As organizations, networks, and technologies changed over time, so did the way that enterprises thought about managing their networks. In the future, we will see a proliferation of solutions to help teams adopt an agile and data-driven network operating model. In many organizations, software developers and networking professionals have used separate tools and processes. Developers use pipelines to test, deploy, and change code. They then create tickets for network changes like VPNs and firewalls. The network team would make the changes and then end users could use the application. The handoff from dev to network can be instant or it could take several days, preventing the end user from accessing the new functionality.
NetDevOps addresses this critical issue, which is one of the most pressing infrastructure questions in the market: How can you create an organization that functions smoothly across multiple skill sets, technologies, and processes? Those same enterprises will be looking to leverage continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices from their software development best practices to help them overcome some of the challenges involved with implementing automation and orchestration into their networks.
What Is a CI/CD Pipeline?
A CI/CD Pipeline automates the automation of continuous integration and deployment processes.The pipeline streamlines the software development process by facilitating stages such as Build, Test Merge, and Deploy.
A pipeline is not an overhead. It’s actually a specification of steps which can be run to reduce manual work and speed up the delivery of new software versions.
The Stages of a CI/CD pipeline:
  • Source Stage
In the majority of cases, a pipeline is started when a change to the central repository is attempted. These triggers are defined by the CI/CD tool at the source stage.
  • Build Stage
Compilation is also required for the built-in languages, such as Java. This happens in the build phase. This stage can also facilitate the creation of docker images. If this step fails, it could indicate a possible error in code or dependencies.
  • Test Stage
This is the automated test phase that runs to validate and verify our code. This stage is a sieve to prevent bugs from reaching end users. Multiple stages can exist, from end-to-end testing to smoke tests. If this test fails, it will reveal errors in the code.
  • Deployment Stage
Once the code is runnable, all tests are passed before deployment. For the product team, there are many stages such as “Beta, Staging,” etc. There is also a “Production” phase for end-users.
CI/CD Accelerates the Automation Process
Let’s begin with CI/CD. As network operators begin to rethink network updates and configuration, the adoption of orchestration and automation will increase. Cisco’s white paper “Automation drives network engineer skills transformation” states that the increase in automation is due to the fact that organizations are relying more on continuous connectivity. They also need the network to be dynamic, and they have to keep up with the rate of change in both the application consumers as well as the application supply side.
Some enterprises struggle to build their automation infrastructure due to a lack of resources, skills, and maintenance efforts. To solve this, many of them are looking to incorporate the traditional DevOps practice of building and updating code with traditional continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines into their network automation and orchestration initiatives.
DevOps should follow a CI/CD workflow. CI/CD is used by organizations to minimize bottlenecks and improve the delivery of software. Continuous integration helps optimize building, integrating, and testing code in a development environment.
Teams will improve their delivery by integrating CI/CD and network automation.

Why NetDevOps

NetDevOps is a networking approach that brings DevOps’ culture, methods, strategies, and best practices to the network.
DevOps principles allows organizations to increase efficiency, and ensure network availability, quality, and reliability.
NetDevOps applies these principles in a network environment. It offers tools that empower teams to work together and create an organization capable of working across different skill levels and processes.
It’s a trend that is gaining traction. Cisco’s Hybrid Cloud Trends Report shows that 55% of respondents have created a multi-functional team, with both technical and business representatives. 50% also have a central CloudOps/NetOps function.
DevOps is a combination cultural philosophies and practices and tools which increase the ability of an organization to deliver services and applications at high speed. It means faster changes using automation and rigorous tests, which reduces the overall Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC).
Many network infrastructures today are not managed by SDLC. They’re instead managed using more conventional techniques. The manual nature of the network change makes it error-prone and slow.
NetDevOps addresses the shortcomings of DevOps by adopting DevOps team for Networking. The goal is to deliver applications and services at high speed. To achieve this goal, however, the changes to the networking infrastructure must be implemented faster so that they don’t become a bottleneck during the delivery cycle. In the figure below, you can see how NetDevOps stages are represented.
NetDevOps automates and orchestrates network changes in order to reduce the lifecycle of network delivery. It treats the network like code, allowing version control. And it tests reliably changes to ensure quality and stability.
