Customer Highlights
One of the world’s largest e-commerce companies, with operations in over 30 countries. It facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer transactions through its website. It is one of the top 5 e-commerce websites with monthly active users in the US exceeding 500MM.
Challenges
- Maintaining five 9s of reliability for the e-commerce website.
- Ensuring that network configuration complies with site standards at all times and automatically alerting when it drifts from those standards.
- Testing changes to the network, as well as entirely new network designs, before implementing them in the production environment.
Business Impact and Results
- Significantly lowered the risk of a network outage that could force their e-commerce website offline.
- Increased network change velocity by comprehensively testing changes prior to deployment.
- Full visibility into deviations from site standards, enabling network automation that further improved agility and resilience.
Building an Agile, Always-on Network
Previously, this organization struggled with the heterogeneity of the network, a result of over a decade of its operation. Network heterogeneity made it impossible to enforce site standards, evolve the network rapidly, and get assurance that a network change will not cause an outage for the primary website or other critical services. It also made it difficult to automate common network management tasks.
This e-commerce leader wanted to get a high degree of confidence that network changes were safe, by comprehensively testing them before deploying to the production environment. They also wanted continuous and full visibility into how and where the network deviated from its desired site standards in order to start building a network automation suite.
Customer teams found that Batfish Enterprise met both of these needs. They expressed their site standards as well as intended network behaviors, such as the website is always accessible from the Internet, as Batfish Enterprise policies. These policies are continuously and automatically evaluated for the live network. Any violations are reported to a dedicated Slack channel for their network reliability engineering (NRE) team. The customer also uses the Change Review feature of Batfish Enterprise to comprehensively vet the change against network policies and to understand the full impact of changes before deployment.
Learn First Hand: View demo of Automatic Network Policy Analysis with Batfish Enterprise
Comprehensive and Automated Network Testing
Digital transformation is driving business strategy and network investments. Companies that successfully make the shift realize higher revenues and lower operational costs. It is critical that the network evolve rapidly and reliably in response to business needs.
Test automation is essential to operating a highly-available network and enabling network engineering and operations teams to safely deliver the many changes required every week. In order to effectively deliver business-requested changes, you need a comprehensive, production-scale validation system. Instead of creating a parallel test network, with Batfish Enterprise you get an exact mathematical replica of your network to predict the impact of changes and validate them in minutes before deploying updates to the production. This helps ensure that changes are fast and do not cause an outage.
The network policy evaluation and change review workflows built into Batfish Enterprise transforms network and change management processes. It helps ensure that the network is always policy-compliant, alerts rapidly when it is not, and speeds the change testing process. Batfish Enterprise APIs also enable the integration of these capabilities into network automation pipelines and notification systems.
About Intentionet, Inc.
Intentionet are pioneers in the network validation and automation space. Intentionet’s award-winning platform, Batfish Enterprise, enables pre-deployment validation, the foundation of any network automation workflow. Network engineering and operations teams are using Batfish Enterprise to validate planned changes before pushing them into production. Batfish Enterprise predicts the impact of network changes and ensures that the security, reliability, and compliance of the network is never compromised.
Intentionet, Batfish, and Batfish Enterprise are registered trademarks of Intentionet, Inc.
