Re: Operational feedback on policy redundancy

[Tom Beecher via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>]

Intent Based Networking is the love child of a failed network engineer, and
an MBA.




On Sat, Apr 4, 2026 at 5:42 PM Shane Ronan via NANOG <nanog () lists nanog org>
wrote:

> I can attest that a very large American ISP/Telco/Wireless Provider is
> using intent based systems all over the place.
>
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 4, 2026 at 4:16 PM William Herrin via NANOG <
> nanog () lists nanog org> wrote:
>
> > 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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