  • NetDevOps Components
Let’s examine the components that make up NetDevOps (practices and tools, cultural philosophies, etc.) to gain a better understanding.
  • Modularity
You may be familiar with the word ‘monolith,’ which is used to describe a software application that has individual components tightly coupled together. A change to a component can affect the entire application. The impact area is large, so it’s sensitive to any changes. This requires a holistic test of the whole system. It creates complexity, which slows down innovation. Modern systems tend to move away from monolithic architectures and towards modular ones. We can achieve this by dividing the monolithic systems into smaller micro-services, where we can manage, maintain and scale each component separately.
  • Cultural Changes
Corporate culture is one of the major differences between NetDevOps and traditional networking practices. As we mentioned in the previous section of this article, historically networks were monolithic structures with multiple components tightly coupled. Changes to single components can affect the entire architecture in this model. Due to this blast radius, network changes are sensitive and require extensive testing. Network operations and changes, therefore, are usually the responsibility of one central team that evaluates potential impacts and maps out the required actions.
The tight coupling of a network and the perceived importance of it encourage a culture where manual, sequential operation is used infrequently.
NetDevOps, on the other hand, encourages a modular and decoupled architecture of the network where changes can be made without affecting any other components. This represents a change from the centralized, coupled model.
To make this model work, however, it is important that teams are empowered to take full responsibility and operate independently, rather than having to go through the centralized decision-making.
Your delivery velocity will increase with automated parallel network changes, operations and testing.
Code for Automation and Infrastructure
We have known the benefits of network automation for many years. It automates manual tasks to reduce the risk of human error and accelerate network deployments.
In a world of software-defined networking (SDN), the benefits of network automation are magnified, and they have a greater impact on the speed and innovation rates for organizations.
You can define the Infrastructure as Code of your network (IaC). You can embed enterprise guidelines and best practices into your network configurations by using templates.
You can then make these templates accessible to the individual teams of application developers, who can create new network segments on a large scale.
In addition, by representing your network in code you can also track and log changes. You create new templates as your network configuration changes. This can be a difficult task and lead to “snowflake” networks – networks that have different configurations of networking in similar components. IaC combined with source control allows you to maintain a single point of truth while tracking changes.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
IaC and modular architectures make it simple for autonomous teams define and deploy changes to the network infrastructure to meet their goals without having to change the entire setup. Despite this, the majority of deployments require manual approval, multiple levels of testing, and configuration tracking. Deploying changes to production environments is therefore a time-consuming process. We can use CI/CD to accelerate the process.
Example Use Case – Configuration Changes
You could click on each action manually to achieve your goal. If you want to add another VPC in a few days, you will have to repeat the process. This approach will not guarantee enterprise best practices and that you don’t change your configuration.
A NetDevOps-Based Approach would Include:
  • Create IaC template for the network resources that include best practices and enterprise guardrails
  • Keep the templates in your source control system.
  • Use a CI/CD Pipeline to orchestrate actions, utilizing unit and integration tests.
The Workflow High-Level for this Example Use Case is:
  • The NetDevOps Team will create VPCs as code templates that will be -
  • Accept parameters such as application name, environment and CIDR ranges from the application team.
  • Create VPC, subnets, and TGW attachment requests based on the parameters provided by application team. Configure VPC route tables.
  • The template will be available through a self service portal to the application teams.
  • A request made by the application team via the self-service portal, as shown in the figure below, will initiate a deployment pipeline.
  • The enterprise guardrails will be tested using unit tests. In the previous section, some examples of checks were provided.
  • After successful validation of the checks, the CI pipeline will deploy the VPC, subnets and initiate a request for TGW attachment.
  • The Networking Team can approve attachment requests by either automating the process or manually approving them. They will then associate this request with a route table that has been predefined.
  • You can also run network connectivity tests using ICMP pings, and VPC reachability analysis.
  • The workflow is completed when the test results are positive.
Implementing CI/CD Pipelines to the Network
When the traditional CI/CD pipe is applied to network configurations some issues can arise. There isn’t a single source of truth. The final version of each configuration may only be available on a specific device. There could be multiple templates, each of which is responsible for a different chunk of the configuration. The developer can then version control the templates and start a build each time one is modified. The entire configuration will not be built. Therefore, to get the result you want, you must apply the step to the device. Two major problems arise.
