What is Razor Network? - Deep Dive into Decentralised Oracles

Razor network is a decentralised oracle network.

Anything which provides external data to a blockchain is called an “Oracle”.

Razor Network consists of validators who lock in their tokens as a “Stake” and provide data to the network. The honest validators are rewarded and those who report incoherently are penalized.

The core of Razor Network is a set of smart contracts, that can run on any Ethereum compatible blockchain. Razor relies on the underlying blockchain for providing certain properties such as censorship resistance, security from network partition attacks, etc.

Detailed introduction
For a detailed introduction, please check What is Razor Network?

White paper
The latest version of the whitepaper is always available at Whitepaper

Smart contracts
Our smart contracts are hosted at Contracts

Please note that the project is in active development and breaking changes are introduced frequently.

Client
A javascript reference client is being developed. It can be found here: CLI

Please see Client documentation for more details.

What is Razor Network?

This is an explanation of how Razor Network works to achieve its goals of providing a decentralized, trustworthy, fast and scalable way to provide external data to smart contracts.

Anything which provides external data to a blockchain is called an “Oracle”. Razor Network consists of validators who lock in their tokens as a “Stake” and provide data to the network. The honest validators are rewarded and those who report incoherently are penalized.

The core of Razor Network is a set of smart contracts, that can run on any Ethereum compatible blockchain. Razor relies on the underlying blockchain for providing certain properties such as censorship resistance, security from network partition attacks, etc.

Goals of the protocol

The goal of the project is to provide a decentralized way to verify and provide data to a blockchain. Since entire economies are being built on top of blockchain which rely heavily on the external data, it is extremely important that the data is provided and aggregated in a decentralized way to avoid many kinds of attacks.

The various kinds of attacks that can be faced by a decentralized oracle such as Razor are:

• Takeover attack by controlling the majority of the validators
• Bribe attack
• Bribe signaling attack
• Providing invalid or compromised data source
• Making invalid queries to the oracle
• Censoring reports of honest validators.

Apart from being secure from such attacks, Razor Network has the following features:

• An oracle which is both fast and secure
• Cover a large number of use cases by allowing results to be fetched both manually or automatically

How does Razor Network compare to other oracles?

As can be seen from the table above, there are two kinds of decentralized oracles:

• Oracles which have fast resolution times but are game theoretically insecure
• Oracles which have slow resolution times but are game theoretically secure

Razor Network’s ICO Public Sale Round on Balancer

Razor Network will be offering 20 million RAZOR tokens (Around 2% of total supply) through a Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP) on 4th February 2021 at 1 PM UTC. The event will continue till around 6th February 2021 at 1 PM UTC, or till all RAZOR tokens have been distributed.

The initial weight of the LBP will be RAZOR: USDC = 90: 10 and will gradually change to RAZOR: USDC = 30: 70 over this offering period. For complete details about the tokenomics, please refer to this article.

The starting price of the $RAZOR token would be around $0.53. The weights of the pool will change gradually. The projected end price is $0.025, which was the price of the Private sale 2, in case no tokens are sold. The end price will however move upwards as more tokens are sold.

You can see the estimated price change in case of no orders here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZalwuxGAIjhTTb105Sah4k1OMuX9HF2FfARkicqXczg/edit#gid=0

How to Participate in Razor Network’s Public sale?

The following sections will provide a step-by-step guide as to how you can participate in Razor Network’s Public Sales Round and swap RAZOR tokens on Balancer’s LBP.

1. Install and Setup MetaMask

2. Visit the dashboard here: Razor Network Public Sale Dashboard

3. Buy the $RAZOR on Balancer

Detailed Guide:

You’ll need a Web3 enabled cryptocurrency wallet in order to swap tokens on Balancer’s LBP. Balancer supports applications such as MetaMask, WalletConnect, Coinbase, and Portis.

Here, we’ll see an example with MetaMask, which is one of the most popular and easy to use Web Wallet. You can download and install the MetaMask extension in your browser for Google Chrome and Firefox.

1. Setup a Metamask Wallet
   Make sure that you have sufficient ETH in your wallet to pay Gas fees on Balancer. You’ll also need USDC to exchange for RAZOR tokens.
   Balancer’s multi-pool routing enables other tokens besides USDC to be used as well, but that might result in higher fees as extra hops will be required to complete the transaction. Hence, we recommend you use USDC directly.

