This article is based on concepts originally published on itproportal.com (2017). The core principles remain relevant to network DevOps and NetOps automation discussions today.
Why Networks Are the Next DevOps Frontier
In a business climate where every company is becoming a software company, enterprises are under constant pressure to accelerate software delivery. DevOps has emerged as one of the leading methodologies for doing exactly that — aligning application development (Dev) with IT operations (Ops) to improve the full application-management lifecycle.
DevOps achieves this primarily through two mechanisms: virtualisation and automation. Virtualisation lets developers create environments that closely mimic production conditions, so every line of code can be validated before release. Automation ensures those environments can be spun up and torn down quickly and safely.
These capabilities have been transformative inside the data centre. But a significant gap remains: the network and security layers have been much slower to adopt a software-defined, automated approach — and that gap undermines the agility DevOps promises.
What Is Still Missing from DevOps?
Within a typical DevOps workflow, servers and storage in the data centre are reasonably well served by virtualisation and software-defined approaches. Network and security, however, have lagged behind for a straightforward reason: servers are singular endpoints, while networks are complex, distributed systems with little homogeneity. A change to one network element can cascade unpredictably across the entire infrastructure.
Historically, network configuration and provisioning have been handled in silos, with poor communication between network engineers, security teams, developers, and operations staff. In these environments, manual provisioning can take days or even weeks — a pace completely at odds with what CI/CD demands.
The Blame Falls on Network and Security Teams
When application development and testing move fast but network provisioning does not, the bottleneck becomes visible and painful. Network and security teams are frequently blamed for slowing time-to-market and for an inability to keep pace with agile delivery cycles. The problem is not a lack of skill — it is a lack of tooling and integration with the broader DevOps pipeline.
Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) Applied to the Network
CI/CD simplifies, automates, and accelerates application and service lifecycle management. For application code, this means:
- Continuous Integration (CI): All in-development code branches are merged into a shared repository frequently — often multiple times per day — so integration problems surface early.
- Continuous Deployment (CD): Automated pipelines package and deliver software to target environments without manual handoffs.
Until recently, this model worked well for application developers but excluded network and security teams, who lacked equivalent tooling. The old, sequential approach — develop network configurations after dev and test phases are complete — simply cannot support an agile CI/CD process.
The solution is to extend virtualisation and programmability into the network and application services layer, treating network configuration as code that can be tested, versioned, and deployed through the same pipelines used for application software.
Network Orchestration
Network orchestration applies a software-defined infrastructure (SDI) approach to provision networks quickly and with minimal human error — analogous to how software-defined servers and storage are provisioned. Key characteristics include:
- Flexible application provisioning across physical and virtual environments
- Automated sequencing of production-critical elements: availability, core network services, security services, and performance settings
- Reduced dependency on manual, error-prone configuration steps
In a CI/CD model, network orchestrators ensure that all required infrastructure is ready and correctly configured before an application reaches production.
Application Services Automation
Application services automation focuses on three pillars: availability, performance, and security. Historically, this category was limited to load balancing. Modern automation extends well beyond that to include:
- Template-based provisioning that encodes validated policies and makes them repeatable
- APIs that allow network and security configurations to be triggered programmatically from CI/CD pipelines
- Integration with infrastructure-as-code platforms (such as OpenStack-based distributions) that let teams configure and automate application services during the test phase, not after it
Automation of network services through templates and APIs helps ensure that when an application rolls out, the supporting infrastructure is ready to perform at the expected level without last-minute manual intervention.
Benefits of Applying DevOps Principles to Network Operations
Extending DevOps methodology to network and security teams delivers measurable improvements in two critical areas:
1. Speed
Automation dramatically accelerates both configuration and troubleshooting:
- During development and test phases, network settings and policies are configured automatically rather than manually.
- In production, performance can be tuned by making targeted adjustments to existing policies without requiring a full architecture rebuild.
- Change requests that once took days or weeks to work through ticket queues can be completed in minutes when infrastructure is code-driven.
2. Stability and Consistency
Automation enforces infrastructure consistency across every application rollout and update:
- Validated, version-controlled templates preserve provisioning and configuration policies, making them auditable and repeatable.
- There is no need to re-architect the network during or after a production launch.
- Security and availability postures remain consistent because configurations are applied programmatically, not typed by hand under deadline pressure.
Practical Takeaways for Network and DevOps Teams
If your organisation is pursuing greater agility in responding to market changes or new business opportunities, consider these steps to bring DevOps discipline to your network layer:
- Treat network configuration as code. Store configurations in version control (Git), review them through pull requests, and deploy them through automated pipelines.
- Test network policies concurrently with application code. Do not wait until application testing is complete to begin network validation. Run both in parallel.
- Use templates and APIs to standardise provisioning. Remove manual steps from the provisioning process wherever possible. Validated templates reduce human error and improve repeatability.
- Break down team silos. Establish shared tooling, shared visibility, and regular cross-team communication between development, operations, network, and security staff.
- Adopt network orchestration tools. Evaluate software-defined networking (SDN) controllers and orchestration platforms that integrate with your existing CI/CD toolchain.
Conclusion
The same principles that make DevOps effective for application development — virtualisation, automation, continuous integration, and continuous deployment — apply directly to network and security operations. The network no longer needs to be the bottleneck in an otherwise agile delivery pipeline. By extending DevOps methodology to network orchestration and application services automation, organisations can deliver applications faster, with greater stability, and with a security posture that is baked in from the start rather than bolted on at the end.
The result is an application-management lifecycle that is genuinely end-to-end agile — from the first line of code to the network configuration that serves it to users in production.