Automatic life cycle management of network configurations

Abstract

Managing the life cycle of network configurations, including the generation, update, transition and diagnosis of the configurations, is the primary task of network operators and a critical process for the reliability and efficiency of the networks. This paper presents NetCraft, a framework which automates the life cycle management of network configurations with a unified network model. Designed for life cycle automation, NetCraft's network model can expressively encode all parts and protocols in the network; It can be converted to or constructed from configurations with interoperability; It is able to perform fine-grained configurations with flexibility to deactivate or undo any configurations for safe configuration updates; And it can work without cooperations from device vendors. We have built and deployed an initial version of NetCraft in Alibaba's global WAN. Evaluations in real environments show that NetCraft can reduce the network incidents caused by configurations by 95% and cut the average time to plan and execute a network update by up to 93%.