Today on the Priority Queue, intent-based networking. What is it? What’s it good for? What’s the technical reality? Is it like, “Alexa, make me a network” and then a network magically appears? Sort of.

In actuality, there’s a lot more to intent-based networking. There are APIs and message busses and abstraction layers and event handling and state enforcement and compliance reporting and so on.

Put another way, intent-based networking is kind of hard, especially when you try to handle complex networks of size and multi-vendor environments.

To talk about intent-based networking today, we have a sponsored show with Apstra. Apstra has brought an intent-based networking product to market and is here to explain the concepts and technologies behind its approach.

Joining Greg Ferro and Ethan Banks are Sasha Ratkovic, Derick Winkworth, and Douglas Gourlay from Apstra.

We talk about why the industry cares about intent, how intent-based networking actually works, and what its impact might be on the careers of network engineers.

Links:

Blog: The Industry Embraces Intent-Based Networking (by Mansour Karam)

Blog: A New Era In Network Operations (by Derick Winkworth on packetpushers.com)

Blog: Intent-based Networking Systems (by Derick Winkworth)

Video: Time Travels with @CloudToad

Video: Networking Field Day 13 – Who We Are (with Derick Winkworth)