Nokia Event-Driven Automation (EDA) is a modern infrastructure automation platform that combines speed with reliability and simplicity. It makes data center network automation more trustable and easier to use, from small edge clouds to the largest AI fabrics.
With EDA, you can automate the entire data center network lifecycle from Day 0 design, Day 1 deployment to Day 2+ daily operations. The platform abstracts the complexity of multivendor networks, which helps you provision and monitor your network in real time and make sure it always operates as expected.
EDA builds on the proven Kubernetes platform and taps into its vast open-source ecosystem. This reduces your risks and lowers barriers to entry for users.
As a key component of our Data Center Fabric solution, EDA complements and extends our Service Router Linux (SR Linux) network operating system, which features the industry’s most complete set of programmatic and telemetry interfaces. While EDA is a vendor-agnostic platform, it provides exceptional insight into how the network is operating when it is combined with SR Linux.
Move fast with confidence
Automation is the fastest way to break things at scale if it solely focuses on speeding up processes. By combining reliability and simplicity with speed, you can eliminate the fear factor around changes and automate your data center operations more effectively. EDA is delivering on that promise: if you can make things safer and simpler, it’s easier to go faster.
Ensure reliable network operations
EDA reinforces your trust in network automation by driving network downtime to zero. It helps you achieve reliable operations by making configurations predictable and ensuring that your network always operates the way you want it to.
Source of truth
Maintain a centralized repository of accurate, up-to-date information about the configuration and status of all devices, connections and services in your network.
Pre- and post-checks
Identify conflicts before you push a new configuration to a device. Verify whether the intended configuration has been applied on the device or rejected by it.
Remediation
Let EDA ensure your network is always provisioned as intended. EDA continuously checks in-production devices against the desired state of the fabric to identify and implement the required change to the network.
Revision control
Don’t be afraid to push changes to your network. EDA stores and versions all your configuration intent files in a Git repository. You will always be able to “go back in time” and roll back your network if needed.
Network-wide transactions
Combine multiple configuration changes into a single fate-shared transaction. Avoid indeterministic network state by ‘undoing’ a configuration change if any of its required steps fail and retrieving the original configuration and state of the network.
Digital twin
Test and validate network changes in a fully integrated and emulated environment before you apply them to your production network. Verification will give you peace of mind before you make disruptive changes.
Fabric observability
Monitor your data center fabric in real time and gain deep insights into its east–west and north–south traffic. EDA makes it happen with instant observability enabled by multidimensional on-change telemetry.
Simplify the network management lifecycle
EDA simplifies operations by abstracting the complexity of the multivendor network and making automation easier to use.
Intent-based automation
Focus on what you want to achieve through high-level declarative intents. Let EDA determine how best to implement the low-level detailed configurations.
GenAI assistance
Ask EDA anything in natural language as an interface to the platform. You can query functionalities, verify device and network states, troubleshoot issues, fetch configuration examples and much more. Our GenAI assistant makes your operations more intuitive and helps you get the most from EDA.
Multivendor support
Let EDA take the pain out of managing the nuances of different supplier implementations. EDA hides the underlying configuration of the specific devices across multivendor environments.
Customized UI
Customize the user interface to your needs and preferences. You can change existing dashboards, drag and drop them, or create new ones to distill system state, or allow drill ins. You can also chart or visualize any query in real time––no programming skills required.
Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP)
Turn device onboarding into a “plug in and power up” process. EDA provides topology discovery and a ZTP bootstrap process to bring new nodes online.
Adapt to fast-evolving demands
EDA can be easily customized to address your specific automation needs. EDA is compatible with open-source cloud-native technologies and integrates with a rich ecosystem of tools and clouds. This means you can use EDA with a variety of tools without being restricted to proprietary platforms and speed up the creation and deployment of solutions that will meet evolving end user demands.
Application store
Move fast and iterate quickly with automation tasks available as applications that cater to your unique needs and environment. Those applications can be downloaded from the EDA application store.
Cloud management
Unify the management of your IT and network infrastructure. EDA integrates with cloud and workload management systems, enabling the fabric to react to workload and compute connectivity requirements from OpenShift, VMWare or OpenStack clusters in real time.
Open-source ecosystem
Grow your automation toolset. EDA is built on the Kubernetes automation platform and naturally inherits from its infrastructure-as-code principles and rich ecosystem of tools.
IT service management
Streamline your trouble-ticketing and response processes for network incidents. EDA integrates with incident, inventory and workflow management systems to propagate events and manage network issues more efficiently and effectively.
Public clouds
Connect workloads seamlessly across your private data center fabric and various public clouds as if they all were hosted on the same data center. EDA offers simplified deployment and manageability of workload connectivity across multiple clouds.
Event notification
Simplify event and fault management by taking advantage of EDA’s integration with event notification and collaboration tools such as Microsoft Teams, Discord and WhatsApp.
What is event-driven automation (EDA)?
Event-driven automation is an approach that triggers automated actions in response to specific events instead of regularly polling the infrastructure. When an event related to the configuration or state of the infrastructure occurs—such as an alert, network change, telemetry update or user action—the platform automatically executes operational logic without manual intervention.
Event-driven automation ensures faster response times, reduces manual effort, minimizes errors, consumes less compute resources and handles network-wide operations at scale with consistent performance. By proactively resolving issues, it boosts reliability and reduces operational costs.
Kubernetes for network automation
Introducing a new controller into your existing environment can present integration, customization, trust and entry barrier challenges for your staff. Our EDA platform uses Kubernetes to solve these issues.
Kubernetes is widely recognized as the leading orchestration system for successfully managing containerized applications through intent-based automation. Kubernetes has millions of users, and its flexible and extensible nature is easy to leverage in other domains, including networking.
As a cloud-native platform, EDA runs on Kubernetes. But it does more than that: EDA brings the successful Kubernetes concepts and consumption model to networking in the data center. With EDA, you can leverage the Kubernetes ecosystem and API operations to manage and consume the network.
EDA also augments Kubernetes to make network automation more predictable, avoid eventual consistency and ensure that the network is not left in indeterministic state.
EDA explained
Watch Bruce Wallis, Senior Director of product management at Nokia, discussing how EDA raises the bar on data center network automation with a modern approach that brings highly reliable, simplified, and adaptable lifecycle management to data center networks.
EDA at Networking Field Day
Watch the replay of the Networking Field Day exclusive Nokia event.
Resources
Related topics
Simplify and transform the way you build, control and operate your network.
Our networking for AI workloads solution delivers the reliability and ease of network operations you need for data-intensive AI infrastructures.
Related solutions and products
Solution
Bring new levels of reliability, simplicity and adaptability to your data center switching and cloud infrastructures.
Product
Build reliable management network solutions for data centers.
Product
Build open and automated data center fabrics with high-capacity, fixed-configuration platforms
Product
Deploy high-density, high-capacity data center switches for an open, leaf-spine architecture.
Product
Evolve your IP and data center networks with an open, extensible and resilient NOS
Learn more about network automation and data center networks
Blog
Data sheet
Blog
Blog
Blog
Blog
Customer success
Customer success
Latest news
Ready to talk?
Please complete the form below.
The form is loading, please wait...
Thank you. We have received your inquiry. Please continue browsing.