Networks physically appear to be simple interconnections between servers and computers, but the abstract logical part of it that handles the communication and data transfer is incredibly complex. Since networks are the foundations upon which services and applications run, they have to keep up with the high velocity and bandwidth of the application development side, which led to the rise of NetDevOps. Let’s look at NetDevOps in detail and the components that make it work.

What is NetDevOps?

With the increasing adoption of DevOps, businesses became capable of releasing microservices (updates) and complete applications at quick paces, primarily due to the automation of CI and CD pipelines. However, most of them handled network configuration manually, which couldn’t keep up with modern Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) methods. And we all know a chain can only be as strong as its weakest link. So this network component, which is part of the computing infrastructure that runs in the background, became the weakest link, and something had to be done.

The solution was to adopt DevOps in networking. NetDevOps treats the network infrastructure as code while automating and orchestrating any changes (with testing included) to ensure stable and speedy application and service delivery.

Components That Enable NetDevOps

NetDevOps adopts these DevOps principles to enable it to work.

Cultural Changes

Just like with DevOps, one of the most significant differences between NetDevOps and traditional networking practices is in the organization’s culture. Networks are traditionally implemented in a monolithic style, and engineers simply follow this technique, with the organizational structure having one centralized team handling all network operations. This team also evaluates the potential impact of making network configuration changes and maps out required recovery actions. This tight-control culture usually promotes manual and sequential operations.

But NetDevOps advocates for the independence of team operations with complete ownership of decision making processes. This decentralization simplifies the networking tasks into modular ones that are easier to automate and hasten the delivery process overall.

Modularity

In software development, the traditional way of delivering applications was via building a piece of monolithic code. However, this had its challenges in that a single edit to one part could change the entire application. This means developers had to spend more time fixing bugs than innovating. But DevOps brought with it the breakdown of complex applications into microservices, which are easier to write, test, scale, and maintain individually, before integrating them with the rest (orchestration) to come up with a fully functional software.

This level of modularity is applied to networks in NetDevOps, where the use of a large monolithic Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) to handle all your microservice/applications and their environments is discouraged. Making slight changes to this cloud’s configurations, such as IP, DNS, and DHCP can affect all your applications, resulting in costly downtimes.

The best solution is to create multiple VPCs to handle each microservice or application and its environment individually, each with its own subnet to define its connectivity access.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

IaC is one of the biggest enablers of networking automation because it eliminates manual configuration, which takes time, can be erroneous, and requires repeated configuration. With software defined networking, network engineers write and templatize network configurations as commands, which can then be provided to individual application development teams to include them in containers to run microservices.

With a version control system, implementing the network configurations as code also allows engineers to track and audit changes via the history log, with the possibility of editing settings for optimization to accommodate new application changes that require more or less infrastructure provision. If these changes bring about issues, IaC simplifies rollbacks to previous versions in the VCS to more stable settings that ensure application availability is restored quickly.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

Although IaC with modularization makes it easy for teams to automatically define and deploy network infrastructure changes, each deployment needs multiple testing levels with configuration tracking along the way and manual approvals. This process can be accelerated using the CI/CD pipelines, which trigger automatically to run the code through all steps to final deployment.

Continuous Integration

The pipeline implementations are quite simple. Once code changes are detected from the VCS after being pushed by application developers, the CI pipeline automatically triggers to handle testing and building. Since network configurations are written as code, they are applied automatically to create this part of the infrastructure to create an environment for running the microservice. Testing is done to check if the microservice runs successfully in this environment. If not, configuration changes have to be done.

Open-source frameworks like CloudFormation guard and CFN Lint are also critical in this testing process because they let you define custom network configuration policies and validate your templates against these policies. On the security aspect, tools like cfn-nag help to identify patterns in the code that might indicate the VPC will be insecure. For instance, when deploying firewall rules, the tool will highlight if you have included overpermissive rules that enable public SSH access. These checks are usually done before integration testing.

Once these validations are complete, they proceed into a staging environment for integration testing, where each one gets assessed on how it works with the rest of the network. This can be via ping tests to confirm remote access or tools like the VPC reachability analyzer, which checks the connectivity and reachability of the VPC to other cloud environments or the internet. Load and performance tests are also part of integration testing.

Continuous Delivery

This pipeline automates deployment of the network configurations to the environment (development, testing, or production) for build health assessment. For instance, you can deploy them to a digital twin testing environment, then subject the build to different real-world parameters and edit or rollback changes accordingly.

Conclusion

Like DevSecOps, incorporating NetDevOps in the SDLC is critical to ensuring high velocity microservice and application delivery. So the practice is critical in modern networking, and adopting it is possible by simply implementing the same DevOps principles needed for software development. But this adoption is not only about technology. The organizational culture must also shift to include DevOps practices to ensure success.

Amelia Olivia