Developer Track Theme: Tackling Brownfield Challenges with NSO & Crosswork Workflow Manager
As we gear up for this year’s Automation Developer Days, we’re excited to announce that one of the three core themes for the Developer Track, is Brownfield!
Why Brownfield?
Most networks today aren’t built from scratch—they are Brownfield environments with years (or decades) of legacy configurations, manual processes, and vendor-specific implementations. Furthermore, most large-scale networks are operated in a way that out of band changes happen often: there are more than one entity (operators, scripts, multiple network controllers) making changes to the same set of devices according to recent customer interviews conducted with major service providers. Operating such a network poses unique challenges. Cisco NSO and Crosswork Workflow Manager (CWM) are key enablers in helping organizations reduce their operational complexity and transition to fully automated, intent-based networking.
Top Brownfield Challenges & How We’re Addressing Them
At Developer Days, we’ll be covering some of the most pressing Brownfield automation challenges, including:
Service Discovery – Transitioning existing services from old to new way of working. Transition manually configured Services to automated, model-driven orchestration is a long-term investment. NSO’s service reconciliation provides a structured approach to seamless migrations.
- Service Migration Complexity – Transitioning existing services from old to new modern HW. Hardware refresh comes with its own challenges: you need to make sure that all existing services are provisioned correctly on the new HW. NSO’s services with multi-vendor support and CWM’s migration workflows provide a structured approach to seamless migrations..
- Configuration Drift & Service Integrity – Over time, networks develop inconsistencies that lead to outages and inefficiencies. We’ll show how NSO and CWM can detect and correct drift, ensuring alignment with golden configurations and business intent.
- No single source of truth - Managing services across various network controllers and platforms is increasingly complex, as their effect may overlap; causing inconsistencies to other systems. These inconsistencies can affect service deployment: the intent to device configuration mappings. We’ll discuss how NSO’s new feature can simplify operations and ensure safe and correct configuration change execution.
- Scaling Network Automation – Brownfield networks must evolve without disrupting operations. Our sessions will explore how new advancements in NSO and CWM help organizations scale automation while maintaining network stability.
Customer Success & Exclusive New Feature Reveal
This year, we’re bringing you two exciting sessions - stay tuned as we unveil more on this theme.
- A real-world customer success story on Service Migration, demonstrating a service migration application build on top of how NSO
- An exclusive preview of a groundbreaking development initiative—a new set of features designed to improve service integrity and enable multi-controller support in a revolutionary way.
If you’re navigating Brownfield automation challenges, this is a track you won’t want to miss!
One of the other themes is Deployment Strategies. You can read more about it here.
Stay tuned for more details on the agenda and speaker lineup. See you at Developer Days!
