PipeConf: An Integrated Architecture for the Automated Configuration of Network Assets
A. Pires, Fernando Matos, Aldri Luiz dos Santos, Diego Ernesto Rosa Pessoa, Paulo Ditarso Maciel · IEEE Transactions on Network and Service Management · 2022
The manual management of network assets is susceptible to configuration errors, lack of standardization, a large amount of repetitive work, and little or no traceability of changes over time. The Infrastructure as Code (IaC) approach makes it possible to automate the process of configuring resources such as operating systems, network services, containers, and applications, by treating them as software and allowing standardization and configuration rollback. This paper proposes an integrated architecture based on different software tools that use the IaC approach to automate the configuration of network assets, considering different models and manufacturers. A quantitative analysis shows the architecture’s efficiency in response time and scalability. The architecture has achieved a proportional gain of 83% in the average response time to manage 128 assets, with no significant increase in processing and memory usage.