A recent short article from an IBN Evangelist brought up an interesting point about how complex modern networks really are and how IBN (Intent Based Networking), assuming SDN is dead, would potentially transform your network and equip you with enough insight by virtue of using AI & ML in such a way that overall network will be much more predictive in nature & AI/ML magic will take care of all complexity.
Wow...by now if You are not sold to this such a great marketing sales pitch....I'll be disappointed 😈
But as an Individual Network Consultant & as a Network Architecture practitioner, I often help my Clients to look deeper under the hood and uncover insights which helps them transform their networks in such a way that's much more realistic and much more practical in nature.
So let's start uncovering some details around " What makes our Networks really Complex? " to understand the problem space at its core and not just at its surface and bring this idea to " How to go about this idea and bring it to reality".
Business Layer
+++++++++++
Often business people based on tons of marketing from vendor believe that the technology is and was the way to transform their businesses. And don't get me wrong but that's true for most part at it's surface. But on the flip side what they don't get it is that the Technology is part of solution and not heart of solution. At it's core you still got to get it right from People & Process perspective. That's one of the reason why over 80% of Digital Transformation projects which are technology centric often gets failed and they get failed miserably from ROI perspective.
To simplify this I often quote this to my friends and colleagues " In theory your Smart phone has more computing power than Apollo 11 which took men to moon, but doesn't that mean you know completely how to harness this power still today to it's potential"
So why most technology driven Digital Transformation Projects really fail today ?
1. Short Term Thinking
3. Absence of Collaboration Culture - Start building trust at its core
4. Imposed Fake " Innovation " Culture - It's a big one in big Orgs.
5. Vendor driven Tech & Innovation - Vendor religions are still ruling the world
6. Most Valuable yet underrated skills:
A. Common Sense
B. Listening
C. Hard Work
D. Framing the Problem correctly and map it to its roots
E. Hypothesis Testing of your ideas, thoughts and frameworks
7. Fake Data Analytics - People using biased data & statistical models to prove their point and sound intelligent
8. The Generation Gap - This is actually a very big one
9. Absence of a comprehensive & mature "OEM/Partner/Solution benchmarking & onboarding process"
10. Moving away from Vendor A to Vendor B to save cost - If it's just CAPEX, just don't do that
11. OPs & Engineering are usually not invited in Business reviews as they seem irrelevant to many business folks still today
12. Most cross skill programs are fake and misleading
13. Too much of belief in - Cloud, SDN, IBN, Automation and the saga continues...
14. Believing that it's eventually the APP that matters and not the underlying tech...remember it's still Information Technology (IT) and not App Technology (AppT)
15. The urgent culture - Remember that most urgent things are unimportant
16. Let's not focus too much on those MBAs and CAs running companies at this point 😇
Technology
++++++++
1. The fake Application Aware Networking notion - It doesn't exist...Period !
2. Most Networking Managers & CTOs are still not investing into Core Network Architecture & Design skills and keep believing in OEM's Voodoo magic
3. Lack of Test bed environment - Over 90% of organizations still don't own dedicated Test bed environment that can validate those fresh configuration & configuration changes by replicating your production network at scale
4. The fake Architectural Skills - Just because someone owns an Expert Level networking certification or tons of experience on resume doesn't mean they own strong architectural & design skills
6. Common misunderstanding that if someone is working on new cool shiny tech, they are innovative
7. Tech people still believing understanding "How business really works" is boring & unimportant since that's why they chose to become Engineer
8. Vendor & Technology/Solution religions
9. All you need to pick on a new vendor and it's solution is that 3-5 days of training - Really ?
10. Tech folks still thinking in SLAs which BTW is a business metric and not a technology metric to begin with while still keep ignoring SLOs and SLIs
11. Tech Folks not being able to articulate changes they would need around People & Processes when introducing new shiny Tech, So how you handle change management in your SDN solution world and most importantly how different it is compare the what it was before introducing SDN ?
12. Outdated and non-standardized network documentation
13. The One Book Mentality - Not sure how many times and how often I came across his mentality. Usually the moment you ask a regular network engineer for example "How should we go about implementing IPv6 in our network ? ", the common set of responses you will hear back would be:
A. Let me read a good book on this and come back
B. Tell me what you want me to implement
C. Let me find the IPv6 deployment best practices document
But often they miss the point of first get a full understanding of following to fully understand the problem statement:
A. Why we are doing it in first place ?
B. What problem we are trying to solve ?
C. What changes we would need to make across Tech, People & Processes ?
D. What are my alternatives to meet same goal ?
E. How we would measure our success and more importantly our Business will measure it for us ?
14. Most Networking tech folks are still madly in love with Vendor stories & narratives when it comes to learning
15. Learning a product doesn't make You an Engineer, understanding how tech works behind the scene does
16. No tight & close feedback loop between Design & OPs team
Standard Bodies Failures
++++++++++++++++++
Like every other Industry, we got IEEE, IETF, MEF & ONUG and bunch of other standard governance bodies in Networking. But how robust their process are at their core ?
1. In most standardization documents, its not mandatory for You as author to talk through entire life cycle bits of your proposed protocol or solution. Always remember that building something new is perhaps always the easier part compare to operating it for next 5 years or so on daily basis. Under the hood the problem is very similar to " Why most hackathons are useless " for most part despite being chosen as one of popular tools to drive innovation.
2. Most RFCs are just boring lengthy texts...Not saying all of them since I am in love with RFC 1925 and RFCs do add lot more details in the equation, but why can't those be written in more interactive manner in a modern world where people predict that visual and AR/VR based learning is going to be the future despite we ignore based on evidences that people retain visual memories for longer. Perhaps they put on a dedicated track around this lead by Dan Roam at some point understanding its importance.
3. Networking & even Expert Level certifications only focus on Tech aspect and are still far from reality you have to face in real world...ping me to discuss those numerous examples 😇
4. Security aspects of any new protocol or solution is still an after thought in most cases
5. Lack of metrics defined to measure the quality of any protocol, solution & tech
So what do you think now about " Are Networks really Complex ? "
Further Readings:
HTH...
A Network Artist
