14. Intent-Based Network Management

Network providers are under significant pressure to automate network operations to the greatest extent possible. Drivers for this include networking economics as well as the necessity to scale operations to keep up with the explosive growth of network size, complexity, and services. In the past, this has led to the pursuit of the vision of networks that are autonomic and self-managing and to technologies such as policy-based management based on the articulation of abstract operational rules independent of device details. The latest development in this space concerns intent-based network management, or simply intent-based networks (IBN). IBN is based on the recognition that even fully autonomic networks will still require guidance from operators to fulfill their intended purpose—from providing specific instances of services to achieving overarching operational goals under consideration of certain tradeoffs. IBN allows users to manage networks by defining expected management outcomes, as opposed to having to specify precise rules, steps, or algorithms that will lead to those outcomes. This requires systems that support advanced man-machine interfaces and that possess the necessary intelligence to identify the required steps on its own, generally using advanced algorithms, control loops, and artificial intelligence techniques. The following chapter provides an overview of IBN and its basic underlying concepts.