Automatic driving Network "on the Road", you need the old driver belt?

The first time I heard of the term "self-driving network" was about six months ago, when Rami Rahim, chief executive of Juniper Networks, said in an interview that Juniper was working to implement a network with autonomous capabilities. In his words, autonomous network is like a self-driving car, the network itself not only to have high-performance and powerful functions, all network components can provide relevant data and information, and effective analysis, and can use machine learning platform to better understand the state of the network, Prior to the failure to anticipate and provide the appropriate solution, while the network can also achieve automated configuration and security policy settings, with the ability to adjust themselves.

At that time to hear these descriptions, the author of the psychological although I agree with the future direction of the network, but also believe that this may be a few years before it will happen. But only after half a year, the author at the end of 2017 at the Global Network Technology Conference (GNTC) once again from the Spruce Network CEO Shing Mouth heard the "Automatic Driving Network", and then Lenovo to the release of Oracle 18c Autonomous database mentioned in the "Automatic Driving database" concept, suddenly realized that The era of "self-driving networks" may have come to an imperceptible moment.

Shing believes that the "self-driving network" will become a reality sooner than self-driving cars.

1 interactive networks based on "intent"

"Automatic Driving Network" is an image of the metaphor, meaning that the future of the network will be more automated, some of the most basic network configuration, function realization, security can be fully realized by the network system, independent management, network administrators will be liberated, will be more focused on the network business planning, Rather than every day to eliminate network failures. As long as you think about it, surely everyone will agree with this trend, the key is how to achieve.

IBNS (intent-based Networking System, an interactive network based on intent) emerged.

Gartner has focused on Ibns for about 2016, "Innovation insight:intent-based networking Systems, Gartner, Feb 7, 2017," defined Ibns must have the following four capabilities: translation and validation, automatic installation, network State awareness, accurate diagnostics, and dynamic optimization and remediation.

IBNS provides a new way to build and transport the network, which improves the usability and agility of the network. The system can make appropriate network changes across existing network facilities and is automatically completed by the network. IBNS also provides lifecycle management of the network infrastructure, including design, installation, operations, and accurate diagnostics.

"Ibn is not the same as Sdn. SDN is concerned with the network itself, which is the ' road ', and Ibn is the traffic light that realizes the control. "Shing explains," The wide application of SDN provides a basic condition for Ibn. Because of the advent of SDN, the network has become more complex, requiring more strategy, management, which is very difficult. And the appearance of Ibn, let Sdn network configuration, management and Operation dimension become more simple and convenient. After the realization of SDN, Ibn is the inevitable choice. ”

The concept of Ibn came into being in the 2016. Spruce Network from the beginning of attention, but also put forward a more direct statement-Network monitoring integration. Today, SDN has become a new normal for data center networks. SDN is from the technical point of view, and Ibn is from the user's business point of view, to solve the specific application problems, including network management, business continuity, security and so on. Gartner's data show that with Ibn, the user's business deployment can be increased 10 times times faster and business disruption reduced by 50%.

"The emergence of Ibn has the greatest impact on those network engineers, and this is not just a technical problem, but a radical change in people's perceptions." Shing, for example, "If one day we don't have to drive ourselves, there's going to be a pickup, that's what it feels like." The change that Ibn brings, the network engineer wants to adapt and change slowly. ”

2 users ' spontaneous needs

In the past, we have seen more cases, the development of technology to drive the application of the change, and Ibn has broken the conventional, because the first customer demand for spontaneous, only to promote the emergence and development of Ibn.

Because of the popularity of cloud computing, SDN and so on, Enterprise's data center, network scale is more and more big, also more and more complex, continue to use the way of manual management, not economy, also is the ability of human oneself is difficult to be competent. "The trend of the future development of the network must be to achieve automated management." "Some securities companies, internet companies, and even large logistics companies in the country are proposing almost the same requirements: reducing the complexity and cost of network management, and more effectively ensuring business continuity and security," Shing said.

