Occam: A Programming System for Reliable Network Management

The complexity of large networks makes their management a daunting task. State-of-the-art network management tools use workflow systems for automation, but they do not adequately address the substantial challenges in operation reliability. This paper presents Occam, a programming system that simplifies the development of reliable network management tasks. We leverage the fact that most modern network management systems are backed with a source-of-truth database, and thus customize database techniques to the context of network management. Occam exposes an easy-to-use programming model for network operators to express the key management logic, while shielding them from reliability concerns, such as operational conflicts and task atomicity. Instead, the Occam runtime provides these reliability guardrails automatically. Our evaluation demonstrates Occam's effectiveness in simplifying management tasks, minimizing network vulnerable time and assisting with failure recovery.