Intent-based networking: How Labs is helping to automate the journey from want to do

[Curt_Hopkins]

Intent-based networking (IBN) is a movement toward automating laborious and manual networking rules and configurations, toward telescoping the distance between a network intent and an action.

Hewlett Packard Labs is assuming a prominent place in the development of IBN. Labs is working on pushing forward the ease and efficiency of use of IBN across platforms and companies and as part of the ongoing efforts, Labs’ researchers are publishing two new important papers on IBN this month alone.

Collapsing the networking process

“The key here is that IBN allows the network administrators to specify their end goal, how they want the network to behave, in a very high-level language,” Ahmed says. “And then that intent language is translated, you could say processed, into lower level network configuration.”

Mercian adds a detailed explanation of how that works in terms of abbreviating and automating policies.

“You have routing policies, firewall policies, or load balancing policies” she says. “Such policy may say, for instance, ‘allow packets from this server to go to a different server.’ You want to have policies to define where packet can go, especially in enterprise networks where you want the internal network to be different from the external network.”

This type of policy can, using intent-based networking, be automated, reducing the work, time, trouble, and expertise needed to run your network, without sacrificing security.

The HPE difference

“HPE is agnostic in supporting enterprise edge networks,” says Mercian. HPE’s Aruba division “has been very good in a heterogenous environment because of the diverse set of network policy management solutions such as Aruba Central, ClearPass, and Introspect.”

Another place where HPE excels is in its adoption of open-source solutions and its participation in the open-source community. This is a long tradition at HPE. Accompanying this is HPE’s philosophical devotion to transparency. HPE has always believed that the industry is better the more that companies work together to standardize language and process.

The paper trail

“Mind the Semantic Gap: Policy Intent Inference from Network Metadata” is a paper by Anu Mercian, senior research scientist. It’s co-authored by her colleague, research scientist Faraz Ahmed, as well as Puneet Sharma, Director of Networking and Distributed Systems Lab, also from Labs, Shaun Wackerly, from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Charles Clark from HPE. It was presented at Netsoft 2021, IEEE International Conference on Network Softwarization.

This paper introduces a novel technique to infer network intent from existing network deployments. Legacy networks are not IBN ready and often managed using command line interface. Policy Intent Inference framework bridges the gap between the high-level intent and low-level configuration by extracting intent from metadata, such as labels, descriptions, and attributes.

Another paper, “Epinoia: Intent Checker for Stateful Networks,” will be presented at the 30th International Conference on Computer Communications and Networks. It’s authored by Faraz Ahmed, along with Huazhe Wang, Puneet Sharma, and Joon-Myung Kang of Labs, as well as Chen Qian of UC Santa Cruz and Mihalis Yannakakis of Columbia University.

This paper examines stateful network functions, internet-based networking for Stifel network functions. “It outlines a vendor-agnostic model for specifying or supporting our diverse set of network functions,” says Ahmed.

Curt Hopkins
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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