Network Automation e-Academy

Editor's Notes

• #2: Introduction to the OAV work done in the GÉANT project for the NRENs and the community
• #4: Orchestration and Automation are needed to make a smarter use of resources: Enable faster service delivery / decrease delivery time Reduce the number of human errors Decrease the amount of manual work Lower the costs of service delivery Ensure configuration consistency Provide better reporting Increase efficiency Increase configuration uniformity and consistency The subtask aims to promote wider adoption of general OAV principles within the NREN community.
• #7: Recursos humanos, experiencia y habilidades Reducir la brecha de la automatización entre las NREN
• #8: Q21. What kind of skills do you consider that people in your organisation should have to approach orchestration, automation and virtualization? Do you consider that people in your organisation have the right skills? If not, what is missing?
• #9: Q22. Does your network engineering / Network Operations Centre (NOC) team have specific concerns around a movement towards increased automation? If so, what are they?
• #10: How can the GÉANT project assist you in your journey towards greater automation and orchestration of your services? Which of the following would you find useful: a) providing data model(s) b) providing methodology c) providing training (please specify the topic) d) developing software (please specify which) e) providing a tool(s) / automation repository f) or other ways (please specify)
• #18: As we saw before, knowledge was mentioned as a gap in the survey, and we want to do something about it. We want to facilitate a knowledge transfer instead of having a knowledge gap. On the other hand, many NRENs have not really started automating yet. If you Google “network automation training”, more than 250 milion entries will show you that there is a lot of material out there. Many tools, platforms, programming languages, concepts like data formats and data modelling... There are excellent courses, but it’s easy to get lost. That’s why we planned to prepare a training focused on the research and education community, with external references that can be useful for us and examples that can be closer to our use cases. It’s a training by the community for the community. And we have done it in collaboration with the GÉANT Learning and Development Team, using the e-Academy platform and Moodle.
• #19: We already mentioned in the first video that this training has been prepared thinking about the organisations in the research and education environment, and that we are using the TMForum ODA architecture as a functional blueprint. This training as a whole is structured in several big blocks or modules that try to include all the necessary content for network engineers, managers and researchers to have a full view of the concepts needed to succeed in the journey to OAV. Each block or module contains several learning units. The first block is the Introduction, and you are now listening to the first learning unit. After the Introduction learning units, network engineers and systems engineers are recommended to follow the path through DevOps and the TMForum ODA functional blocks, starting with decoupling and integration. This way, you will see how Infrastructure needs to be treated as machine-readable Code (IaC) in order to be able to automate, follow DevOps principles, etc. For a more theoretical approach to standards, the blocks on the right are a less technical and less operational option. The examples on use cases from NRENs’ concepts are relevant to any profile, to understand how organisations in the environment have applied the OAV concepts. However, as in the world of OAV there are several protocols, tools, formats and programming languages, we have taken a phased approach to the training, where each phase adds more information to the concepts from the previous one, but where there is an overview of the whole OAV world from the start.
• #26: We have prepared a phased approach to the training. The metro map lets you choose your path and follow the learning units that are more relevant for you. There are 11 learning units and 6 documents published so far.
• #27: These are your trainers. A group of 18 people from several NRENs around Europe that have experience in OAV and can help you with the first steps of this journey to OAV. From university professors to network engineers and from managers to developers.
• #40: and we will have one hour per month for Questions and answers, like an open window to the trainers every first Tuesday, every month.