Will it work??

[ggnfs000]

"Intent Based Networking" is the way to move forward. Apstra really spear-headed this charge and Cumulus and others jumped on shortly after. Cisco with this announcement just confirmed its relevance and there is a market.

Now in true Cisco fashion they tied it to a hardware platform with the new Cat 9000 whatever. Which IMO is a against the true idea of intent based networking.

The idea of intent based networking is to provide what you want out of a network and how you want it to perform and have a design built that meets those needs. Protocols, config and what hardware you use does not matter unless they are limiting. Think about running through a Wizard and a DC fabric spits out the other end.

Once the network is built you know the intent of the network and have better visibility into performance and deviations since you know what the network should be doing.

Cisco is coming at this backwards. They are saying here is all this hardware and features you can build your network with now how do you want it.

My guess is Cisco will do just like iWAN with this one. Run it hard for a year or two. Fail miserably and buy out one of the top players in this game to stay relevant.

to my understanding, here is the parallel:
intent based net - apple - ferrari - luxurious, fast and furious but once broken you have to buy another iphone or ferrari.
traditional net - android, old clunker - breaks all the time, needs parts everytime it breaks.

You're joking right. Androids are far from old clunkers when you buy the right model. And I'm sure that every single cloud provider and hyper scaler views their standards based networks as clunkers.
And ferraris and apples... seriously, your employer bias is showing. Have fun with your  version 1 code.

There has been some exaggeration for the sake of dramatization effect
Secondly I made this statement based on public perception stereotype angle rather than speaking my mind. If I some my own mind, of course it will be entirely different.

[that1guy15]

Read you guys replies and had to take a step back and go over some of the press releases and details of the Cisco announcement. With everything going on I guess I glossed over alot of it.

I agree with Wintermute, Intent Based networking (IBN) goes beyond just the DC fabric. Till this conversation I have honestly only focused my thoughts there. But that is really the only space IBN exists right now.

I think Cisco (just like with ACI) will have their hands full trying to control the whole stack. The biggest reaction to ACI I hear right now is "man that is a butt-load of lock-in!" and its true. You have to be all in with Cisco to go this route. Same appears to be true with this announcement. Not a huge issue outside the fact that Cisco is getting chewed up in the hardware space on all front and they are slowly losing their foothold.

IBN is 100% used to build out Greenfield deployments. Dosent make sense to try and integrate into existing. That has been my struggle with trying to get buy-off on it. And IMO any engineer/architect that is looking to build-out fresh should be avoiding vendor lock-in in the network. Things are changing and improving very fast now and lock-in kills flexibility. 

The next five+ years are going to be crazy in this space!

[wintermute000]

The problem is the security stuff, the identity, telemetry and enforcement can't be done in any open manner. The standards just aren't there and that is the value proposition. They're claiming 99.999% malware detection on encrypted data using just metadata and header analysis. Also you don't even have to drive ISE directly it's all done from the renames APIC EM. even hidden all the ACI constructs behind drag and drop GUI. This will sell to tier 1s on security alone. Like you say the next few years will be interesting