What is DevNetOps?
What is DevNetOps?
DevNetOps is the application of DevOps philosophies, principles, and behaviors to network operations (NetOps). DevOps philosophies originated with the software engineering culture and lean manufacturing revolution that occurred during the 1980s-2000s. These principles are commonly known as CALMS—culture, automation, lean, measurement, and sharing.
One of the most referenced DevOps principles counters the waterfall methodology—where extended planning, building, and testing cycles occur in long sequential stages. As documented in The DevOps Handbook, DevOps research has shown that for IT and manufacturing industries, smaller, more frequent deployments result in greater operational speed, agility, and improved quality.
For organizations to quickly meet their business goals, reliability is a key prerequisite! Speed without sustainability results in failure, and failing fast is beneficial to organizations only if they can improve between iterations. Coincidentally, a recent and popular implementation of DevOps is the site reliability engineer (SRE) role. Similarly, DevNetOps is implemented by the network reliability engineer (NRE) role.
What is a DevNetOps Pipeline?
DevNetOps Pipeline
To reduce the lead time between development and deployment, and work in shorter, faster cycles with smaller deployment change deliverables, the DevNetOps pipeline automates the progress between engineering changes and production deployments.
Committing to a versioned code repository triggers a continuous integration (CI) pipeline of progressive building and testing. Through a series of automatic and manual judgments, candidate delivery payloads are tested in virtual environments, simulations, and labs toward the state of a committed reliable delivery. The state of continuous delivery (CD) pipeline ensures that the committed delivery is always in a deployable state. Continuous deployment is the automatic push to staging and then production.
However, before changes are pushed into a runtime environment (such as staging and production), it is important to realize micro-sized architectural units of changes and immutable infrastructure. Large monolithic changes are not safe, and are slower to form and validate. Additionally, issues are harder to identify when compared to small packets of change.
Immutable infrastructure is equally important before continuous deployment. It is not efficient nor useful to deploy, and then have an engineer alter the meaning of what actually deployed. Production runtimes must be reproducible to safely test changes and determine how issues can be improved.
Continuous monitoring, measurement, and response comprise the last piece of DevNetOps. The in-production feedback to service-level indicators are used to make reactive or proactive adjustments to the transitory network state. Also, the analyzed telemetry, incidents, and external change requests feed continuous improvements back into the codified state of the networking systems.
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Automated DevNetOps Pipeline Summary |
Tooling |
Process |
People |
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Network as Code |
Repos of configuration secrets, artifacts, and gitOps |
Branching, reviewing, pairing, Agile |
Code skills (not necessarily programming) |
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Pipeline Orchestration |
Pipeline CI/CD tools, test frameworks |
TDD, measurement judgments |
Build and debug skills, pipeline pros |
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Micro and Immutable Architecture |
Baking deliveries for ZTP, vendor refractors |
Small-step commits/deployment |
Hands-off CLI/TTY |
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Orchestrated Upgrades |
ZTD, virtualization, labs, traffic draining |
Staging and simulation canary analysis |
In-hours maintenance, roll back or forward |
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Resiliency Design and Drills |
Traffic generation, DoS, chaos monkey |
Chaos windows, document limits |
Force failure for understanding |
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Continuous Measurement |
Big data analytics, ML, ITops integration |
Incident playbooks, capacity planning |
Management by stats, metrics, efficiency |
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Continuous Response |
Auto-remediation, FaaS, predictive stats |
Supervise self-driving |
Engineer telemetry, indicators, self-healing |
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Continuous Improvement |
Upgrades, features, fixes, changes |
Record local lesson into global knowledge |
Active open-mindedness post mortems |
Benefits of DevNetOps
- Team culture and behaviors consistent with reliability engineering combined with smaller, more frequent deployments lead to higher performing teams and companies1.
- DevNetOps allows for speedier integration of vendor systems, especially software upgrades and patches. It persuades vendors to deliver in smaller payloads on a faster cadence, solving the problem of long lead time for features and fixes. It dramatically shortens the gap between the vendor’s time-to-market and operator time-to-deployment.
- For engineers, DevNetOps reduces stress (deployment anxiety) and boosts job satisfaction.
What is the Relationship between NRE, DevNetOps, and DevOps?
DevOps and DevOps engineers are associated with business application development and operations. A role does exist for networking, especially for some types of software-defined networking (SDN), in running application clusters. However, networks also exist inside enterprises and service providers separate from the domain of developing and running software applications and platforms2. Some examples of NetOps networks which focus on enterprise applications are: wide-area backbone, transport, backhaul, and data center underlay networks.
To differentiate DevOps and DevNetOps, the separation of networking’s Dev-Ops is between vendor and customer instead of between teams of the same company. Some DevOps goals, such as rapid iteration of features and product experimentation, are not typical goals for the foundational infrastructure of networks. Nevertheless, DevOps principles and benefits apply equally to networking.
While DevNetOps, like DevOps, is a collection of philosophies, principles, and best practices, network reliability engineering (NRE) implements them. The “Dev” and “Engineering” goals are the same. However, while DevOps principles elevate the speed of iteration and evolution toward continuous learning, NRE focuses squarely on reliability as its foremost goal. These are complementary twin goals: a what and a why.
DevNetOps FAQs
Why is DevNetOps needed?
Network changes are complex, requiring rigorous and costly vetting processes, and they’re susceptible to problems and unexpected impacts. DevNetOps addresses these issues with practices that ensure that changes are small, frequent, and performed in an automated and reliable way. This approach improves quality, outcomes, and deployment times over the traditional waterfall methodology, which breaks activities into lengthy, sequential phases, each dependent on the quality and accuracy of the previous one.
What is the difference between DevOps and DevNetOps?
While DevOps is primarily concerned with accelerating an organization’s software development processes and deployment times, DevNetOps applies DevOps principles and practices to automating network operations and treating infrastructure as code. The expected DevNetOps outcome is a more flexible, programmable, and scalable network infrastructure that can support the accelerated pace of DevOps practices and software deployments.
Both DevOps and DevNetOps focus on breaking down departmental and functional “silos,” improving collaboration between teams, and increasing automation for greater operational speed, agility, and quality. However, DevOps focuses on in-house collaboration where DevNetOps more often addresses the relationship between vendor and customer. In addition, while DevOps’s prime concern is the speed of iteration, DevNetOps’ top goal is reliability.
What are the benefits DevNetOps?
The adoption of DevNetOps has a multitude of benefits. A few examples are increased efficiency; speedier integration of vendor systems, especially software upgrades and patches; shorter lead times for features and fixes; and a shorter interval between vendor time-to-market and operator deployment.
What DevNetOps technology/solutions/products does Juniper offer?
Juniper Cloud-Native Contrail Networking (CN2) is a software-defined networking (SDN) platform that automates the creation and management of virtual networks. It delivers infrastructure as code, a DevNetOps tenet, to achieve software quality at hyperscaler efficiency and speed. It's tested, qualified, and deployed using project Argo-based CN2 with Pipelines, a GitOps and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) model for NetOps, to deliver reliability engineering at hyperscaler speed.
