Why intent matters Be on guard, we have a new buzzword; “intent”. Appledore have been advocating such approaches for many years, long-before the industry coalesced around the term intent. Why? Because we believe that this core operational approach is essential to achieving the industry’s elusive goals of agility and true, hands-off, automation. “Intent” fundamentally changes how we structure operational processes, resulting in far more latitude for automation to do it thing, but, conversely, far less certainty about what the precise implementation will look like. One of the industry’s biggest challenges will be coming to grips with this uncertainty – “letting the machines do their job”. Intent is a useful handle, but also a misleading buzzword Like most buzzwords, intent is both conveniently short, and misleadingly open to interpretation. Intent seems to be a fairly clear word in English. Yet, as we emphasize out in our recent Market Outlook, it is perfectly easy to define “bad intent”. The real challenge is to define a service at the proper level of abstraction. Too high and it’s useless. Too low and it becomes hard-coding. A longer, less sexy, but better definition Back in 2016 we discussed an orchestration approach that had three characteristics. […]