Tom Beecher via NANOG wrote on 04/04/2026 23:12:
Intent Based Networking is the love child of a failed network engineer, and an MBA.
it's mostly relevant to small/medium enterprise networks, which will have different operational goals to service provider networks. As a general principle, if you try to optimise for a specific outcome on any system - e.g. improving latency/throughput to a specific destination - there's invariably a cost. In the case of intent-based networking, the cost will be complexity and routing consistency and long term maintenance. For a tiny network with simple edges, that might not be a problem. For larger networks, it probably will be. Worse still, undoing complex networking configuration is a complex operation in its own right and often leads to unexpected service loss. Any fool can build a complex network, but it takes skill to create a simple one. The fact that some larger networks use intent-based networking doesn't change this calculus. Nick