Background
Since the introduction of smart mobile devices and cloud computing, the world has been undergoing a series of major technological revolutions, including IoT (Internet of Things), AI (Artificial Intelligence), Machine Learning, and the upcoming 5G specifications, all involved with networking. In recent years, SDN (Software-Defined Network) has taken the most spotlight, and has indeed been widely adopted among enterprises all over the world. Following the success of SDN, there is another growing trend, Intent-based Networking, or abbreviated as IBN. In fact, IBN and SDN have often been jointly discussed due to certain level of similarities in their natures. Thus, this article is going to address the relations between SDN and IBN.
SDN and IBN
SDN has been the hit for enterprise IT management because it abstracts the network hardware as the logical layer for network programmability. By logically abstracting the hardware, SDN enables the agility and flexibility of programming the networks, without being restrained by vendor-specific ASICs and other proprietary HW/SW. Without the constraints, enterprise IT management can adopt “white-box” vCPE devices as their physical hardware in their network infrastructure. Thus, SDN greatly reduces the costs in implementation and maintenance. Today, major global cloud service providers have employed SDN for their network and serviceability.
The question is “how does SDN relate to IBN?”. The reason is, they share the similar principle, using software to run the network while shifting away the focus on hardware facilities. However, there is a fact deserving the attention. As said, SDN is very popular among cloud service providers, but this popularity has not yet tipped in the sector that relies on network automation. According to official figures, a great number of organizations in this sector still run their networks manually. In other words, they manually input command-line interfaces for any needed configuration for their networks. This has caused delays in responsiveness, and indirectly or directly hinder competitiveness.
This is where IBN comes in. Like SDN, IBN offers an abstraction layer so that the administrator can implement policy and instruction across all the physical hardware within the network infrastructure, no more manual configuration. Besides the virtualization nature like SDN, IBN is more oriented to the translation and implementation, which are essential elements for automated networking. The business intents can be described and input in plain, ordinary language, and then translated into policy or instruction. Once the network is implemented with the business intents, it will generate automated responses. For instance, the administrator may describe his/her intent for strict packet filtering, and this intent will be translated into policy in the abstraction layer, and then the network will initialize more strict packet filtering with focused monitoring of abnormal traffic.
The characteristics of translation, automation and implementation make IBN easily deployable across different platforms. In fact, the business intents can be carried over to other platforms. For organizations that heavily rely on network automation, IBN enables them with great agility and interoperability, without additional investments on switches and other devices.
Future Implications
IBN is still in the beginning stage and it requires sophisticated integration of SDN controller, and some degrees of AI, machine learning and Open Source Software to make it work as requested.