Nokia Event-Driven Automation (EDA) Multi Vendor – Deliver on the Promise

Bruce Wallis, Product Manager for Nokia’s EDA (Event-Driven Automation) platform, began by revisiting the core assertions made when the product was unveiled a year prior. He reiterated that EDA was built on the same successful principles as Kubernetes: abstraction and a declarative model. The goal was to apply this logic to networking, creating a ubiquitous platform that could define a unit of work for the network, just as Kubernetes did for compute workloads. This approach aims to normalize networking primitives like interfaces and BGP peers, allowing an operator to declare the desired end state without scripting the specific sequential steps, letting the platform handle the how.

The presentation’s main focus was delivering on the multi-vendor promise made at the previous event. Wallis conducted a live demo, bootstrapping an eight-node, dual-stack fabric underlay using a single 58-line YAML file. This high-level abstract definition was automatically reconciled by EDA, which then generated and pushed the correct, vendor-specific configurations to four different operating systems running on the leaf switches: Nokia SR Linux, Nokia SROS, Cisco Nexus, and Arista EOS. This demonstrated the platform’s ability to manage a heterogeneous network through one common model.

Finally, Wallis addressed other key platform features, including the ability to bubble operational state up into the abstract model, allowing operators to view the “health” of the entire fabric rather than just individual components. He also clarified for delegates that while he used YAML for demo speed, the platform is fully operable via a form-based UI for users unfamiliar with programmatic inputs. He concluded the demo by successfully deploying a complex EVPN overlay network across the newly built, multi-vendor underlay, again using a single, simple declarative input.