2. Navigate to Balancer LBP

2.1 Go to Razor Network Public Sale Dashboard

You can get all the information by diving into Quick Links. A price chart is provided, which will enable you to know the current price trend immediately and help you decide on the optimum point of purchase as per your need.

2.2 Go to the Balancer LBP exchange

IMPORTANT:

These are the contract addresses of the RAZOR token and the RAZOR/USDC pool contract address on Balancer respectively. Please make a note of them and check for the correct token contract address.

· RAZOR token address — 0x50de6856358cc35f3a9a57eaaa34bd4cb707d2cd

· Balancer LBP address — 0xd64bb9076f513d05ac31d1f143edcea6884d595f

WARNING: We anticipate that there will be fake RAZOR liquidity pools created by scammers on Balancer to steal away your funds. Razor Network team will not be responsible if you swap the wrong RAZOR token.

2.3 Unlock your wallet

Step 1: Click on the Connect Button to choose the Wallet.

Step 2: Open your Metamask wallet and allow it to connect with the balancer LBP.

Once you will get connected, you can see your address on the top right corner of the balancer LBP.
You will need to provide permission to Balancer in order to interact with Balancer’s smart contracts and swap your USDC for RAZOR. Submit the transaction and please wait for it to be confirmed.

3. Swap RAZOR tokens

MPORTANT
Please don’t swap tokens until you have read all the details and understood completely about the RAZOR Public Sale.
After successfully submitting your bid, please wait until MetaMask updates the transaction status from “PENDING” to “SUCCESS”. This might take a few minutes depending on the congestion on the Ethereum network.
If you don’t see RAZOR tokens in your wallet, Don’t Panic! Follow the instructions given here to add a custom token to get the balance of the Razor token on your Metamask Wallet.

Here are the details of $RAZOR

· Token Contract Address: 0x50de6856358cc35f3a9a57eaaa34bd4cb707d2cd
· Token Symbol: $RAZOR
· Decimals of Precision: 18

Razor Network — A truly decentralized Oracle platform for Decentralized Finance. We are working on next-generation oracle systems.

· Follow us on Medium
· Join our Telegram
· Follow us on Twitter
· Read our Explainer and Whitepaper
· Explore the Network
· Visit our Website
· Reach out — hello@razor.network

#razor #razornetwork #ico #publicsale #balancer #ethereum

What is GEEK

Buddha Community

Oracle Kills 402 Bugs in Massive October Patch Update

Business software giant Oracle is urging customers to update their systems in the October release of its quarterly Critical Patch Update (CPU), which fixes 402 vulnerabilities across various product families.

Well over half (272) of these vulnerabilities open products up to remote exploitation without authentication. That means that the flaw may be exploited over a network without requiring user credentials.

The majority of the flaws are in Oracle Financial Services Applications (53), Oracle MySQL (53), Oracle Communications (52), Oracle Fusion Middleware (46), Oracle Retail Applications (28) and Oracle E-Business Suite (27). But overall, 27 Oracle product families are affected by the flaws. Users can find a patch availability document for each product, available here.

“Oracle continues to periodically receive reports of attempts to maliciously exploit vulnerabilities for which Oracle has already released security patches,” according to the company’s release on Tuesday. “In some instances, it has been reported that attackers have been successful because targeted customers had failed to apply available Oracle patches. Oracle therefore strongly recommends that customers remain on actively-supported versions and apply Critical Patch Update security patches without delay.”

While details of the flaws themselves are scant, two of the critical vulnerabilities disclosed by Oracle rank the highest severity score – 10 out of 10 – on the CVSS scale.

These include a flaw in the self-service analytics component of Oracle Healthcare Foundation, which is a unified healthcare-analytics platform that is part of the Oracle Health Science Applications suite. The flaw (CVE-2020-1953), which can be remotely exploited without requiring any user credentials, requires no user interaction and is easy to exploit, according to Oracle. Affected supported versions include 7.1.1, 7.2.0, 7.2.1 and 7.3.0.

