New Research from Appledore Research plots the status and trajectory of the industry and leading players. Appledore Research has recently released the 2nd major report in a series of 3 that investigates the necessary foundation to achieve flexible, efficient closed loop automation in virtualized networks. This report is available here. Critical Advances in Orchestration for Agility and Automation The report identifies 4 key technology enablers; in this blog I will comment on two that are closely linked: First, Model- & Policy- driven orchestration, and Second, onboarding tools and practices to help Service Providers build, maintain and share those models and rules. Without diving into the details, we wanted to emphasize that it is essential that orchestration be effected natively by models; that those models must reflect intent; and that rules (or other methods) must be capable of instantiating that intent based on context. Any old model won’t do. The good news is that nearly every orchestration vendor is delivering model based orchestration that utilizes rules to specify at least some parts of intent. But it’s also clear that most are still leagues behind the “HyperScale” Web leaders (Azure, AWS, GOOG, BlueMix) in terms of true hands-off automation, and fully intent-based, […]