PreConfig: A Pretrained Model for Automating Network Configuration

Abstract

Manual network configuration automation (NCA) tools face significant challenges in versatility and flexibility due to their reliance on extensive domain expertise and manual design, limiting their adaptability to diverse scenarios and complex application needs. This paper introduces PreConfig, an innovative NCA tool that leverages a pretrained language model for automating network configuration tasks. PreConfig is designed to address the complexity and variety of NCA tasks by framing them as text-to-text transformation problems, thus unifying the tasks of configuration generation, translation, and analysis under a single, versatile model. Our approach overcomes existing tools' limitations by utilizing advances in natural language processing to automatically comprehend and generate network configurations without extensive manual re-engineering. We confront the challenges of integrating domain-specific knowledge into pretrained models and the scarcity of supervision data in the network configuration field. Our solution involves constructing a specialized corpus and further pretraining on network configuration data, coupled with a novel data mining technique for generating task supervision data. The proposed model demonstrates robustness in configuration generation, translation, and analysis, outperforming conventional tools in handling complex networking environments. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of PreConfig, establishing a new direction for automating network configuration tasks with pretrained language models.