Cisco Cisco Prime Network Services Controller 3.2 White Paper

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About This Paper

Cloud services or IT as a service is now becoming a reality; it promises significant cost savings and more

streamlined management of mission critical information technology, data processing, networking, security, and

storage needs. Networking automation is one of the biggest customer requirements to help this tremendous market

shift, being a mandatory solution to allow upper layer stacks of applications to communicate and provide the

needed services to the end customer. Still there are confusions and misunderstandings on the implementation,

best practice design details, and the actual use cases of network automation. In reality many providers still struggle

to provide the needed communications solutions for their application provisioning demand.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a simplified review of the challenges around network automation for the

cloud and to clear out some of the common misunderstandings. The paper also tries to provide a clearer best

practice design and a view of how network automation should be implemented in customer facilities to create a

virtual data center (VDC) that spans virtual and physical domains and that is replicable, cost effective, and highly

dynamic.

Cisco has been driving innovations around cloud technology for the last few years; this paper also attempts to

aggregate several learning from network automation implementation projects.

The goal of this paper is to simplify the challenges and describe a practical model to be used as the basis for

network automation in cloud facilities.

PaaS/IaaS and NaaS Recap

Cloud providers, enterprises, and service providers alike started the journey into cloud technology with a business

model called IaaS (infrastructure as a service). This was an evolution of the common data center hosting model. In

order to save infrastructure costs, the facility is yet again transported to hosting mode, this time in an automated

and self-service fashion. This provides lower administration overhead and faster service. Customers were looking

for a self-managed hosted environment so they built a service model for self-ordering infrastructure services - that

is, mostly compute, storage, and networking resources for basic operations.

On top of the IaaS catalog items, customers also began looking for certain types of commonly used applications to

be available and automatically installed on top of the already available automated infrastructure. Those application

automation options are available on the same self-ordering catalog. This evolution is mostly known as platform as

a service (PaaS). This paper does not discuss the SaaS (software as a service) model as in most cases the

underlying infrastructure in such a model is not automated. Figure 1 shows the legacy/known models for those

three cloud offerings.

Figure 1. Cloud Offering Tiers