From Clicks to Code: Asiera’s Network Automation Journey

From Clicks to Code: Asiera’s Network Automation Journey

Alternatives titles: “The Good, the Bad and the Automated”; or “From Scripts to Strategy: Building an Automated Network”

Asiera’s ambition is to fully automate the operational tasks that underpin its network and digital infrastructure services. A complex and involved transformation – it is an ongoing journey requiring time, iteration, and continual process improvement.

This initiative began as a response to the End-of-Life of a key operational network-provisioning platform, which provided the catalyst to rethink how network operations could be provisioned and managed. Rather than replace like for like, Asiera used the opportunity to begin developing a more modern, extensible and highly automated approach to the realization and delivery of network services to Asiera’s clients.

To that end the presentation will emphasize the benefits of the new infrastructure to Asiera’s clients: faster, more efficient, more seamless, less error-prone and more reliable processes for the establishment and management of the Network Services Asiera provides to them.

This session will explore how Asiera developed its network automation capability using open-source, extensible tools. We will discuss the technologies selected, the underlying motivations for their selection, and how they were integrated into our operational environment. The talk will also highlight the practical realities of implementation, including challenges encountered, mistakes made, and how the approach evolved over time.

We will share the timeline of the journey, the effort involved in building the capability, and the lessons learned in estimating, managing, and delivering an ambitious automation program. Attendees will gain insights into which tools proved most effective, where complexity was underestimated, and how value has been realized so far.

Finally, we will reflect on results achieved to date, assess the effectiveness of the automation approach, and outline the next steps in Asiera’s roadmap towards greater operational automation.

This talk is suitable for anyone interested in automating business or network processes, and in the tangible time-saving and operational efficiency benefits this can bring to end users and clients.