Title

AWS re:Invent 2023 - AWS Journey Toward Intent-Driven Network Infrastructure (NET401)

Summary

Stephen Callaghan, a senior principal engineer at Amazon Infrastructure Services, discusses AWS's evolution towards an intent-driven network.
AWS's network infrastructure includes physical routers, switches, and the software that maintains them, focusing on high reliability and availability.
AWS has set goals to increase network availability, consistency, confirmation, scalability, and reduce operational burden.
AWS has developed "intents" to manage network behaviors declaratively, improving consistency, visibility, and operations.
The talk introduces CIDR, a new routing protocol, and ADEN, the AWS intent-driven network management plane.
CIDR is designed for a single control plane domain, hierarchical control, completeness, SLA-bound operations, and eBGP connectivity.
ADEN coordinates across multiple domains, ensuring that changes are consistent and validated across the network.
Automated reasoning is used to apply formal methods and proofs to network configurations, ensuring robustness and preventing outages.
The talk concludes with an invitation to visit the AWS Village to see physical hardware and meet the creators, and a request for feedback on the session survey for future topics.

AWS is moving towards an intent-driven network to manage the growing complexity and scale of its infrastructure.
Intent-driven networking centralizes the management of network behaviors, allowing for more consistent and efficient operations.
The introduction of CIDR as a new routing protocol addresses the challenges of scaling network control planes and maintaining a single domain of knowledge across thousands of devices.
ADEN serves as the overarching management plane that integrates intents across various domains, ensuring that network changes are propagated and validated consistently.
Automated reasoning within AWS's network infrastructure allows for mathematical verification of network behaviors, reducing the risk of outages and ensuring network configurations meet both customer needs and AWS specifications.
AWS's approach to network infrastructure emphasizes the importance of customer feedback and the continuous evolution of their systems to meet customer demands and technological advancements.