Erwan James is one of the champions of automation in the data center. He has a long association with the technology behind making the data center a better place for operations teams. I talked to him about Nokia Event Driven Automation (EDA), an exciting new platform that will help this process along.
Erwan talked about three big pillars in this interview that are crucial to the vision for Nokia EDA. The first is abstraction. By abstracting the implementation details of a fabric away from the underlying hardware you can focus more on the intent of what you want to accomplish instead of worrying about things like CLI commands or platform capabilities. Nokia EDA understands the components of the system that it operations so all you need to do is declare what you want to happen and the platform will take care of the rest. Today it supports Nokia SR-Linux but soon it will support even more operating systems.
The second pillar is reliablity. Declaring your intent for the network and actually making it happen are two different things. Half-baked automation implementations usually fail when the network crashes because of bad commands or because the system decides to make changes outside of approved windows. Nokia focused on ensuring that EDA was reliable and predictable so that changes and updates were easy to do but also easy to roll back in the event that something is amiss. With the database of modifications that Nokia tracks you can even rollback device software upgrades!
The final pillar is extensiblity. It’s one thing to build a fabric. It’s another to build a good one. Vendors will all tell you that their approach is the best, even if everyone builds them the same way from standards like EVPN and VXLAN. However, the implementation details do matter once you start trying to build systems that interact with each other. Nokia recognized that having a strong opinion about how to build something is an asset, but so too is being able to relax that opinion to make a data center fabric consumable to the masses.
If you want to learn more about the Nokia EDA platform and how Event Driven Automation can help you, please make sure to check out the Networking Field Day Exclusive with Nokia videos available on the Tech Field Day website