The second severe flaw (CVE-2020-14871) exists in the pluggable authentication module of Oracle Solaris, its enterprise operating system for Oracle Database and Java applications (part of the Oracle Systems risk matrix). The flaw is also remotely exploitable without user credentials, requires no user interaction and is a “low-complexity” attack. Versions 10 and 11 are affected.

Sixty-five of the vulnerabilities also had a CVSS base score of 9.8 (and six had a score of 9.4) out of 10, making them critical in severity.

Oracle did offer some workarounds, advising that for attacks that require certain privileges or access to certain packages, removing the privileges or the ability to access the packages from users that do not need the privileges may help reduce the risk of successful attack. Users can also reduce the risk of successful attack by blocking network protocols required by an attack.

However, both these approaches may break application functionality, and Oracle does not recommend that either approach be considered a long-term solution as neither corrects the underlying problem.

“Due to the threat posed by a successful attack, Oracle strongly recommends that customers apply Critical Patch Update security patches as soon as possible,” according to the company.

Oracle releases its CPUs on the Tuesday closest to the 17th day of January, April, July and October.

Previous quarterly updates have stomped out hundreds of bugs across the company’s product lines, including one in April that patched 405. There are also out-of-band updates; in June for instance, Oracle warned of a critical remote code-execution flaw in its WebLogic Server being actively exploited in the wild.

#vulnerabilities #web security #cpu #critical patch update #cve-2020-14871 #cve-2020-1953 #oracle #oracle communications #oracle e-business suite #oracle financial services applications #oracle fusion middleware #oracle mysql #oracle retail applications #quarterly patch update #remote code execution #security update

5 Steps To Get An Oracle Database Certification

So, do you have to become Oracle Certified? it has been a debatable issue for a short time, but one thing is certain: the Oracle Certification provides an accurate measure of your technical abilities.

Additionally, it gives you a foothold over people competing for the database administration positions you desire. Join Oracle online certification course and get complete guidance

Here are the steps to getting an Oracle Database certification:

1. Associate Certification

The first step to getting your Oracle is getting the Associate Certification, which needs that the person passes two tests to become an Oracle Certified Associate (OCA). With this qualification, you’ll add junior management as a team member or an application developer. to urge the associate certification, you’ve got to pass in one among the three tests explained below and therefore the final “Oracle Database 11g: Administration I” test.Join best Oracle online training program to improve your skills.

Step 1: Take one among the subsequent three courses

Oracle Database 12c: SQL Fundamentals 1Z0-061

The examination tests ability to make, retrieve, maintain, and edit data during a database. Mainly, this involves a grasp of important database administration concepts like an electronic database. Additionally, the necessity to know and use SQL is extremely important, because the test would require you to demonstrate your SQL programming skills.

Oracle Database SQL Expert 1Z0-047

In general, this is often a complicated version of the “Introduction to Oracle9i SQL” test. you’ll need proficiency in 76 topics to achieve this exam. you would like to possess a high understanding of database objects, control privileges, and system-level queries. The questions require a deep understanding of SQL, and are multiple parts in nature, requiring the application of concepts instead of mere memorization of answers. Experience in database administration will offer you a notable advantage during this test.

Oracle Database 11g: SQL Fundamentals I 1Z0-051

This test is an improved version of the “Introduction to Oracle9i SQL” test. The content is newer and includes set and conditional operators, which are absent within the older version. Therefore, you’d be happier choosing this test over the previous.

Step 2: Oracle Database 11g: Administration I 1Z0-052

The test requires knowledge on the way to found out database environments and secure Oracle instances in any network environment. Other concepts needed to pass this exam include understanding of database backup and recovery, Oracle Database Architecture, also as the configuration of security instances. The questions require the application of concepts, not just memorization of data.

2. Professional Certification

The professional certification allows you to manage large databases and develop large-scale database applications. In summary, to become an Oracle Certified Professional (OCP), you’ve got to require an instructor-led course, an exam, and a hands-on course.

Step 1: Be an Oracle Certified Associate

You must have the OCA certification as a pre-requisite for this course.

