Azure Operator Nexus - Network Fabric

Azure Operator Nexus offers various capabilities to manage the lifecycle and configuration of the networking required to run the Operator's infrastructure and workloads.

Operator Nexus enables you to:

• Single pane of glass to manage your on-premises networking devices and their configuration.
• Create infrastructure and workload networks which are isolated.
• Configure route policies to import and export specific routes to and from your existing infrastructure network.
• Monitor and audit device performance, health, and configuration changes and take action against them via metrics, logs, and alerts.
• Set access policies to govern who can manage the network.
• Manage the lifecycle of the network devices.
• Tap or mirror desired network data with Network Packet Broker.
• Get highly available and robust control plane for your network infrastructure.

Key capabilities offered in Azure Operator Nexus Network Fabric:

• Bootstrapping and lifecycle management - Automated bootstrapping & provisioning of network fabric resources based on network function use-cases. It provides various controls to manage network devices in operator premises via Azure APIs.

• Tenant network configuration - Automated network configuration in Network Fabric for Container Network Functions (CNFs) and Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) that are deployed on the compute nodes. The network configuration enables east-west communication between network functions as well as north-south communication between external networks and VNFs/CNFs.

• Observability - Monitor the health and performance of the network fabric in real-time with metrics and logs.

• Network Policy Automation - Automating the management of consistent network policies across the fabric to ensure security, performance, and access controls are enforced uniformly.

• Networking features built for Operators - Support for unique features like multicast, SCTP, and jumbo frames.

Next steps

• Network Fabric Controller overview