  • The first is that you don’t know whether the configuration being added to the device will be accepted. Templates could be incorrect, or code on the device may conflict with changes made. The device could reject all changes (which would be the desired result in this case). The device could also accept some changes but not others, leaving it in an unstable state. The device may accept some changes, but not all, leaving it in a potentially unstable state.
  • Second, changes were made before testing! The result is that the testing takes place on the live network, instead of matching what was desired.
In the event that something goes wrong during testing, it will be necessary to change the device again to restore its previous configuration. In this case, it is necessary to perform a backup before deployment.
Companies often try to minimize risk by making changes during scheduled maintenance window when an outage will have the least impact. Isn’t the point of CI/CD that you can make changes in real time? The core principles of the methodologies are violated by implementing this gating system.

Rethinking NetOps DevOps

It is not possible to “compile”, as it is done in the CI/CD pipeline, configurations for the network. The NetOps Pipeline has divided the build phase in two to accommodate this. First, there is the “build” phase. This is where you build complete configurations using external data or blocks of prebuilt configurations. The “validate” phase is the second. This phase checks that the configuration is deployed makes sense. The validation phase, unlike the network example from before (where there was no way to know if the configuration constructed would be accepted by the device), checks if the configuration is compatible without having to deploy. Combining these two phases is similar to the work that a compiler would do during the build stage.
Testing services is the next step in the NetOps Pipeline to ensure that changes are implemented as intended. If you change an ACL on a device, for example, it is possible to run multiple tests to simulate the outcome of different scenarios.
In the final phase, changes are made to network devices. In most networks, multiple systems are authoritative about different parts of the network. Changes to the network might not be propagated to other systems. It’s important to not only support device changes but also to keep the other systems up to date whenever an infrastructure change occurs.
Automation (such as the process described above) helps networking teams adopt agile modern processes. The adoption of Network Infrastructure as Code is becoming easier as more services become available. Organizations of all sizes are able to accelerate their use of network orchestration and automation by abstracting the traditional CI/CD pipe and tweaking it slightly.
Benefits of NetDevOps CI/CD Pipeline Solutions
NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines are two technologies that are interconnected. They are becoming more popular in the IT sector. Both technologies are aimed at automating and streamlining software development lifecycles, including testing, deployment and monitoring. Organizations can reap many benefits by adopting NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD Pipeline solutions. These include improved collaboration, faster times to market and higher quality software releases. Learn more about the benefits of NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD.
  • Improved Collaboration
NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines promote collaboration among development, operations and testing teams. These technologies allow teams to collaborate more closely and solve problems faster. NetDevOps allows developers and operations to share responsibilities. This leads to increased agility and responsiveness. Developers can get feedback more quickly by automating testing and deployment. Teams can then deliver software faster, with less defects and better quality.
  • Reduced Time to Market
NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines enable organizations to release software more successfully and quicker. By automating the software lifecycle, organizations will be able to eliminate all manual activities, manual errors, and streamline release cycles. This will result in reduced time to market and a competitive edge. NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipeline allow organizations to adopt a continuous release approach where they release software in smaller increments. Therefore, organizations will be able to rapidly iterate on business requirements and adapt quickly.
  • High Quality Software
NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines foster a culture of continuous improvement. This allows organizations to build better software. Automated testing will enable organizations to do more detailed testing, and to do so in less time. Automated testing reduces the potential for human errors, which is a major contributor to software defects. In the end, implementing NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines can allow organizations to ensure that the software they release is thoroughly tested and high quality.
  • Greater Visibility and Control
NetDevOps solutions or CI/CD pipelines provide greater visibility and control in the software development phase. By automating the deployment process, organizations, can see how the software releases are being adopted in real time, providing assurance for a successful implementation. Automation of various hardening processes allows for an objective measure of the successful release. Automated testing provides explicit details on the quality of your releases, allowing us to make informed decisions on the proper timing of release.
