Introduction to Extreme Fabric Automation

Extreme Fabric Automation (EFA) is a micro-services-based scalable automation application.

EFA orchestrates the following:

The life cycle of
- Small Data Center (small DC) fabrics based on Non-Clos topology
- 3- or 5-stage IP Clos Fabric
Tenant-aware Layer 2 and Layer 3 networks
Integration with ecosystems that support HCI (Hyper Convergence Infrastructure) Service
- VMware vCenter
- OpenStack
- Microsoft Hyper-V

The key tenets of this orchestration are as follows:

Conformance to the EVD (Extreme Validated Design) for IP Fabrics: https://www.extremenetworks.com/resources/extreme-validated-design/extreme-ip-Fabric-architecture/
Speed of provisioning
Seamless installation and deployment mechanism
High in performance, low in resource utilization, with minimal touch points
Programmable containerized services, through an industry-standard Open API (https://www.openapis.org/)-based programmable interface
Easy-to-use CLI commands to manage devices in an IP Fabric and in Tenant networks

EFA consists of core containerized services that interact with each other and with other infrastructure services to provide the core functions of IP Fabric automation.


Asset Service	Provides the secure credential store and deep discovery of physical and logical assets of the managed devices, and publishes the asset refresh or change events to other services.
Fabric Service	Helps orchestrate and visualize the BGP and EVPN-based 3- and 5-stage Clos networks.
Tenant Service	Helps manage the Tenants, Tenant Networks, and end points, fully leveraging the knowledge of assets and the underlying fabric.
Inventory Service	Inventory Service is a REST layer on top of device inventory details, with the ability to filter data based on certain fields. Inventory Service securely stores device credentials in encrypted form and makes them available to different components, such as Fabric Services and the Tenant App.

The following figure illustrates the application functionality in provisioning and discovery.