The Living Source of Truth: Network Automation with Infrahub and Terraform#

Marco Martinez (Swisscom)

• Why: Network automation with a cloud-native deployment model — the closest this program comes to the PM's software-networking interests, and a realistic brownfield framing rather than a greenfield demo.
• What: A concept talk on a "living source of truth": mutable, real-time synchronization between the SOT and the actual infrastructure, instead of the classic Git/file-based desired state that drifts. The stated pain points are drift, delay, poor visibility, and manual multi-step changes across split domains (technical docs, org requirements, security policies). The stack: Infrahub as the SOT, Terraform to define/aggregate desired state, Infrahub artifacts consumed by Vidra (which applies them to a Kubernetes cluster and overwrites manual changes, keeping the cluster congruent with the SOT), and an SDC layer to push device configuration.
• How: Pipeline pattern: define desired state → aggregate desired states → create infrastructure from the data source, with each tool doing only what it does best. The deck is mostly screenshots of the Infrahub/Terraform/Vidra flow (thin on numbers), but the brownfield advice is concrete: centralize the data source, start small, fix the most time-consuming issues first, use existing tools. Goal stated as idempotent infrastructure on a reliable data source with transparency and a single pane of glass.
• Where applicable: Swisscom-scale enterprise context, but the pattern (SOT → artifacts → GitOps-style enforcement on both K8s and network devices) is broadly adoptable. Caveat: the slides are light on evaluation/results — treat this as an architecture reference, not a validated case study.