Step 2: Take an Exam

The second step within the OCP certification process is to require a course from a variety of about 50 courses and sit an exam. The list of those courses is out there on the Oracle site. The broad selection means you’ll choose the course that most accurately fits your training requirements. Note that you simply cannot meet the wants of this course through self-study; you’ve got to require an instructor-led class, a virtual class, or learn through training-on-demand.

Step 3: Submission of an Already Completed Course

In this step, you’re required to submit a previously completed course from an inventory of 21 courses. Alternatively, Oracle allows submissions from courses taken within the previous step.

Step 4: Oracle Database 11g: Administration II 1Z0-053

This is the ultimate exam within the OCP certification process. Once you pass this exam, you’ll proceed to the ultimate process.

Step 5: Submit a course completion form
Once you pass this exam, you only need to complete a course submission because of the final step within the OCP certification process.

Master Certification

This is the very best Oracle certification you’ll get. With this qualification, you’ll well-suited to figure in senior levels in IT departments handling sensitive database system issues and applications. you’ll need an OCP certification to urge started. then you’ll take a two-day exam then a hands-on course.

Conclusion:
In general, Oracle Certified database administrators have the knowhow to run databases both at the junior and senior levels, counting on the certification level. Some people might argue that there’s little point to being certified because the process involves the memorization of theoretical concepts and taking a multiple-choice test. However, while there’s credence to the very fact that certification does little to catch up on the shortage of technical competence obtained through experience, it does give validity to such claims. As an Oracle Certified database services, potential employers and clients are more easily convinced of your capabilities within the field.

#oracle online training #oracle online course #oracle online certification course #oracle certification course #oracle course #oracle training

What is Razor Network? - Deep Dive into Decentralised Oracles

Razor network is a decentralised oracle network.

Anything which provides external data to a blockchain is called an “Oracle”.

Razor Network consists of validators who lock in their tokens as a “Stake” and provide data to the network. The honest validators are rewarded and those who report incoherently are penalized.

The core of Razor Network is a set of smart contracts, that can run on any Ethereum compatible blockchain. Razor relies on the underlying blockchain for providing certain properties such as censorship resistance, security from network partition attacks, etc.

Detailed introduction
For a detailed introduction, please check What is Razor Network?

White paper
The latest version of the whitepaper is always available at Whitepaper

Smart contracts
Our smart contracts are hosted at Contracts

Please note that the project is in active development and breaking changes are introduced frequently.

Client
A javascript reference client is being developed. It can be found here: CLI

Please see Client documentation for more details.

What is Razor Network?

This is an explanation of how Razor Network works to achieve its goals of providing a decentralized, trustworthy, fast and scalable way to provide external data to smart contracts.

Anything which provides external data to a blockchain is called an “Oracle”. Razor Network consists of validators who lock in their tokens as a “Stake” and provide data to the network. The honest validators are rewarded and those who report incoherently are penalized.

The core of Razor Network is a set of smart contracts, that can run on any Ethereum compatible blockchain. Razor relies on the underlying blockchain for providing certain properties such as censorship resistance, security from network partition attacks, etc.

Goals of the protocol

The goal of the project is to provide a decentralized way to verify and provide data to a blockchain. Since entire economies are being built on top of blockchain which rely heavily on the external data, it is extremely important that the data is provided and aggregated in a decentralized way to avoid many kinds of attacks.

The various kinds of attacks that can be faced by a decentralized oracle such as Razor are:

• Takeover attack by controlling the majority of the validators
• Bribe attack
• Bribe signaling attack
• Providing invalid or compromised data source
• Making invalid queries to the oracle
• Censoring reports of honest validators.

Apart from being secure from such attacks, Razor Network has the following features:

• An oracle which is both fast and secure
• Cover a large number of use cases by allowing results to be fetched both manually or automatically

How does Razor Network compare to other oracles?

As can be seen from the table above, there are two kinds of decentralized oracles:

• Oracles which have fast resolution times but are game theoretically insecure
• Oracles which have slow resolution times but are game theoretically secure

Razor Network’s ICO Public Sale Round on Balancer

Razor Network will be offering 20 million RAZOR tokens (Around 2% of total supply) through a Balancer Liquidity Bootstrapping Pool (LBP) on 4th February 2021 at 1 PM UTC. The event will continue till around 6th February 2021 at 1 PM UTC, or till all RAZOR tokens have been distributed.

