Introduction

Growing numbers of National Research and Education Networks (NREN) are interested in automating and orchestrating their network portfolio. However, individual NRENs may be at different levels of engagement, ranging from interested but with no concrete plans as yet, to fully automated and orchestrated. Of the many commercial and open-source tools that can be used, the NREN community’s interest appears to be focused on Ansible and NSO for the automation part and on Workflow Orchestrator (WFO) for the orchestration part. Although the WFO is agnostic to the domain it is used in, this section describes, as an example that will be recognised by NREN, a set of network service products that are common to this community and can be used in combination with the Workflow Orchestrator.