CSPs seeking to provide a new generation of on demand, dynamic services to consumers, enterprises and through partners need to be able to rethink the design of their networks for flexibility and agility and be able to deal with complexity. “Network as a service” is a big opportunity if we can quickly and cheaply assemble new end-to-end services out of pre-existing components. How do we deliver such composite dynamically changing services, when these services are built on top of complex and evolving network technologies? It is not possible to do such operations in the current manual/automated model. We need to make sure that our networks and their operations are autonomous or self-managing, minimizing manual operations, so that we can manage the complexity at a reasonable cost, as proven in other industries and in hyperscaler environments. Transport networks form the backbone of many of these high value Enterprise services, Cloud interconnect and 5G backhaul. Transport networks are also becoming more sophisticated with optical networks going to 400G, 800G and beyond with coherent optics/routing, flexible photonics etc and the network becoming more programmable with features like segment routing and more pervasive optical domain switching. Coupled with full observability in real time of […]