The key to 5G success? Network automation. By leveraging automation, you can improve operational efficiency, reduce time to market for new services, and lower total cost of ownership (TCO). Learn more about the benefits of automation and the solutions
Today’s Communication Service Provider (CSP) networks are becoming dynamic and heterogeneous. The requirement to constantly change network parameters and configurations to meet customer expectations creates huge amounts of complexity. The flexibility of 5G networks makes efficient network operation without high levels of automation impractical. Automation improves every aspect of CSP operations.
Network automation does not an automated network make. Today’s network engineers are frequently guilty of two indulgences. First, random acts of automation hacking. Second, pursuing aspirational visions of networking grandeur — complete with their literary adornments like “self-driving” and “intent-driven” — without a plan or a healthy automation practice to take them there.

When we approach the network as code, we need to consider network elements and their configurations as building blocks created in a code-development pipeline of dev/test/staging/production phases. Stringing together this pipeline shouldn’t be a manual process; it should be mostly coded to be automatic.

As with software engineering, there are hardware and foundational software elements with network engineering, such as operating systems that the operator will not create themselves, but rather just configure and extend. These configurations and extensions, with their underlying dependencies, can be built together, versioned, tested, and delivered. Thinking about the network as an exercise in development, automation should start in the development infrastructure itself.
Can a Middle Way be found, enabling engineers to set achievable goals, while attaining the broader vision of automated networks as code? Taking some inspiration from our software engineering brethren doing DevOps, I believe so.

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