have.
Automation allows for headcount reductions or expansion of what can be done with existing headcount. This
is a touchy topic when working on these kinds of efforts, but it is naive not to acknowledge the part this plays
in the cost justification.

Due to the complexity mentioned above, human error impacts the quality of the network. A single mistyped
letter or number by an engineer can bring the network to its knees. By automating activities, this risk is
mitigated.

Why orchestration is not automation

As previously mentioned, you can have orchestration within a single domain that is human driven and does not
automate a process beyond certain specific activities. You can also have cross-domain orchestration with an
orchestrator of orchestrators that comes close to meeting the definition of automation but is still operating in a
vacuum that typically requires some level of human interaction.

Automation means everything operates with no human interaction. This encompasses integration with the
northbound business systems making requests into the automation ecosystem. It also includes integration to the
domain-specific orchestrators, controllers, and other tools that touch the network, as well as network events that are
integrating with assurance systems that monitor the network. This is where the major divide between orchestration
and automation happens.

Orchestration is narrowly focused on a specific domain or set of domains. Orchestrators typically run into crippling
deficiencies when services traverse multiple domains. Orchestration is not focused on interfacing with the
northbound business systems, and certainly not east/west to other orchestrators and controllers. It is important to
understand that orchestration is a vital piece of automation due to its domain ownership, but it is a subset of
automation, not a replacement.

The confusion arises because orchestration is one of the most overused words in the networking industry. Solutions
are being marketed as end-to-end automation solutions when in reality they are nothing more than a piece to the
overall automation puzzle.

Orchestration solutions typically work well with equipment or software that is provided by the same vendor. Most
orchestrators provide some level of multi-vendor capability, but if you stray from the preferred vendor ecosystem,
the capability becomes severely limited. That’s why it’s common to see vendors attaching hardware sales on top of
software sales opportunities. This approach is an attempt to sell customers on migrating to a single vendor network,
which is just not realistic for most organizations. However, this is the only way an orchestrator only approach to
automation can work.

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2/10/2019 Why Orchestration Does Not Equal Automation | IT Infrastructure Advice, Discussion, Community - Network Computing

The key point to remember is that orchestration is an important part of network automation, but it’s just a part. It’s
an important distinction to understand, especially with the misrepresentations in the marketplace. Network
automation will play a leading role in enabling enterprises to move beyond the fragile practices of the past (like
CLI and scripting), while extending capabilities to take advantage of emerging technologies enabled by the modern
network like IoT, NFV, and 5G.

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