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Network automation vs. orchestration: What's the difference?
Automation and orchestration take different approaches to achieve network efficiency. However, network engineers can use them together to create an efficient, centralized network.
As digital tool and service demands continue to climb, IT budgets have remained stagnant. Now, IT leaders are seeking new ways to squeeze more out of their capital and operational expenses.
For example, network administrators often waste time on repetitive network maintenance and troubleshooting tasks. Network automation and orchestration help eliminate those repetitive tasks and enable engineers to refocus their time on other activities.
Although network automation and orchestration are different, they're both important in modern network management. Despite their differences, network automation and orchestration make day-to-day operational duties more efficient.
What is network automation?
Network automation is a strategy in which software tools automatically and autonomously perform network-related tasks. Network automation has two main goals:
- Reduce time spent on repetitive tasks.
- Minimize human error during manual configuration changes.
The following are examples of network automation:
- Network configuration. Network automation tools script precise configurations across multiple network devices without human intervention. Successful network automation requires a deterministic network environment maintained by sequential device configuration.
- Firmware updates. Network automation can test, apply and validate network component firmware updates. Network automation systems use digital twins to apply and validate firmware updates before deploying them to infrastructure components. This lowers the risk of unexpected bugs or incompatibilities in a software update or patch that could cause performance issues or outages.
- Monitoring and optimization. Streaming telemetry, machine learning and AI collect and analyze network health and security data, as well as baseline behavior. They then alert engineers when deviations in these systems occur. Advanced AI automates root cause analysis and remediates the network in real time.
What is network orchestration?
Network orchestration is the foundation of modern network automation. Orchestration platforms use a centralized management dashboard for network device control and visibility. Because network engineers can use orchestration across multiple network components, they often manage network-wide automation in these dashboards as well.
Network administrators gain high-level and granular views of the network service health, performance and security posture within a network orchestration platform. The orchestrator can create and manage security policies. Once developed, network administrators can uniformly deploy these policies to the required network components. This type of unified policy management eliminates misconfiguration risks from devices.
Network orchestration platforms are the interface to access the network source of truth. A source of truth is a data repository for network information. When network orchestration tools access the source of truth, they can dynamically modify configurations. This helps optimize network performance as traffic patterns, service demands or network conditions change.
Network automation and orchestration work together
Early network automation tools operated without orchestration. Instead, network engineers created configuration or maintenance scripts that could automate processes across multiple devices. This type of automation saved time, but some capabilities still needed manual oversight.
Network orchestration enables organization and unified control of the entire network. A centralized network management plane enables engineers to uniformly apply network policies and maintenance processes from a single source with advanced automation and AI. This lowers the risk of human error and creates a scalable platform for network growth.
Andrew Froehlich is founder of InfraMomentum, an enterprise IT research and analyst firm, and president of West Gate Networks, an IT consulting company. He has been involved in enterprise IT for more than 20 years.
