Heavy Networking 550: Automation Readiness Isn't About Your Routers (Sponsored)

Welcome to Heavy Networking. In today’s sponsored show we are talking with Omar Sultan from Cisco systems about what he’s been discovering in the world of automation and orchestration which, apparently, includes “egg-laying wool milk sows” … more on that later.

Omar is the public face of Cisco’s Network Services Orchestrator (NSO) product. I’m gonna be somewhat controversial and say that NSO is my preferred SDN solution from the Cisco portfolio. And I’ve got reasons to say that.

NSO has multi-vendor cross-domain ability. NSO allows your domain teams to keep using their favorite tools and still be able to build integrated automation workflows. It’s is a more open, expansive platform. It has extensive support for open APIs and methods and a toolset to consume a range of network features and integrate them. For example, NSO can be used to orchestrate ACI or SD-Campus – to consume them as automation tools. Why?

This is cross-domain automation and its not something that many people are considering. We discuss how this works, how it fits and when you might want to embrace it.

We discuss: