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Introduction
Research firm GigaOm says ‘NetDevOps is the application of DevOps principles and techniques to network operations (NetOps), minimizing operator interactions and optimizing programmable network processes to configure, deploy, and manage the environment.”
Why does this make sense? The short answer is that software needs infrastructure. Previously, the software development process was often isolated from networking and infrastructure planning. However, these functions started to merge under NetdevOps, a methodology that aims to enhance quality and agility by eliminating handoffs between teams.
Imagine shifting the testing, validation, and monitoring forward in the production process of an application while also doing this for the network. Production networks must be continuously tested and monitored as new applications are implemented. This is where DevOps and NetOps come together to make NetDevOps.
Exploring the Leaders in NetDevOps: An In-Depth Analysis
This year, the GigaOm Radar report delves deep into the NetDevOps landscape, evaluating 17 of the top solutions in the market. Comparing the offerings against crucial capabilities such as table stakes and key features. This comprehensive report provides a thorough overview of the NetDevOps market, spotlighting leading solutions and guiding decision-makers in evaluating and selecting the best options for their needs.
As the landscape of network automation and DevOps continues to evolve, several key players have emerged as leaders. In the latest GigaOm Radar report, Anuta Networks has been highlighted as an outperformer due to its accelerated pace of innovation, surpassing the industry average.
About GigaOm
The GigaOm Radar plots vendor solutions across a series of concentric rings, with those set closer to the center judged to be of higher overall value. The chart characterizes each vendor on two axes—balancing Maturity versus Innovation and Feature Play versus Platform Play—while providing an arrowhead that projects each solution’s evolution over the coming 12 to 18 months.
The categorization of vendors (Forward Mover, Fast Mover, or Outperformer) is based on customer adoption rates and their ability to execute against their roadmap and vision, reflecting their overall progress and improvements in the industry.
Feature Highlights
#1. The Importance of Native Vendor Support
The GigaOm Report highlights the importance of native vendor support, emphasizing the need for out-of-the-box integration and support for platforms, solutions, and tools provided by network equipment vendors within the NetDevOps ecosystem. This includes support for vendor-specific APIs, data models, and other software interfaces to manage and automate network devices and services.
Rated five stars in this category, ATOM excels in vendor support, building a robust ecosystem for your network. ATOM offers out-of-the-box support for new vendors, platforms/controllers, workflows, and service models, boasting the broadest industry coverage across 60+ vendors and 250+ platforms with 350+ out-of-box use cases. ATOM also supports Open APIs, enabling new vendor support within days, provided APIs are publicly available. With ongoing innovation, whether developed in-house or through strategic acquisitions, ATOM continues to enhance its comprehensive vendor support.
#2. Understanding Network Discovery
Network discovery is all about automatically finding and tracking all the devices in your network. It’s key for keeping an accurate inventory, enforcing access policies, and understanding how your network runs. But why is it so important for NetDevOps?
ATOM can discover devices across multi-vendor, multi-cloud setups using CDP, LLDP, and SNMP protocols. It supports seed and sweep discovery methods and allows data to be imported from CSV files. Instead of manual data entry, ATOM lets CSPs remotely discover every server using Redfish APIs, supporting DELL and Super Micro servers and adding new ones easily.
Once devices are in ATOM, diagnostics are super flexible. You can schedule a conference to manage and monitor thousands of devices across various domains.
#3. Configuration Validation
Configuration validation checks if network changes match the design or intent, ensuring everything is set up correctly. But what role does it have for a successful NetDevOps?
Imagine this: You’re rearranging your living room. You want everything to fit perfectly and look great. Configuration validation is like measuring your space and furniture first so you know everything will fit and look good before you move it.
Risk Reduction: It helps catch errors and misconfigurations before they become problems, ensuring changes are done right and safely.
Compliance: It ensures that your network setups follow the rules and best practices, keeping you compliant with regulations.
Efficiency: Automating these checks speeds things up, helping you spot and fix issues before they mess up your network performance or security.
There is also a dry run mode to verify commands before pushing.
And ATOM scores a perfect five stars in this area.
#4. Monitoring & Telemetry
ATOM is a ‘one data collector.’ It can ingest everything, be it SNMP, SNMP traps, Syslog, or modern streaming telemetry. ATOM normalizes this disparate data and offers real-time information via its Kafka and time-series database.
When we talk about monitoring and reporting, providing comprehensive statistics at device, platform, and regional levels is pertinent to know the overall health of your network. Admins can make informed decisions based on detailed reports on performance, inventory, operations, and network compliance, including routing protocols and interface data.
ATOM detects patterns and anomalies by interpreting telemetry data for proactive issue identification and swift resolution. Network administrators can customize visualizations using ATOM’s templates or create bespoke charts to monitor node health and compare interface statistics.
ATOM integrates seamlessly with IT infrastructure software through Open APIs, ensuring future-proof automation deployment. Southbound, Anuta ATOM integrates with 60+ vendors using CLI, NETCONF, YANG, or API. Check out managed devices for the complete list of supported vendors and platforms.
Northbound, Anuta ATOM integrates with self-service portals such as OSS/BSS and ServiceNow or JIRA. The entire ATOM functionality is available through REST API.
Anuta ATOM also integrates with third-party software such as IPAM, NMS, Syslog Managers, VIMs, SDN, and SD-WAN controllers.
#5. Software Management
Software management ranges from simple version control and basic deployment features to pre-built automation upgrading network device software to enable new features, address security vulnerabilities, or mitigate end-of-life scenarios.
