Emergence: An Intent Fulfillment System
Kristina Dzeparoska, Ali Tizghadam, Alberto Leon‐Garcia
Abstract
Network management complexities stem from the multitude of resources, services, and applications that are to be built on top of heterogeneous and distributed infrastructure. To address these complexities, a vendor-agnostic, logical, and abstract view of the infrastructure is essential. Intent-based networking (IBN) helps address complexity by providing a set of abstractions (e.g., functional, data, infrastructure), but the intelligent and automatic decomposition of an intent into a course of actions is a challenging task. In this article, we propose a policy-based approach to model functional abstractions, and decompose intents into a hierarchy of policies. We use closed control loop automation, guided by Finite State Machines (FSM) to execute the policies and deploy the intents. To make our approach widely applicable, we provide a mapping to the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) Policy Driven Orchestration (PDO) model. We also discuss opportunities for IBN in large language models, and demonstrate our system through a cloud intent that includes a VNF and a health check service.