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Introduction

Through lifting others we rise 🚀

Network Automations Fabric¤

Network Automations Fabric

Hi 😄, thank you for getting here.

NORFAB is a distributed task execution framework focused on network automations.

Why - The Story 📖¤

In a world devoid of network automations, the streets were silent and grey. Without network automations, network engineers' lives became a grueling cycle of manual configurations and endless troubleshooting. They spent hours accessing each and every device, manually configuring and patching systems. Nights were sleepless, filled with frantic calls to resolve outages that could no longer be preemptively detected or resolved. Collaboration was slow, relying on face-to-face meetings and manual documentation. Overwhelmed and exhausted, their innovative spirit was stifled by the sheer volume of repetitive tasks...

Let us introduce you to the world of Network Automations Fabric.

What - The Idea 💡¤

NorFab purpose is to augment engineers capabilities with automation superpowers.

Most of the software to manage networks falls into one of the two categories:

  • heavyweight platforms running on dedicated infrastructure
  • lightweight scripts or tools developed and run locally

NorFab can be both - software you can run equally well from your laptop or on a server, centralized or fully distributed, lightweight and feature reach. Capable of doing any use cases without the need to throw gazillions of dollars and man hours at it. Always ready to serve the purpose of unlocking engineers superpowers managing modern networks and making engineers life better.

How - The Features ⚙¤

  • Run Anywhere - locally on Windows, MAC or Linux, in a container, on a VM, in the cloud, centralized or distributed
  • Extend Anything - extendability is in the core of NorFab
  • Integrate with Everything - Python API, REST API, CLI northbound interfaces
  • Manage Anything - develop your own services or use built-in to manage your network infrastructure
  • Model and data driven - Pydantic models for API, validation and documentation
  • Automate Anything - we mean it, sky is the limit on what you can do with NorFab automating your networks

Architecture¤

Key actors of the system include

  • SERVICES - a collection of workers and managed resources
  • CLIENTS - consume services, processes that run on client machine and connect to broker
  • WORKERS - form services, processes that run anywhere and act as resource proxy agents
  • BROKER - provides access to services for clients
  • RESOURCES - entities managed by workers, e.g. network devices, databases, file systems

Clients communicate with broker to submit jobs, broker distributes jobs across workers comprising the service, workers run jobs producing results retrieved by clients. In other words, Services hosted by Workers and expose functionality consumed by Clients via Broker.

Network Automations Fabric Architecture