Previously, network management by the Enterprise's network management Department of a force, and now want to realize the network of "fastest", only by artificial is far from enough. For example, a large logistics enterprise, there may be hundreds of concurrent business, to its real-time state management, must rely on the automation of the network. For example, many internet companies now provide public cloud services, but often some users seek help because of basic network configuration or functional problems, and cloud providers often do not have the manpower to deal with these problems. What to do. The only way to do this is to automate the network's ability to solve these problems. This is the root cause of the rise of Ibn.

Spruce Network to provide based on Ibn Services also for some time, the existing customers mainly from the financial, operators and other industries, many of which users are active to come to the door. "In 2011, when SDN first started deploying, we were mainly learning from foreign manufacturers," he said. Now entering the Ibn era, Chinese users have become the pioneer of application, and their demand is stronger than abroad. "And the demand for Ibn is more a traditional enterprise than an Internet company like bat," says Shing. Foreign market-analysis agencies have also noted these differences from past changes. ”

Ibn current major application environments include data center infrastructure networks, WANs, and so on. The U.S. Highway Safety Board will automatically drive 5 levels, Level 0 represents no autopilot, and level 4 means full automatic driving. Shing that the current level of automatic driving network is equivalent to a car with enhanced driving function, almost 3.

3 from safety

Spruce Network is from the angle of network security into Ibn. Great minds alike, juniper in order to ensure the safety of autonomous operation of the network, also introduced a software definition Security Network (SDSN). "We are mainly dealing with security policy management issues. According to Shing, the Spruce network only took six months to launch the Safe white list function.

The research and development of the Spruce Net safety white list originates from the customer's actual demand. The production environment of a customer is a openstack cloud platform, and its security department puts forward the demand of building a cloud to realize security monitoring. For the traffic on the cloud, north-South security by the traditional firewall burden, and the security of things to the temporary no solution, so hope Spruce Network can be based on the white list scheme to achieve internal network flow control.

The business unit is responsible for defining legitimate VM pools, IP addresses, port, and other resource groups, and the security Department decides whether to release the flow of the resource group according to the opinion of the business Department, and thus form an editable strategy to ensure the security of the business and the controllability of the network.

Security whitelist specific features are implemented as follows: Suppose a financial institution has a mobile banking business, its business flow is the user in the mobile phone app back to the data center, first through the server checksum processing, and then back to the database, then the database will change the results of feedback, until the user mobile phone app. For security purposes, the security personnel of the financial institution only allow access to a specific database (specified port) by the service side of the mobile app (some fixed IP or other custom resources), and no other resources are allowed. This rule is between the protected resources and external access between the security door, called the White list system, just like some company's access cards, only the company employees can open the door, not in conformity with the white list of the access system in addition to blocking, but also to the alarm, log and other related operations.

Of course, Ibn will use artificial intelligence, data analysis, data collection and analysis is the core, and in order to achieve real-time monitoring of the network, the performance and efficiency of data analysis to be further improved.

As early as 2012, the second year that Spruce Network was founded, Spruce Network launched the first network virtualization platform in China. After years of polishing, the product has evolved to Deepflow v5.2, which helps users to create network virtualization, network analysis and network security services platform based on x86 and Linux environments. Unlike traditional network management systems, Deepflow can help customers to ensure business continuity and security in a virtualized network environment. The safe white list is actually a new feature of Deepflow. Shing said: "In the future, we will be faster to achieve product iterations, and further enrich product functionality, such as the current only VM management, the future will be unified management of physical machines, container clusters, as well as the public cloud. ”

Now, we have a more and more clear understanding of artificial intelligence, it is not to replace people, but to assist people to improve the efficiency of work. The emergence of Ibn, is also the use of artificial intelligence, data analysis, so that the network to complete their "capabilities" of things, and people just do things that can only be done by people. Will ibn bring about a revolution? Rather than revolution, it is the result of the natural evolution of the network. Or that sentence, in the future, the network must be automated management.