The promise of cloud is the promise of automation. It’s almost that simple. Automation has many benefits; from reduced costs, to on-demand agility, to pro-active healing and higher effective availability. At Appledore Research, we have written dozens of reports on the benefits of automation, and especially, what makes for successful, low maintenance, automation; there is clearly a “right way” and a “wrong way”. While the cloud domain has received the bulk of attention, and even has its own terminology for the state of the art (“cloud native” which to be fair is far more than a buzzword, but defined by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation [CNCF]), transport is the heart and soul of the telecom business. Everything else is a vertical add-on or a platform enabler. Transport demands agile effective automation. Automation, however, must extend beyond the network setup itself. Many supporting processes not only benefit from automation, but *must* be automated if true on-demand services are to be practical. Manual actions don’t occur in seconds or even minutes – rendering on-demand both impractical and uneconomic. Emerging service models are also complicating this process, as they open up new sources of revenues. A case in point is the new enterprise […]