Cisco WAN Automation Engine
The WAN Automation Engine (WAE) is a software tool that provides multivendor and multilayer visibility and analysis for service provider and large enterprise networks. It plays a critical role in understanding and abstracting how traffic moves through the network and can simplify traffic engineering mechanisms such as RSVP-TE LSPs and Segment Routing policies.
The WAE server builds an abstracted model of the IP/MPLS network that contains the topology, traffic and state. The WAE network model includes the multivendor devices that participate in the IGP (OSPF or IS-IS) and can be extended to include the DWDM topology. This model is represented on the server in YANG.
Network planning, engineering and operations can use the WAE Design planning application to evaluate WAE models, running simulation and optimization tools offline. Other applications and scripts can also use the WAE APIs to evaluate the model on the server engine, enabling near real-time automation.
WAE for Network Planning
WAE Design is a planning tool that runs on your desktop. In WAE Design you can retrieve a network model from the server and view the topology. You can quickly filter and drill down, simulate “what if“ scenarios and run tools to evaluate potential risks, find optimal paths/IGP metrics or suggest changes in capacity.
WAE for Network Automation
The WAE engine on the server is not a controller. The WAE engine can be asked to evaluate a scenario or run an optimization via the APIs and WAE will return a response based on the model it has.
WAE and the Network Services Orchestrator (NSO)
NSO is the preferred method to configure the network, as NSO has the ability to provide service abstraction and multivendor device configuration. WAE compliments NSO with a network abstraction accessible via NETCONF/RESTCONF APIs that are very similar in style to those provided by NSO. An NSO service that wants information from WAE need only query the API.
For more information on NSO, see the NSO DevNet portal
WAE and SR-PCE
SR-PCE is Cisco's Path Computation Element (PCE). SR-PCE can receive the BGP-Link State (BGP-LS) topology and based on this topology it can compute paths for Segment Routing policies and RSVP-TE tunnel. SR-PCE can establish PCEP communication with the routers and also has a northbound REST interface. WAE can establish a REST session with SR-PCE to get live topology and LSP updates as SR-PCE gets them. This enables the WAE model to be in-sync with the current network state.
dCloud Demos
To see WAE and SR-PCE in action, see the demos on dCloud.cisco.com