GigaOm Solution Profile: Gluware

1. Summary

Founded in 2007, Gluware provides a suite of intent-based, idempotent network automation solutions with closed-loop verification enabling extensible, scalable, and secure multi-vendor, multi-domain, and multi-cloud networks. Gluware’s modular, microservices-based NetDevOps solution includes intelligence for each vendor platform with continuous discovery and out-of-the-box network monitoring and management. It supports more than 40 network operating systems and cloud platforms, including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud.

Figure 1. Gluware Intelligent Network Automation at-a-Glance

Comprising Gluware Intelligent Orchestration Engine and Gluware Control, Gluware’s Intelligent Network Automation platform hosts a suite of intent-based applications, including Config Drift and Audit, Config Modeling, Dashboard, Data Explorer, Network RPA, OS Manager, and Device Manager. These integrated components provision inventory, drift, audit, and config management tasks via SSH (or REST) to enterprise network devices.

Communicating with multi-vendor, multi-platform physical and virtual systems via an API or CLI, Gluware Intelligent Orchestration Engine provides data-model driven, intent-based intelligence to discover, analyze, and validate network actions at scale. This feature can be used to accelerate the replacement of less extensible and less secure legacy network configuration and change management (NCCM) solutions.

Actions are automated via Gluware Intent-Based Applications, which incorporate modular, purpose-built functions for device management and inventory, configuration drift and audit, OS upgrades, configuration modeling, and workflow automation. For example, the Gluware Config Drift application takes periodic high-resolution “snapshots” of either the entire network or specific nodes to establish a baseline configuration. Automated line-by-line comparisons detect changes, triggering device remediation or promoting the snapshot to the current default.

Gluware Control, the cloud-based or on-premises control panel for Gluware’s platform, allows you to administer users with role-based access, create organizations for multi-tenant network management, import devices, perform inventory, and load and manage software packages and applications. The Data Explorer application also offers increased network visibility and allows any data to be extracted from within the Gluware databases to create actionable insights. The new Network RPA application provides the ability to build end-to-end process automation with a no-code drag-and-drop interface. It enables a CI/CD approach with the integrated ability to build, test, deploy, and monitor automated processes. Gluware provides native tasks to orchestrate its underlying app suite and also integrates with StackStorm to provide more than 150 external integrations for platforms including Ansible, AWS, Jira, ServiceNow, and Slack.

In addition to providing off-the-shelf applications, Gluware Lab accelerates deployment by eliminating the need to build your own automation. A self-contained CI/CD ecosystem deployed on-premises, Gluware Lab enables customers to develop their own features, networking packages, custom API integrations, and workflows on top of the Gluware platform for on-premises or cloud-based deployments.

Gluware Enterprise, hosted on premises or in the cloud, offers flexibility and scalability to address the needs of larger enterprises or those requiring special sizing. It can scale to any size network, and customers can select which components of the Gluware Application Suite they want to deploy. Incorporating Gluware Zone Engine Servers, Gluware Enterprise enables provisioning power to be distributed to geographical regions or edge locations, or data centers with a cluster of network devices.

With Gluware’s SaaS offering, Gluware Pro, customers download and install the Gluware Secure Gateway (GSG) virtual appliance on their network, providing a secure TLS tunnel to the AWS-hosted, multi-tenant Gluware instance. Designed for networks of up to 2,000 devices, a single GSG provides dual provisioning engines with Gluware Pro supporting the deployment of two GSGs on each customer network for redundancy.