The initial weight of the LBP will be RAZOR: USDC = 90: 10 and will gradually change to RAZOR: USDC = 30: 70 over this offering period. For complete details about the tokenomics, please refer to this article.

The starting price of the $RAZOR token would be around $0.53. The weights of the pool will change gradually. The projected end price is $0.025, which was the price of the Private sale 2, in case no tokens are sold. The end price will however move upwards as more tokens are sold.

You can see the estimated price change in case of no orders here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZalwuxGAIjhTTb105Sah4k1OMuX9HF2FfARkicqXczg/edit#gid=0

How to Participate in Razor Network’s Public sale?

The following sections will provide a step-by-step guide as to how you can participate in Razor Network’s Public Sales Round and swap RAZOR tokens on Balancer’s LBP.

1. Install and Setup MetaMask

2. Visit the dashboard here: Razor Network Public Sale Dashboard

3. Buy the $RAZOR on Balancer

Detailed Guide:

You’ll need a Web3 enabled cryptocurrency wallet in order to swap tokens on Balancer’s LBP. Balancer supports applications such as MetaMask, WalletConnect, Coinbase, and Portis.

Here, we’ll see an example with MetaMask, which is one of the most popular and easy to use Web Wallet. You can download and install the MetaMask extension in your browser for Google Chrome and Firefox.

1. Setup a Metamask Wallet
   Make sure that you have sufficient ETH in your wallet to pay Gas fees on Balancer. You’ll also need USDC to exchange for RAZOR tokens.
   Balancer’s multi-pool routing enables other tokens besides USDC to be used as well, but that might result in higher fees as extra hops will be required to complete the transaction. Hence, we recommend you use USDC directly.

2. Navigate to Balancer LBP

2.1 Go to Razor Network Public Sale Dashboard

You can get all the information by diving into Quick Links. A price chart is provided, which will enable you to know the current price trend immediately and help you decide on the optimum point of purchase as per your need.

2.2 Go to the Balancer LBP exchange

IMPORTANT:

These are the contract addresses of the RAZOR token and the RAZOR/USDC pool contract address on Balancer respectively. Please make a note of them and check for the correct token contract address.

· RAZOR token address — 0x50de6856358cc35f3a9a57eaaa34bd4cb707d2cd

· Balancer LBP address — 0xd64bb9076f513d05ac31d1f143edcea6884d595f

WARNING: We anticipate that there will be fake RAZOR liquidity pools created by scammers on Balancer to steal away your funds. Razor Network team will not be responsible if you swap the wrong RAZOR token.

2.3 Unlock your wallet

Step 1: Click on the Connect Button to choose the Wallet.

Step 2: Open your Metamask wallet and allow it to connect with the balancer LBP.

Once you will get connected, you can see your address on the top right corner of the balancer LBP.
You will need to provide permission to Balancer in order to interact with Balancer’s smart contracts and swap your USDC for RAZOR. Submit the transaction and please wait for it to be confirmed.

3. Swap RAZOR tokens

MPORTANT
Please don’t swap tokens until you have read all the details and understood completely about the RAZOR Public Sale.
After successfully submitting your bid, please wait until MetaMask updates the transaction status from “PENDING” to “SUCCESS”. This might take a few minutes depending on the congestion on the Ethereum network.
If you don’t see RAZOR tokens in your wallet, Don’t Panic! Follow the instructions given here to add a custom token to get the balance of the Razor token on your Metamask Wallet.

Here are the details of $RAZOR

· Token Contract Address: 0x50de6856358cc35f3a9a57eaaa34bd4cb707d2cd
· Token Symbol: $RAZOR
· Decimals of Precision: 18

Razor Network — A truly decentralized Oracle platform for Decentralized Finance. We are working on next-generation oracle systems.

