 of expertise needed to operate a diverse network is reduced with the widespread adoption of automation. Reduces operational expenses: This is one of the greatest savings that is incurred as a direct consequence of a sophisticated network automation framework. Almost every operator in the world has to invest a significant number of hours in maintaining their network. A network consisting of hundreds of pieces of network equipment is bound to have some wear and tear on its gear. Many malfunctioning or broken network equipment parts need to be identified and replaced at any point in time. This can vary from the entire equipment or server to small parts of the equipment. This part replacement needs to follow a meticulous procedure, as most of the equipment would be in a production environment. Hence, careful procedures to divert traffic and complete the task within a small window of time are important. This method can also be automated to a large extent. All the steps, from identifying faulty equipment to ordering the replacement part, can be automated. Scheduling the maintenance work and diverting traffic can also be automated. Then comes the time of actual part removal, which can be either robotic or manual. Finally, the last step of checking and traffic convergence can also be automated. Hence, if most of the steps in the process are automated, it would save precious time and cost in terms of keeping large teams for this work. As most of these tasks are recurring, it would make a lot of sense to automate this process. This would help the maintenance team in focusing on more specialized tasks rather than being engaged in such mundane activities. Similarly, software upgrades and configuration changes can be automated completely. A cloud- native approach also provides a provision for canary-based upgrades, where a small portion of traffic is first diverted to the newly upgraded software. Its stability can be monitored and then, if found to be acceptable, the entire volume of traffic can be moved to the newly updated