AUSTIN, Texas -- Big Communications Event -- Intent-based networking re-emerged at the forefront of the telecom lexicon last year as a way to automate data center networking operations but the technology has been plagued by murmurs that it's just a marketing buzzword.

As the term has been referenced in discussions around automating the WAN, for example, the waters have muddied over whether IBN is just marketing lingo or if there are legitimate use cases in applying the technology to the data center, WAN, enterprise networks and more. (See Intent-Based Networking: Marketing Hype or a Magic Bullet for Automation? and Intent-Based Marketing or Intent-Based Networking?)

At Light Reading's Big Communications Event last week, panelists from Apstra , Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE: VZ) and CableLabs examined the hype and reality behind IBN.

Heavy Reading Senior Analyst James Crawshaw defines intent-based networking as a "northbound interface between an infrastructure controller and higher-level business system. In some respects, there are parallels here with the layering concept in MANO that we use in the NFV architecture. At the top layer of this abstraction we have very generic instructions, as you go down the layers it becomes more granular and device specific... Intent at the higher levels isn't concerned with these lower level APIs, it's concerned with high level business needs."

Randy Levensalor, leading member of the network virtualization team for CableLabs, said IBN is a "marketing buzzword but will turn into a segment, there's rough consensus around it." While he said IBN is still in the early stages of development, there are intriguing future use cases for it, such as having voice traffic managed by intent.

Figure 1: From L to R: Carly Stoughton, Apstra; Randy Levensalor, CableLabs; Mike Freiberger, Verizon; James Crawshaw, Heavy Reading.

Crawshaw explained that intent-based networking differs from other abstraction concepts in software is the use of a declarative language. The panelists agreed that the benefit of IBN is expressing the what not the how -- Stoughton compares it to taking an Uber where the rider expresses a need to move from point A to point B, but the driver is responsible for determining the optimal route to reach the destination.

"Intent is understanding the what and not the how and validating that with the actual operating state," said Carly Stoughton, senior technical marketing engineer for Apstra. "The value of looking at intent is what does the system look like now, am I hearing about any deviation from intent of the system, am I notified about that in real time? That's where we get the real value from intent."

Start-up Apstra launched its AOS in 2016 -- a vendor-agnostic management platform that enables automation of operations across underlay and overlay networks in data centers. Since it's AOS 2.0 release last fall, Apstra's Carly Stoughton, Senior Technical Marketing Engineer, told Light Reading in an interview that the company has added intent-based analytics and additional telemetry.(See Apstra's Intent-Based Networking Adds SDN Overlays.)

Larger vendors joining in the intent-based networking arena include Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR) with its AppFormix acquisition and Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) with its DNA Center. However, Stoughton claimed Apstra coined the term intent-based networking in 2014 and Cisco's recent entry into this arena last fall is what turned IBN into marketing hype.

"Sometimes it's good for a small company when a huge vendor uses our terminology, but they tarnished it a little and made it seem like a marketing term ..." Stoughton told Light Reading. "It seems like they're fitting a product to a term as an afterthought rather than creating something novel like we're doing. If it was just marketing hype, we wouldn't have any customers."

Stoughton adds that while there are some areas that Apstra competes with Cisco, "they're also one of our biggest partners. We can automate Cisco gear, run on Cisco gear, enable customers to have a multi-vendor environment that includes Cisco. There is some overlap but we're not going head-to-head to them, we're agnostic to the hardware and software vendors."

Next page: Applying IBN Beyond the Data Center

So when does IBN move beyond the data center to other applications -- like furthering automation efforts for service providers' complex WAN environments -- and are standards the way to get there?

MEF has begun working on creating a domain-specific language and standards for IBN, said Crawshaw, but the panelists argued it's too early for standards in this space.

"It might be a little early to get real standards, we're still learning how much we can do with intent and what we want to describe," said Levensalor, and added that Open Daylight has an intent engine and there may be room for open source projects to impact the creation of standards.

Stoughton explained standards may come in to play at a later date, but there's no need to wait on them to move forward with IBN and that's exactly what Apstra has done.

"We already today can run a multi-vendor solution," she said. "We can run on the established vendors like Cisco and Arista, we can run on white box or bright box. We're agnostic to what you're running. You can choose your hardware vendor, you can choose your network operating system."

Mike Freiberger, senior manager of Network Service Abstraction SDN Technology, Architecture and Planning at Verizon, sees opportunities for IBN in service provider networks but that it's still early days for the technology. There could potentially be use cases for applying intent-based networking tools to 5G network slicing or security, he said.

"The problems that IBN intends to solve are present there today and we're dealing with them in other ways," said Freiberger. "This could potentially be a tool in the toolkit to solve those problems in a more elegant way. That potential is there but it's also early days. I can't say until we get deeper into that puzzle."

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Before intent-based networking can take hold in service provider networks, more automation has to be implemented, said Levensalor.

"As that automation becomes more available more broadly across access networks and interconnects, once that becomes more pervasive we'll start doing things like intent, autonomous machine learning and deep learning," he said. "Maybe it learns from the system where instead of telling it what you want it to do, it learns what you want to do."

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading