Re: Operational feedback on policy redundancy

I can attest that a very large American ISP/Telco/Wireless Provider is
using intent based systems all over the place.



On Sat, Apr 4, 2026 at 4:16 PM William Herrin via NANOG <
[email protected]> wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 3, 2026 at 11:49 AM manwar--- via NANOG
> <[email protected]> wrote:
> > I am a PhD student currently looking at the long-term management of
> network policies and intents. In studying a large-scale production dataset
> from a service provider, I found that over 95% of the operational intents
> were semantically redundant (meaning they were completely shadowed or
> subsumed by broader, older rules).
>
> Howdy,
>
> How have you determined that the redundancies are unintentional
> (i.e.bloat)? Networks are dynamic systems. You're looking at a
> snapshot or snapshots.
>
> Things break. This changes which rules apply at any given instant.
>
>
> > To clarify: the data comes from an intent-based enterprise network,
> where the intents are high-level requirements collected from a running
> production system.
>
> Actually, I'm curious if anyone in the ISP world is using intent-based
> networking. I've read about the concept but it struck me as an easy
> way to dig yourself a very deep hole. Networking at the ISP level is
> heavily focused on managing how things break. Because things break. A
> lot.
>
> Regards,
> Bill Herrin
>
> --
> For hire. https://bill.herrin.us/resume/
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