  • Production and Efficiency
NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines help the company to be more productive and efficient. With the automation of manual processes, organizations are able to see a significant reduction of time and effort in software releases. Therefore, teams can focus their efforts on other important tasks that were originally diverted to release preparation and other tasks. NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines increase the ability of teams to work together efficiently, which equals a reduction in time to resolution. The information that comes from these technologies highlight and help organizations become more efficient, and improve productivity that would normally compromise quality, speed-to-market, or both.
  • Enhanced Security and Compliance
NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines can help organizations enhance their security and compliance. Automating security testing enables organizations to deliver compliant, secure software releases. Automated testing can also help organizations identify security and compliance issues earlier in the software lifecycle, leading to reduced security risk and non-compliance risk.
  • Reduced Expenses
NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines can lead to reduced expenses related to software development and maintenance. Automating manual processes helps organizations reduce the time and effort involved in releasing software. In turn, this leads to lower expenses. NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines also help organizations identify and address issues sooner in the development cycle, which leads to reduced expenses for fixing production issues.
NetDevOps Solutions and CI/CD Pipeline Implementation Best Practices
As organizations implement digital transformation and agile processes, adopting NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines (continous integration and continuous development pipelines) becomes increasingly important. Ultimately, these delivery processes enable teams to deliver better software, faster and at a higher level of quality and reliability. Implementing NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines is a complex task that should include a great deal of planning and implementation.
Here are some of the best practices you should consider when implementing NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines.
  • Start with a Vision and Plan
It is important to develop a vision and plan for the outcome of the implementation before you start implementing NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines. You will need to know the goals, the scope, the timing, and any resources that you will need. You should involve all stakeholders in the planning process in order to have their alignment and buy-in for your implementation process.
  • Automate Everything
If you want to reap the full benefits of NetDevOps, CI/CD, and NetDevOps pipelines in speed, reliability, and quality, you need apply automation to everything! Automation should be applied from infrastructure provisioning to test, deployment and operational stages. Not only will you reduce errors and save time, but automated practices will also ensure repeatability.
  • Version Control is Key for all

Version control is key to NetDevOps Solutions and CI/CD pipelines. Git is a good version control system to house all of the code, configurations, and infrastructure. This can help teams work effectively together, while also tracking any changes, and reverting back to older versions, if need be.

  • Embrace a DevOps Culture
NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines are about more than just technology. They are also about culture and collaboration. In order for teams to succeed, they must find a harmony with a DevOps based culture that emphasises collaboration, communication, and continuous improvement. It is key to de-silos the teams (development, operations, or any others) and drive a learning and experiment culture.
  • Implement Continuous Testing
Testing is a significant component of NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines. Teams should try to implement continuous testing through their development process, whether that is unit testing, functional testing, continuous integration pipeline tests, or performance tests. This will help teams continuously deliver better software because they will be spotting bugs sooner and fixing them.
  • Monitoring
Monitoring is critical for ensuring reliability and performance for NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines. Teams must monitor all aspects of the pipeline from infrastructure metrics and application performance to security and user behavior; monitoring the complete pipeline allows teams to catch issues earlier and manage incidents accordingly and more effectively.
  • Containers and Microservices
NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines rely heavily on the technology of containers and microservices. Containers provide a lightweight, portable mechanism for packaging and managing applications and their dependencies. Microservices allow teams to break down monolithic applications into more manageable components, making it much easier to scale and update applications.
  • Measure Everything
Teams should be measuring everything that needs to be measured, in order to evolve and improve NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines. This includes the measuring of metrics like deployment frequency, lead-time, change failure rate and mean recovery time, which can be useful for future improvements or modifications to process, and capturing the gains made by teams.
  • Continual learning
NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD pipelines are in a constant state of change. To stay competitive, teams need to adopt a commitment to continual learning. Continual learning includes spending time on training, attending industry events and trying new technologies and practices. Teams can stay competitive through continual improvement and learning. Teams can also deliver better software faster.
  • Be Prepared To Evolve
It is also important to understand that NetDevOps solutions and CI/CD Pipeline implementation is iterative. The initial deployment is not going to be perfect, so it is crucial to be prepared to adapt and iterate based on feedback. Teams that demonstrate agility and flexibility can quickly adapt to meet changes, and provide better solutions.
