Networking technology is undergoing renovations. Vendors are bringing out products that flip the network for multicloud and distributed information technology. These new network types can be a complex, layered handful from an operational perspective. Without visibility into the entire network, operations teams are left guessing about the effects of changes to their systems. Improved network operations, with the help of digital twins, are needed to match the growing complexity.

“In almost every dimension, networking is growing in complexity every single year,” said David Erickson (pictured), co-founder and chief executive officer of Forward Networks Inc.

Erickson spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed the need for comprehensive network operations to manage complex new networking models (see the full interview with transcript here).

This week, theCUBE spotlights Forward Networks in our Startup of the Week feature.

Orgs struggle to keep up with network innovation

Cloud, software-defined networking, and 5G networking are some factors stretching network complexity. The shift from the classic multiprotocol label switching to overlays on the internet is triggering rapid change and innovation in networking technology. We now are operating networks with up to hundreds of thousands of devices on them, according to Erickson.

“If we don’t catch up to that from an operational-capabilities perspective, we’re just going to lose control of it,” he said.  

A recent report by Kentik Technologies Inc. found that many companies are struggling to keep up with network innovation. “Between multiprotocol label switching and software-defined networking, there were about 15 years where the networking world was pretty static. Right now we’re in a world moving as fast as the ISP world did back in the ’90s. Every few weeks there’s something new,” said Avi Freedman, co-founder and chief executive officer of Kentik, speaking about the report results.

The largest majority of survey respondents (35%) said automation was the most important network trend currently. However, only 15% of respondents said their organizations are prepared for it.

There’s also been a huge increase in applications, mission-critical business operations, and infrastructure dependent on a reliable network. So what have companies done so far to ensure their critical networks are working properly and the change process goes smoothly? Depressingly little, according to Erickson. Organizations are making a lot of changes in production with minimal, if any, pre-testing, he explained. Post-testing essentially comes down to customers calling and complaining, and perhaps some traceroute tests.

“This is tremendously risky to the business, let alone security,” Erickson stated. 

Holistic network healthcare

Today, it is relatively straightforward to make a change to the network with software such as Ansible, an open-source community project to automate IT, Erickson pointed out. What is not easy is to paint a holistic picture that shows the changes did not adversely affect critical applications. For example, certain changes may affect connectivity.

“Imagine I’m a web company that has a bunch of customers that need to come in from the internet and hit my critical application that’s underpinning everything my business does,” Erickson said. “I need to know that my network has paths in it that are enabling that to occur 100% of the time,” he said. 

Networks are vast landscapes that are difficult to see across. For example, to conclusively prove security properties of a network, it’s necessary to know where all elements on a network could ever go, Erickson explained. “More often than not today, we’re using very small sampling methods to try to prove properties with humans and doing port scans and things of that nature that just aren’t comprehensive,” he stated. 

Emerging methods in networking — like intent-based networking and NetDevOps — provide greater visibility, testing capabilities, and reliability, according to Erickson. Intent-based networking addresses the above web-company scenario by allowing full visibility and control of network paths. “From a high level, it’s, ‘I need to holistically paint a picture for what my network should deliver to me on an end-to-end basis. And I need to assure that this is always happening,'” he said. 

NetDevOps copies the methods of DevOps. It is an agile method of developing and deploying code that tests for weaknesses or glitches right out of the gate. These same sort of methods ought to be brought to networking, according to Erickson. They will give network operators confidence that the changes they make are safe before they make them. And, crucially, they allow them to continually monitor networks.

“Networks are living, breathing things that have humans that are out there on keyboards touching and changing things. If you don’t keep an eye on it, it can run away from you really quickly,” he said. 

Reining it in with digital twins

Erickson and three others founded Forward Networks five years ago. They studied together in the McKeown Group for networking at Stanford University. They graduated with Ph.D.s in computer science in 2013 and applied the knowledge they’d gleaned to solving new network-operations challenges. 

Forward leverages innovative networking techniques like intent-based networking and NetDevOps. It enables operations teams to know everything the network is capable of and mathematically prove certain things, such as security problems.

“Using an actual mathematical model, we can trace where every packet could ever go in that entire environment,” Erickson said.

Its network-verification platform collects all data from individual network elements with no need for agents or packets. It then builds an accurate software copy, or digital twin, of network infrastructure. Users can use this twin to document, search, verify and predict network behavior. They can monitor and control their entire networks for availability, performance and security.

For example, “Imagine you’ve got a service provider that’s offering a network to two competitors,” Erickson said. “You want to make sure that those networks are actually completely isolated and that there’s no possible crosstalk that could occur between them. With our software, we can analyze that,” he explained. “You know that they’re completely disconnected. And in the event that they’re not, [we] show you exactly why they’re not, when it began occurring, and then quickly help you get that corrected and prove that you fixed it.” 

This brings sprawling, expanding next-gen networks under much-needed control, according to Erickson. “I think that this is the enabling technology to get us to the place that we have scalable 5G services, and we have these planet-wide networks that are being put into space shortly to help reach every corner of the planet and to enable the next generation of overlay services that change our lives,” he concluded. 

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations.

Photo: SiliconANGLE