· Follow us on Medium
· Join our Telegram
· Follow us on Twitter
· Read our Explainer and Whitepaper
· Explore the Network
· Visit our Website
· Reach out — hello@razor.network

#razor #razornetwork #ico #publicsale #balancer #ethereum

Top 5 New Features of Oracle 18c Database

Any of the developments are fairly minor and incremental. For example, in previous versions of App Express, the end date within a range was removed from the list. In version 5.1, it is including with Oracle 18c, the range end date is included as it is with all other elements of Application Express. Now, version 5.1 also enables end-users to access their scheduling with the arrow keys on the keyboard, an update to the interface that is tiny but usefully intuitive.
In the updated Oracle, other improvements are more important and can have a greater impact on your everyday operations. These five impacts us as has been the most important.

Integration with Microsoft Active Directory
The database will authenticate and authorize users from Microsoft’s Active Directory, beginning with Oracle 18c, without any intermediate directories being needed.
This is a modern, easier way for Active Directory to integrate. Intermediary software such as Oracle Enterprise Public Participation was needed in previous versions to achieve integration.
This new function is called Centrally Managed Users (CMU) and allows you to manage Oracle application access authorization for Active Directory users. When clients are authenticated in this way, Active Directory account policies are implemented by the Oracle database.
Schema Only Accounts
In the past, as a user profile that held certain objects, a schema could be linked more closely. But this also meant that a user could log in and have control over all artifacts in the schema.
With schema accounts only, clients are still unable to login to the schema directly. These kinds of profiles can be developed without a password and, much like a normal user profile, allowances or tasks can be allocated.
Server Draining Ahead of Planned Maintenance
The database will now fail over the sessions to another service or node in a RAC area, Oracle 18c. For example, if a service is transferred to another node, the database labels existing drainage sessions so that the application is not disturbed. Any new sessions will be guided to another usable operating service.
The database uses a collection of rules to assess the end of a session and can be deleted from the server. These rules include custom SQL link checks and access limits where no request is active or operation is finished and the session has one or more recoverable states that can be reconstructed during failover.
Automatic In-Memory
As a manner to improve performance by maintaining columnar-compressed database segments in storage, Oracle In-Memory was implemented in version 12c. In 18c, Oracle promotes in-memory development by introducing Automatic In-memory (AIM). By creating a heat map of the in-memory enabled items, Target operates and creates opportunities for more commonly used applications objects. Only when there isn’t enough space to add another item to the memory store will Goal kick in.
SQL Cancel
In previous versions of Oracle, it was determined to destroy the session that was operating SQL if a database administrator tried to cancel a SQL query. This meant the session had to be removed from the database and a new connection had to be started. In Oracle 18c, the SQL statement itself can now be deleted and scaled back.
*If you want to learn Oracle DBA Training in Chennai and FITA Academy is one of the best Oracle DBA Training Institutes in Chennai. We are giving the placement assistance and also giving the advanced level of techniques of oracle DBA. We also giving Oracle Training in Coimbatore, Oracle Training in Chennai and Oracle Training in Bangalore. If you want to kick start your career with Oracle then this is the correct ace to learn about the Oracle database. *

#oracle dba training in chennai #oracle training #oracle training in chennai #oracle #oracle dba #training

Autonomous Driving Network (ADN) On Its Way

Talking about inspiration in the networking industry, nothing more than Autonomous Driving Network (ADN). You may hear about this and wondering what this is about, and does it have anything to do with autonomous driving vehicles? Your guess is right; the ADN concept is derived from or inspired by the rapid development of the autonomous driving car in recent years.

Driverless Car of the Future, the advertisement for “America’s Electric Light and Power Companies,” Saturday Evening Post, the 1950s.

The vision of autonomous driving has been around for more than 70 years. But engineers continuously make attempts to achieve the idea without too much success. The concept stayed as a fiction for a long time. In 2004, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration (DARPA) organized the Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles for teams to compete for the grand prize of $1 million. I remembered watching TV and saw those competing vehicles, behaved like driven by drunk man, had a really tough time to drive by itself. I thought that autonomous driving vision would still have a long way to go. To my surprise, the next year, 2005, Stanford University’s vehicles autonomously drove 131 miles in California’s Mojave desert without a scratch and took the $1 million Grand Challenge prize. How was that possible? Later I learned that the secret ingredient to make this possible was using the latest ML (Machine Learning) enabled AI (Artificial Intelligent ) technology.

