Brutal automation is required to deliver rapid innovation - musings from my week at NFV World Congress

Hurricane Ophelia caused havoc in my home place of Cork, Ireland yesterday. At one stage about 20% of the nation's homes and businesses were without power at the peak of the storm. Schools and businesses were closed. And the devastation is clear to see everywhere today with trees down all over the roads. As I type this I can hear the sound of chainsaws in the distance.

Driving to work this morning, I got redirected on a few occasions as the local council were out clearing roads and restoring services. An ideal Satnav system needs to keep up with real-time changes, such as trees falling down and blocking roads, and recalculate the best route to the destination. And that is exactly what is needed to automate operations for the dynamic world of software defined networking.

Last week I attended SDN & NFV World Congress in Den Haag. Of around 2000 attendees, virtually all are closely associated with the future of networks in their companies. These are the thought leaders, architects and the executives tasked with helping to reinvent their businesses. Service providers spoke about the need to provide automated, on-demand, and flexible virtualized services to meet customers evolving demands/expectations. 

IBM unveiled IBM Agile Lifecycle Manager at the show. With IBM Agile Lifecycle Manager (ALM), service providers can now effectively streamline service delivery, minimize complexity, and deliver innovative new services to customers today and into the future at significant speed and lower cost of operations.

NFV promises to deliver higher service agility and lower operational expense. As it matures to production, the next major challenge is to automate the operational processes needed to bring virtual services to market and manage them throughout their life. One phrase I heard last week was “Brutal automation is required to deliver rapid innovation”. I loved it. 

To achieve high levels of automation, service providers need to reduce the complexity of Service and VNF lifecycles by doing the following: 

• VNF lifecycle simplification & standardization - removing the degrees of freedom for how VNF's are integrated together into a service lifecycle;
• then designing the end-to-end service chains with runtime operational requirements in mind;
• by leveraging tools that understand the full service lifecycle in production, not just building the service - understanding operational aspects such as healing, upgrading, patching etc..

Agile Lifecycle Manager maintains an understanding of how the service elements are connected together through dependencies and relationships, unlike the inflexibility of many workflow engines, which conceptually just automate a manual procedure, restricting their output flexibility. Agile Lifecycle Manager’s Engine is intent based. That is, it calculates and executes the minimum set of required actions, considering the actual services topology, to reach the desired state for the target service instance. In this way the intent engine automatically figures out all the VNF lifecycle tasks in a complex service, required to keep the entire service in an active state, without any up front programming.

That is the key to hiding the underlying service complexity, so that service designers can design their services focusing exclusively on what the service should deliver and not how it should be deployed and implemented at the detailed infrastructure level. Agile Service Manager then compliments this by providing operations teams with complete up-to-date visibility and control over these dynamic infrastructure and services to give real-time and historical end-to-end visibility from service elements into the resources that realise them.

Similar to the requirements of SatNav system where a user programs their destination and the SatNav figures out the best route to get there. As I came across roadblocks on my way to work this morning, I needed the SatNav system to automatically update my journey, based on the latest roadblocks, with the new route to my destination. IBM Agile Lifecycle Manager is here to help our clients in the same way.