Practices from the DevOps world are being adopted into managing networking services. Vendor hardware, configuration tools and deployment modes have eased programmable configuration and automation of network devices and functions.
Some recommendations on how to adopt network automation practices include looking at networks-as-code (along the lines of infrastructure-as-code), orchestration as part of CI/CD pipelines, using network functions that can be deployed in smaller units like containers, applying chaos engineering principles to network services delivery, and measuring and predicting using monitoring tools. The human factor has been found to be a key aspect in ensuring network reliability in some studies.