ATOM empowers network teams to perform remote software upgrades and enables scheduling, downloading of images, and automation of pre-checks/post-checks at the time of software upgrades using workflows.
The workflows can be customized to integrate customer ticketing systems and follow the required approval processes. Each step in the OS upgrade is logged for auditing purposes. In case of upgrade failures, the workflows include steps to safely restore the previous known good version.
In addition, ATOM workflows include predictive analytics. So, if an OS Upgrade takes longer than expected, a ticket will be raised so that the administrator can either extend the maintenance window or cancel the update. ATOM has the most scalable solution for OS upgrades. We have validated 2962 OS Upgrade workflows in 3 hours for Juniper QFX devices.
The software upgrade process can be further customized with MOP development in the IDE, including collaboration with product owners, version control with Git, integration with a main MOP, CI processes, automated deployment to staging environments, and manual or automated deployment to production environments.
#6. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
According to GigaOm, RPA ranges from simple automation of repetitive tasks to allowing non-programming users to build process automation easily and quickly using drag-and-drop interfaces to link network automation tasks with external integrations and business logic.
At Anuta, we help users execute complex MOP operations from multiple vendors with our flexible and powerful workflow engine. Operators can organize tasks in series, parallel, or loops and incorporate comprehensive task capabilities, including user input tasks for decision-making and form completion.
Beyond tasks, Workflows integrate decision gateways, timers, and error handlers to cover all deployment scenarios. Through Northbound APIs, Workflows connect seamlessly with OSS/BSS systems, ticketing systems, network devices, and more, facilitating smooth data exchange via REST/RPC APIs, SSH, Telnet, NETCONF, and others.
Workflows leverage ATOM functionalities for data handling and service orchestration, ensuring robust pre- and post-checks automation. Anuta continuously enhances Workflow with new features like Configlets, enabling dynamic CLI data parsing and configuration generation across multiple vendors.
Enhanced analytics and reporting empower operators to classify, schedule, and optimize workflows, gaining insights through heat maps and custom reports for streamlined operations.
Emerging Features
#7. AI and Co-pilot
ATOM is a next-generation AI-powered Canvas for workflows where the user gets a drag-and-drop interface with a co-pilot. The ATOM Virtual Assistant – AVA helps automate configuration, troubleshoot with real-time analytics, simplify scalability, and provide proactive monitoring. AVA also offers enhanced visibility, knowledge base assistance, and self-service troubleshooting for faster and more accurate support.
#8. EDGE Cloud / Multi-cloud / Hybrid Cloud
As a holistic solution, Anuta ATOM offers customers diverse choices. They can deploy on-prem or on-cloud, start small, and achieve massive scale. ATOM supports different types of cloud networks, including Access, Aggregation, EDGE cloud, and EDGE/Core.
ATOM is built on a microservices architecture. It leverages Docker containers and Kubernetes Orchestration. It can be installed on any Kubernetes infrastructure – Either On-prem, Cloud, or hybrid-
ATOM can be deployed in any of the following environments:
- On-Prem Kubernetes
- Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
- Amazon web service (AWS)
- Microsoft Azure
ATOM can be deployed with all the components at a single location or some of the components distributed.
- Local Deployment
- Distributed Deployment
Anuta ATOM: An Outperformer in Network Automation and Orchestration
How do I select the right option?
When choosing a NetDevOps solution, it’s important to understand that there is no universal “best” or “worst” option. The suitability of each solution depends on various factors, such as feature portfolio, sustainability, customer support, and training. Therefore, it’s up to the customer to evaluate each vendor’s strengths and capabilities based on their specific needs.
ATOM USP, Challenges and the Future
ATOM’s strengths lie in its extensible and scalable vendor-agnostic platform, which offers comprehensive support for out-of-the-box, standards-based service lifecycle management and service orchestration use cases. Its low-code automation and interactive GUI simplify the design of self-service workflows, providing one of the fastest and most cost-effective implementations available on the market.
ATOM prioritizes customer centricity through–
Technical Support Anuta Networks offers technical assistance for troubleshooting, problem resolution, and guidance on its network automation and orchestration platform.
Professional Services: ATOM’s dedicated professional services and iTop integration allow customers to open and track support cases online, ensuring timely assistance and issue resolution.
Online Knowledge Base: Anuta Networks provides an online repository of articles, documentation, and solutions to common issues related to their products.
Looking ahead, Anuta is actively addressing customer feedback to enhance IPv6 management plane support and expand path computation capabilities to include Layer 3 topologies. Plans are also underway to introduce support for optical devices, further broadening ATOM’s applicability across diverse network environments.
The SaaS platform ATOM Cloud has a pay-as-you-go subscription model with three license tiers: ATOM Cloud Essentials, ATOM Cloud Professional, and ATOM Cloud Enterprise to suit the requirements.
Conclusion
Positioned as a Leader in the Maturity-Platform Play quadrant, Anuta ATOM has been successfully deployed by numerous large enterprises and service providers, demonstrating a proven track record across public and private networks. Anuta’s aggressive roadmap includes quarterly functional and monthly maintenance releases. Key capabilities released in 2023 include Anuta Network’s End-to-End (E2E) Service Management Domain leveraging the TeleManagement Forum’s (TMF) Open APIs and the AI-powered virtual assistant, AVA.
Conclusively, Anuta ATOM stands out among its competitors for its robust and scalable solution, comprehensive feature set, and strong support for diverse network environments. Its extensive automation and orchestration capabilities and a proactive approach to innovation and compliance make it a top choice for enterprises and service providers looking to enhance their network operations.