Since then, AI technologies advanced rapidly and been implemented in all verticals. Around the 2016 time frame, the concept of Autonomous Driving Network started to emerge by combining AI and network to achieve network operational autonomy. The automation concept is nothing new in the networking industry; network operations are continually being automated here and there. But this time, ADN is beyond automating mundane tasks; it reaches a whole new level. With the help of AI technologies and other critical ingredients advancement like SDN (Software Defined Network), autonomous networking has a great chance from a vision to future reality.

In this article, we will examine some critical components of the ADN, current landscape, and factors that are important for ADN to be a success.

The Vision

At the current stage, there are different terminologies to describe ADN vision by various organizations.

Even though slightly different terminologies, the industry is moving towards some common terms and consensus called autonomous networks, e.g. TMF, ETSI, ITU-T, GSMA. The core vision includes business and network aspects. The autonomous network delivers the “hyper-loop” from business requirements all the way to network and device layers.

On the network layer, it contains the below critical aspects:

• Intent-Driven: Understand the operator’s business intent and automatically translate it into necessary network operations. The operation can be a one-time operation like disconnect a connection service or continuous operations like maintaining a specified SLA (Service Level Agreement) at the all-time.
• **Self-Discover: **Automatically discover hardware/software changes in the network and populate the changes to the necessary subsystems to maintain always-sync state.
• **Self-Config/Self-Organize: **Whenever network changes happen, automatically configure corresponding hardware/software parameters such that the network is at the pre-defined target states.
• **Self-Monitor: **Constantly monitor networks/services operation states and health conditions automatically.
• Auto-Detect: Detect network faults, abnormalities, and intrusions automatically.
• **Self-Diagnose: **Automatically conduct an inference process to figure out the root causes of issues.
• **Self-Healing: **Automatically take necessary actions to address issues and bring the networks/services back to the desired state.
• **Self-Report: **Automatically communicate with its environment and exchange necessary information.
• Automated common operational scenarios: Automatically perform operations like network planning, customer and service onboarding, network change management.

On top of those, these capabilities need to be across multiple services, multiple domains, and the entire lifecycle(TMF, 2019).

No doubt, this is the most ambitious goal that the networking industry has ever aimed at. It has been described as the “end-state” and“ultimate goal” of networking evolution. This is not just a vision on PPT, the networking industry already on the move toward the goal.

David Wang, Huawei’s Executive Director of the Board and President of Products & Solutions, said in his 2018 Ultra-Broadband Forum(UBBF) keynote speech. (David W. 2018):

“In a fully connected and intelligent era, autonomous driving is becoming a reality. Industries like automotive, aerospace, and manufacturing are modernizing and renewing themselves by introducing autonomous technologies. However, the telecom sector is facing a major structural problem: Networks are growing year by year, but OPEX is growing faster than revenue. What’s more, it takes 100 times more effort for telecom operators to maintain their networks than OTT players. Therefore, it’s imperative that telecom operators build autonomous driving networks.”

Juniper CEO Rami Rahim said in his keynote at the company’s virtual AI event: (CRN, 2020)

“The goal now is a self-driving network. The call to action is to embrace the change. We can all benefit from putting more time into higher-layer activities, like keeping distributors out of the business. The future, I truly believe, is about getting the network out of the way. It is time for the infrastructure to take a back seat to the self-driving network.”

Is This Vision Achievable?

If you asked me this question 15 years ago, my answer would be “no chance” as I could not imagine an autonomous driving vehicle was possible then. But now, the vision is not far-fetch anymore not only because of ML/AI technology rapid advancement but other key building blocks are made significant progress, just name a few key building blocks:

• software-defined networking (SDN) control
• industry-standard models and open APIs
• Real-time analytics/telemetry
• big data processing
• cross-domain orchestration
• programmable infrastructure
• cloud-native virtualized network functions (VNF)
• DevOps agile development process
• everything-as-service design paradigm
• intelligent process automation
• edge computing
• cloud infrastructure
• programing paradigm suitable for building an autonomous system . i.e., teleo-reactive programs, which is a set of reactive rules that continuously sense the environment and trigger actions whose continuous execution eventually leads the system to satisfy a goal. (Nils Nilsson, 1996)
• open-source solutions

#network-automation #autonomous-network #ai-in-network #self-driving-network #neural-networks