Closed-Loop Network Automation: Architectural Principles from Catalyst Center-Scale Systems

Abstract

Enterprise controller platforms must perform operational loop bridging a large and heterogeneous environment of devices, clients, locations, applications and services and must maintain explainability, reliability and safety of changes. The paper is creating a vendor-neutral architecture layout, founded upon the publicly accessible scale attributes of Cisco Catalyst Center, and recognized best practices of intent-based networking, telemetry, assurance and autonomic regulation. The provided framework divides the closed-loop functioning into 6 synchronized planes that comprise: data gathering and contextualization, correlation and diagnosis, intent and policy management, workflow orchestration, outcome verification and external combination. It also introduces hierarchical range of control, evidence amalgamation, categorization of actions and control-budget system in place to keep the remediation activities in stand to reduce the risk of operation. Catalyst Center is considered to be an industry observation source besides source of inner proprietary application and as such the framework might be autonomous of proprietary internals. The framework is evaluated by such criteria as outcome coverage, telemetry freshness, and diagnostic accuracy, control-loop convergence, failover resilience, as well as operator understanding. The resulting architecture provides a procedural basis to the architecture of scaleable enterprise controllers that moderate automation and assurance, explain and guided remediation. The donation is an informed vendor-neutral and product-aware model of trustworthy closed-loop business operations