An analysis of network configuration artifacts

摘要: Computer networks and the Internet have become necessary tools in many daily activities; as such, they share expectation to be "always on" highly available. Throughout a decades-long evolution of increasing reliance, campus/enterprise Wide-Area Networks (WANs) been engineered maintained by an increasingly large set skilled practitioners, i.e., network operators or engineers. While strikingly similar software development programmers engineers, there has not attention discipline operations that engineering. In this work, we analyze deployment operation two over period five ten years. Our analogy-based approach is apply source code artifact analysis techniques device configurations. Specifically, repositories router switch configurations both campus service-provider network; these store actions hundreds practitioners maintaining thousands pieces equipment more than years time. results expose longitudinally time types topological roles. We reverse-engineer operators' work behavior terms how use version control tools, change configurations, long their changes last production network. Lastly, evaluate our proposed analogy between engineering operations, are programmers, comparing contrasting modern operations.