DevOps in Modern Enterprise Networking

In today’s business landscape, companies utilize applications such as DevOps and services that are dispersed among on-premises infrastructure, multiple cloud environments, and intelligent edge networks.

As we approach 2025, the majority of enterprise data – approximately 75% – is projected to be generated and managed at the edge. Furthermore, due to the growing adoption of a hybrid work model, enterprise application users are increasingly mobile.

The changing demands of applications and users are beyond the scope of traditional networking models, such as conventional SDN solutions. As a result, NetOps and CloudOps teams are under mounting pressure. In the absence of the ability to provide networking for applications in a detailed manner and with limited tools to enforce policies in a dynamic setting, NetOps teams are finding it challenging to maintain fine-grained control of the network and promptly address the evolving requirements of the applications.

Understanding the obstacles in the way

To ensure a seamless experience for customers and employees, DevOps teams within the Enterprise Line of Business (LoB) are tasked with maintaining the performance and reliability of their applications. In this context, the way applications and services are interconnected is just as crucial as the applications themselves. Regrettably, NetOps teams are often brought in towards the end of the application development process, making networking an afterthought.

According to feedback from IBM’s customers, the three most common IT connectivity challenges that lead to deployment delays are:

1. Multi-dimensional connectivity: Complicated processes involving DevOps, NetOps, and SecOps teams are resulting in prolonged provisioning times for establishing detailed connectivity between applications and services. It is not uncommon for network provisioning to take several weeks.
2. Network agility: DevOps teams expect network automation to offer the same level of agility as they experience in the compute and storage domains. Unfortunately, network automation is frequently not as mature as computing and storage automation and falls short of fulfilling expectations.
3. Lack of visibility caused by silos: The Operations (Ops) teams frequently operate independently, with their performance metrics and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) existing in isolation from one another. Consequently, troubleshooting degraded application performance can become convoluted and protracted.

Are we ready for DevOps-friendly, application-centric connectivity?

Reevaluating connectivity from an application standpoint can provide a solution to the aforementioned challenges, allowing DevOps teams to achieve self-service connectivity under the supervision of the NetOps and SecOps teams. By seamlessly integrating connectivity provisioning as an extra step in the CI/CD pipeline, DevOps teams can view the network as an additional cloud resource, resulting in straightforward, scalable, smooth, and secure application-level connectivity in any environment, whether on-premises, at the edge, or in the cloud.

This model also ensures consistent policy administration throughout all aspects of IT, significantly streamlining policy management and improving security measures.

By conceptualizing networks within the framework of applications and merging NetOps with DevOps and SecOps, enterprises can experience significant advantages, including:

• Seamless auto-discovery across applications and infrastructure resources.
• Single centralized management and policy control with clear mapping between business context and underlying network constructs.
• The ability to make the network “follow the application” when services move across locations.
• Elimination of silos between different Ops teams.
• “Built-in” zero-trust security architecture owing to the ability to operate and connect at an individual microservice level, drastically reducing the attack surface.
• Simplification of networks owing to the clear separation of application-level connectivity and security policies at the overlay, thereby resulting in a highly simplified underlay

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