The ongoing digital transformation and the rise of AI applications, coupled with data center labor shortages and skills gaps, are driving web scalers, enterprises, and service providers to scale and adapt their data center infrastructures to meet exponential demand and evolving workload requirements. As more critical workloads move to the cloud, cloud service disruptions can have significant economic, security, and societal implications. Increasing automation in cloud and network operations is essential to meeting demand while minimizing service disruptions.

Despite the advantages of network automation, a study of Enterprise Management Associates It shows that most organizations have automated less than half of their data center network management tasks. Among the obstacles to automation adoption are a lack of scalable, open, and multi-vendor solutions; legacy systems and complexity that require skilled resources; and a lack of confidence that fully automated systems will deliver the desired results.

Nokia's new infrastructure automation platform is designed to overcome these barriers, while providing a new way to address key challenges in today's data center network environment.

The risk of human error and associated network downtime is mitigated through EDA's integrated digital twin, pre- and post-deployment checkpoints, highly responsive multidimensional observability, and a robust CI/CD methodology with revision control. Operational simplicity is achieved through intent-based declarative automation, GenAI assistance, and a low-code/no-code approach to creating custom dashboards. EDA integrates seamlessly into multi-vendor and multi-domain environments with support for a wide range of IT service management systems, event notification systems, and cloud management platforms.

As a modern software platform, EDA leverages Kubernetes, a cloud-based automation and orchestration environment with millions of users worldwide, for its cloud-based microservices architecture. The platform adopts Kubernetes constructs to bring an intent-based, event-driven, and declarative approach to network automation, complemented by network-wide transactions. Furthermore, by leveraging Kubernetes' resource model, APIs, and toolchain, EDA enables network resources to be consumed in the same way as other applications in the data center.