Tom Merlin Eichhorn
Tom has worked for more than a decade in the networking industry, always at the bleeding edge.
From global MPLS network, to datacenter fabrics, to automation - all those things he did. Nowadays he is working as a product owner for network orchestration - shaping with his team the future of network automation toolchains at one of the leading internet exchanges.
Session
At DE-CIX, we're redefining network orchestration from first principles. Confronted with the limitations of existing systems, we set out to design a modern orchestration stack—one capable of managing a truly global network, seamlessly interfacing with a variety of upstream and downstream systems, supporting fully managed network devices, and, above all, delivering uncompromising reliability.
In this talk, we share our transformation journey—from our starting point to our vision for the future. We'll delve into the architectural choices, design principles, and decision-making frameworks that guided our approach. We’ll also explore how we rigorously test our systems and highlight the critical lessons we’ve learned—insights that are applicable to any complex network automation project.
Our solution is built on three key pillars: a tightly integrated central source of truth for configuration management, an event-driven architecture for service orchestration, and a highly scalable design that accommodates rapid global growth.
To ensure stability and correctness, we've implemented a digital twin—internally dubbed Shadow—which mirrors the production environment. This shadow stack enables us to validate and test new software iterations in parallel, minimizing risk and accelerating confidence before deployment to real hardware.