The Evolution of Network Configuration: A Tale of Two Campuses

Studying network configuration evolution can improve the understanding of the evolving complexity of networks and can be helpful in making network configuration less error-prone. Unfortunately, the nature of changes that operators make to network configuration is poorly understood. Towards improving the understanding, the authors examine and analyze five years of router, switch, and firewall configurations from two large campus networks using the logs from version control systems used to store the configurations. They study how network configuration is distributed across different network operations tasks and how the configuration for each task evolves over time, for different types of devices and for different locations in the network.