Re: Operational feedback on policy redundancy

[William Herrin via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

On Fri, Apr 3, 2026 at 11:49 AM manwar--- via NANOG
<nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:
> I am a PhD student currently looking at the long-term management of network policies and intents. In studying a 
> large-scale production dataset from a service provider, I found that over 95% of the operational intents were 
> semantically redundant (meaning they were completely shadowed or subsumed by broader, older rules).

Howdy,

How have you determined that the redundancies are unintentional
(i.e.bloat)? Networks are dynamic systems. You're looking at a
snapshot or snapshots.

Things break. This changes which rules apply at any given instant.


> To clarify: the data comes from an intent-based enterprise network, where the intents are high-level requirements 
> collected from a running production system.

Actually, I'm curious if anyone in the ISP world is using intent-based
networking. I've read about the concept but it struck me as an easy
way to dig yourself a very deep hole. Networking at the ISP level is
heavily focused on managing how things break. Because things break. A
lot.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
For hire. https://bill.herrin.us/resume/
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