It’s taken a while, but it looks like the true meaning of “intent” is finally being recognised. Intent is both a “shiny object” – a buzzword du jour – but also a critically important concept and best practice. Appledore have been advocates of the basic idea since long before “intent” became a buzzword. Back then, we were advocating “policy driven orchestration, based on intended outcome and informed by context”. This was in 2015-16. Fast forward to 2019 and Appledore released a pair of major research reports on Intent – what it is, why it is, where it resides and what the state of the art was (or was not). By then, we had combined the term “Intent” with our earlier advocacy of rules, policies, search algorithms and other methods of implementing a loosely defined objective (intent) with current specifics (context) to implement a workload, service or derivative combination. I simplified this in a report to “Intent informed by Context”. Imagine my surprise, and my satisfaction, as I scanned the 2020 Cisco Annual Report. In his list of guiding principles, Chuck Robbins listed #1 “Intent Informed by Context”. Either great minds think alike, or I have a noted reader :-). I’ll […]