Tools and Technologies to Assist with NetDevOps Solutions and CI/CD Pipeline
NetDevOps and CI/CD have become valuable for software development and enable organizations to develop applications faster, efficiently and reliably. Within the past couple of years, there has been an explosion of tools and technologies that support NetDevOps or CI/CD solutions, each having their own strengths and weaknesses. This document will assess some of the main tools and technologies identification within NetDevOps, CI/CD Pipelines solutions and how these can assist in streamlining a software development process.
  • Configuration Management Tool
Configuration Management Tools help to automate configuring, managing, and maintaining servers, applications, network devices, etc. These tools allow NetDevOps to manage and keep their infrastructure consistent and reproducible while minimizing human error or configuration drift. Ansible is one of the most popular Configuration Management Tool.
  • Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) Tools
The CI/CD tool automates building testing and deployment of software. These tools allow NetDevOps to increase software quality and deploy more frequently. Some of the most popular CI and CD software are Jenkins, CircleCI Travis CI and GitLab.
  • Containerization Technologies
Containerization technologies – like Docker and Kubernetes – are becoming more popular with NetDevOps. Docker is a lightweight, portable runtime, and Kubernetes automates deployment, scaling and management of containerized apps. Therefore they enable NetDevOps to develop, package and deploy applications more quickly and reliably.
  • Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) Tools
Infrastructure as Code tools provide NetDevOps with the ability to create infrastructure configuration files in code to version control the infrastructure, apply consistent configurations, and automate infrastructure change. Some of the most widely used Infrastructure as Code tools include Terraform, CloudFormation, and Azure Resource Manager.
  • Monitoring Tools and Alerting Software
Monitoring and alerting software are tools NetDevOps uses for detecting and resolving issues with their infrastructure and applications. Monitoring and alerting software allows the NetDevOps team to monitor certain metrics and create alerts, and quickly respond to incidents. Prometheus is one of the most popular monitoring and alerting tools.
  • Cloud Providers
Cloud Providers such as AWS (Amazon Web Services), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud provide an extensive set of capabilities and services to enable NetDevOps team members to build and deploy applications more efficiently and effectively. This can include computing, storage, networking, and security capabilities. In many cases, cloud providers can help NetDevOps teams lower the costs associated with infrastructure, improve the security posture of applications, and make application scaling possible or easier.
Conclusion
Today we are seeing a change in software development through NetDevOps, CI/CD, and other new technologies. NetDevOps created a union with all development and network teams to embrace collaboration, this produces quicker and more efficient cycles of software development. With CI/CD pipelines, the whole process is streamlined, allowing developers to build, innovate, create, and work on time to market.
Net DevOps, CI/CD, and another pipelines produce benefits such as agility, less risk, and product quality. Developers can leverage Cloud computing and containerization to develop quickly and build out environments to test their code in. They can ensure their coding is working in a testing environment before moving code into production.
Another feature of NetDevOps is automation of repetitive tasks that used to be completed manually. Automation enables developers to tackle complex tasks where they can innovate or fix bugs and develop features.
Like anything new, there are challenges to implementing NetDevOps, CI/CD pipelines. These challenges include the change in culture, the need for new processes and tools. Along with these changes come the requirement of investment in training and infrastructure.
The opportunity to utilize NetDevOps, CI/CD, and other pipelines outweighs the challenges associated with them. Software is going to continue to be everywhere and the demand for development teams that are reliable, secure, and fast will only continue to increase. Developing NetDevOps pipelines, and CI/CD pipelines, are critical to producing rapid, repeatable and high quality deployments. Organizations that implement NetDevOps pipelines and CI/CD pipelines will be best off in this digital age.
NetDevOps, CI/CD, and other technologies have changed the game for software development and provided us with faster, more efficient and more collaborative teams for all things software. With these technologies at our disposal, organizations have the ability to accomplish thefollowing: better software quality, minimize risks, increase frequency and velocity of development cycles. NetDevOps pipelines and NetDevops are the future of software development. Organizations that adopt these in the years to come will find success.