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5G, Automation, Cloud, AI/ML, and IoT are all poised for a breakout
In the coming year, networks will undergo a major transformation. They will be better connected, more secure, faster, and a lot smarter. Companies are moving to remote work even post-pandemic, connections and data transmissions are increasing, and complexities are shooting through the roof. People want more, demand lower costs, and want it now! As business operations undergo massive transformation, communication and connectivity have never been more critical – and there will be some major network automation trends that emerge.
5G will accelerate the adoption of the cloud for service and application delivery
2022 should see a boom in 5G adoption. Creating, storing, sharing, and using network data will become easier, faster, cheaper, and more secure. With its superpowers of high-speed and low-latency performance, 5G will transform the way networks communicate with each other. A survey by Statista predicts 5G adoption to reach 1Bn consumers in 2022. When multiple devices are connected, data storage and analysis become a challenge. This is where the cloud can be a game-changer, given the need to manage a proliferation of data at scale. Sharing that data while providing different team members access also becomes paramount. The cloud will help in this regard while also smoothly managing SLA commitments. As machine-to-machine communication increases, the cloud can also help enable infrastructure upgrades and facilitate the management of complex endpoints more easily.
Automation will be critical to 5G deployments
For 5G to be successful, virtualization is critical to meet the elastic demand, security, load efficiency, and economies of scale. But alas, there are too many components – servers, network functions, radio access elements, monitoring, reporting, and optimization tools – that drive complexity. Service providers can no longer rely on manual operations that are slow, error-prone, and inconsistent. Scaling is a major issue too. The solution? Automation.
Low-code automation that integrates network and server elements from multiple vendors will be critical to accelerate 5G deployments globally. Automation will also facilitate additional benefits of horizontal scale, simplified troubleshooting, visibility, analytics, and reporting to improve performance, availability, and customer satisfaction. As a result, dynamic network configurations and customer requirements can also be managed easily. This bodes well for developers and network operations teams as they can leverage automation to achieve the required scale without the additional burden of increasing resource allocation or operational expense levels.
Cloud-native eco-systems will be table stakes
Monolithic architectures will no longer be the preferred choice in 2022. There are better alternatives – microservices should emerge as a superior alternative. Microservices are at the heart of any cloud-native architecture. Each microservice focuses on a specific function and has its own resource model, APIs, and execution stack. The dependencies with other functions/modules are limited too. Each microservices can be upgraded or scaled independently without affecting the whole application, unlike their monolithic counterparts, which need to be upgraded completely even when just one module requires an update. Furthermore, microservices are packaged into containers (such as Docker), making it easier for teams to move from one cloud to another seamlessly. Container orchestration systems like Kubernetes can also closely watch each microservice’s health, latency, and performance.
A cloud-native architecture offers many benefits, including horizontal scale, flexible deployments, time-to-market feature velocity, and real-time analytics. Additionally, cloud-native architectures help with hitless upgrades, offer multi-cloud support, and deliver resilient and high-availability capabilities. For these reasons, next-generation network automation based on cloud-native architectures will be a clear winner given high-throughput, low-latency provisioning, geo-redundancy, and superior overall performance. This should result in an enhanced user experience while helping organizations achieve retention, economies of scale, and rapid innovation.
As organizations look to adopt the cloud rapidly, the implementation path will likely be a hybrid multi-cloud approach powered by Virtual Networks Functions (VNF) and Containerized Network Functions (CNF). Hence, next-generation network automation tools must support network infrastructure across multiple clouds, public and private. Cloud-Native strategy can provide the perfect architecture for achieving these end goals.
Automation will enable the application of AI/ML Ops for improved efficiency
The IDC 2020 Networking Predictions report predicts that 60% of organizations around the globe will rely on Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate at least one part of their network by 2024. The same report also identifies AI and analytics as the top-most preferred technologies to create modern networks (voted by 47%). AI and Machine Learning (ML) technologies help provide predictive insights about potential issues while also helping teams undertake a root cause analysis. They can also be applied to adjust bandwidth per workload, undertake self-correction, help with device classifications, and support domain-specific use cases. 2022 could also herald the era of hiring virtual network assistants to help analyze large chunks of data, extract insights, provide helpdesk functions, and set up automated workflows to identify and fix issues. Wouldn’t that be great?
Adopting a low-code diet for the perfect automation recipe
Gartner predicts that low code app development will constitute up to 65% of the market by 2024, while Forrester pegged the market to reach $20Bn in 2022. And the benefits are clear – It is easy to deploy, streamlines the work of distributed teams, and can help facilitate a self-serve model for resolving issues tied to use cases/scenarios. A low-code approach also makes a developer’s life easier for visual modeling capabilities, coverage of well-known modules, readymade libraries, an exhaustive, rich set of integrations, OOTB features (for network discovery, service management, 3rd party integrations, visualization, troubleshooting, automated remediation.), and drag-and-drop functionalities. It is also easier to reuse specific components and helps scale an application seamlessly. 2022 can also expect the emergence of a community of developers on the back of a robust low-code strategy.
Wrapping Up Network Automation Trends
- Self-healing will triumph: High-availability, high-bandwidth networks can be achieved by the technologies highlighted above, but the future lies in taking the automation and AI game to the next level by deploying self-healing networks. These could materialize in the form of mesh networks that can be configured or re-configured to detect and fix multiple points of failure. AI diagnostics would require no human input to resolve network problems and remediate sudden outages or data breaches. Fixing day-to-day issues and well-known, repetitive network failures would also come under its purview.
- 5G will proliferate CNFs at an unprecedented level: Virtual machines have limitations in agility and scalability. CNFs fill these gaps using containers, automated releases/verification, one-click deployments, and network traffic redirection to the suitable pods. Network teams can bet on CNFs for meeting their flexibility, scalability, speed, security, monitoring, and efficiency goals over the next two years.
Where could we be in 5 years – 2027
- AI/ML, CNF, Automation, 5G, and cloud could converge: In the next five years, companies can expect to leverage dynamic orchestration and cross-domain re-allocation of network functions and applications between edge, aggregation, and core data centers, through the powerful combination of these big five technologies. This should result in better allocation of network resources between domains, optimize capacity, reduce redundancies, and synchronize administration on a network-wide basis.
- IoT will emerge as a critical driver of innovation: Think driverless cars, smart cities, and industrial robots! You get the picture. Machine-to-machine communication will be more seamless, and complex devices can be connected with utmost ease. Usage of sensors, RFIDs, and IoT gateways should see massive adoption too.
This year and beyond will be an exciting time for network automation. The future will open multiple doors of creativity and efficiency while we humans will be elevated to the next stage, to work on more strategic activities. Innovation and product developments will be faster, smarter, and more intelligent. Do you agree?
What would you add to the list of network automation trends of 2022?
