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Autonomicon Glossary

A glossary of terms used by and within NAF. If you'd like to contribute to, or see revisions to some of these terms, discussion occurs in Network Automation Forum Slack in channel #doc-autonomicon.

Automation

Software or other tooling designed to complete a task with no human intervention

Idempotent

A process or task that can be run multiple times and always reach the desired outcome

Oh Crap to All Clear

A phrase, coined by Jeremy Schulman, that describes the time and effort required to move from discovery of a problem to either fixing it or conclusively determined that it has cleared on its own.

Orchestration

Software or other tooling designed to complete a series of tasks with no human intervention in a workflow based on a defined set of inputs

System of Origin (SoO)

The system that users interact with to create new data points. It is sometimes the SoR, but is always tightly coupled to the business process that manages the data within a domain.

System of Record (SoR)

This is the primary reference point that is authoritative for a particular data domain.

Source of Truth (SOT)

The single aggregated state representing holistic network automation. Often integrates or incorporates SoR data and offers additional relationships1 between data across data domains.

Workflow

A series of ordered tasks, with potentially conditional execution, designed to complete a work process with minimal or no human intervention

  1. Such as relationship with interfaces and IP addresses that may not exist in a single SoR. ↩