Intent-based networking is the latest in a long string of dreams and schemes to get meaningful, wide-scale automation into data center networks.

In broad strokes, intent-based networking, or IBN, sounds like magic: take high-level, human comprehensible business goals, run them through some abstraction layers, click your heels three times, and out comes the low-level configurations that are automatically programmed into the requisite devices.

For any network engineer who’s been burned by automation schemes in the past, this might sound too good to be true.

On today’s Heavy Networking, we peer behind the curtain of intent-based networking to find out if we’re actually dealing with a wizard this time, or just another pretender blowing smoke.

Our guest is Phil Gervasi, a network engineer and solutions architect. You may know him at Network Phil on Twitter or his blog networkphil.com.

Phil wrote two in-depth white papers on IBN for the Packet Pushers Ignition site. He did a lot of research and analysis, and today we’re going to pick his brains as we follow the yellow brick road to intent-based networking.

In particular, we dive into three main areas of IBN:

* Network abstraction

* Continuous validation

* Autonomous remediation

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Show Links:

Packet Pushers Ignition

Phil Gervasi on Twitter

Network Phil

Intent-Based Networking – Concepts and Overview – IETF