Robotron

TLDR

Network management facilitates a healthy and sustainable network, yet its practice is not well understood outside the network engineering community. Robotron is a top‑down system designed to reduce effort and errors in network management by minimizing direct human interaction with devices. Engineers express high‑level design intent in Robotron, which translates it into low‑level device configurations, deploys them safely, and monitors operational state to prevent deviations. Since 2008, Robotron has managed tens of thousands of network devices and hundreds of thousands of servers worldwide at Facebook.

Abstract

Network management facilitates a healthy and sustainable network. However, its practice is not well understood outside the network engineering community. In this paper, we present Robotron, a system for managing a massive production network in a top-down fashion. The system's goal is to reduce effort and errors on management tasks by minimizing direct human interaction with network devices. Engineers use Robotron to express high-level design intent, which is translated into low-level device configurations and deployed safely. Robotron also monitors devices' operational state to ensure it does not deviate from the desired state. Since 2008, Robotron has been used to manage tens of thousands of network devices connecting hundreds of thousands of servers globally at Facebook.