In January 2026, GÉANT has successfully completed the deployment of its ultra-high-capacity IP backbone network, further strengthening its 30,000 km pan-European infrastructure and establishing a highly resilient and secure foundation for data-intensive scientific collaboration for many years to come.
The migration forms part of GÉANT’s IP/MPLS Routing and Switching Infrastructure Replacement project, awarded via public tender to Nokia and Nomios in 2023. The project upgraded the IP/MPLS backbone to Nokia’s high-performance IP networking technology, supporting 800G connectivity across the GÉANT network, including to the edges of Europe. The upgrade delivers significantly higher capacity, improved resilience, and enhanced security for the European Research and Education (R&E) community.
“Completing the IP migration is a significant milestone for the GÉANT network. Moving to this leading-edge platform across our Europe-wide network infrastructure ensures that the IP network remains at the technical forefront, and that we are ready to efficiently support current and future demands. I’m particularly pleased that we managed the transition based on automation, strengthening both network and operational capabilities. This success is a reflection of close collaboration between the Network and the Software teams and provides a strong foundation for continued development and future upgrades.” – Bram Peeters, GÉANT Chief Network Officer
Achieving complete IP migration without service disruption
Delivered in phases between June 2024 and January 2026, the rollout progressed from core backbone integration through to edge service migration. During this period, the team successfully migrated 1,240 services across 32 sites while keeping the live network fully operational.
Automation played a central role in this process. Deployment was carried out using the GÉANT Automation Platform (GAP), built on the open-source Workflow Orchestrator (WFO). GAP provided a framework for modelling network intent, tracking state and orchestrating changes, enabling the migration to the new platform to be delivered in a controlled, repeatable, and fully automated manner.
Throughout the process, maintaining service continuity was essential. GÉANT interconnects more than 40 NRENs across Europe, and together they serve around 50 million users and 10,000 institutions across the continent. The paradigm shift in automation combined with the phased rollout approach ensured that upgrades could be introduced without service disruption for NRENs and their connected users, while preserving the ultra-high performance required by Europe’s R&E communities.
What’s next for automation
Completing the IP migration is just a starting point. With the GAP established as the operational foundation, GÉANT can now explore capabilities that were previously out of reach. The most compelling near-term opportunity is self-service: enabling GÉANT NREN members to interact directly with network services, reducing turnaround times and giving users access to connectivity capabilities on demand.
GÉANT also remains an active contributor and an official partner to the global WFO open-source community alongside multiple research and education networking organisations, sharing code, tools, and lessons learned so that others can benefit from what was built.
Inside GÉANT’s IP network migration
Behind this milestone lies an inspiring story: one of hidden complexity, a fundamental shift in how GÉANT thinks about its network, and the cross-functional teamwork that made it all possible.
GÉANT’s network automation journey began well before the IP refresh. Since 2019, the team had been progressing through successive tools for configuration management. All in search of a more structured, repeatable approach to network operations.
In April 2023, adoption of the open-source WFO marked a turning point. Building on WFO and additional tools, the team created the GÉANT Automation Platform (GAP). But the platform itself was only part of the shift. GÉANT’s IP network migration required a different way of thinking about the network entirely.
“Instead of treating the network as a collection of numbers, values and configuration lines, we started to treat it more like a software product. That is how the GAP came to be.” – Simone Spinelli, Network Software Manager
Bringing automation and orchestration into a live network is inherently complex. While processes can be designed in advance, a live, multi-service environment always reveals hidden dependencies, operational realities, and custom configurations that lived only in the institutional knowledge of the engineers who built them.
As the IP refresh project progressed, the GÉANT team found that existing practices and service-dependent behaviours could not simply be transferred to a new platform without rethinking how the network was designed and operated. Before automation could touch any of it, the team had to clean up, restructure and document what was already there.
In practice, moving from one platform to another meant re-examining each service from first principles and rebuilding it as a clean model, rather than replicating what had existed before. Design became the primary source of truth, superseding the live network itself.
“We had to ask: what actually makes a service a service, and what do we want it to do? You cannot simply translate configuration from one vendor to another. You have to understand what each service is really meant to be.” – Karel van Klink, Network Engineer
That process demands a lot of testing and iteration. Models are continuously revised as cases emerge; workflows are tested and rebuilt. A robust lab environment, where testbed conditions are identical to the live production, was essential to building the confidence needed before operating on the live network. It allowed the team to make small mistakes, understand how changes would affect one another, and, most importantly, take the time to get things right.
Why collaboration was the real foundation
The GAP and the migration process could only succeed because various teams worked closely together. GÉANT’s software engineering, network engineering, architecture and network operations teams collaborated closely throughout design, development and deployment, while also coordinating with teams from NRENs and from Nokia and Nomios.
Software engineers focused on writing workflows and building safe, testable, and reusable automation logic. Network engineers translated services into operational intent and brought deep domain expertise. Architecture designers ensured consistency and alignment with long-term design goals, while operations teams became the primary users of the GAP, shaping its evolution through continuous feedback from day-to-day use.
“Network automation is not just a collection of scripts. At the end of the day, it is a software product, with a network domain inside it. You need people from both worlds working together to make it happen.” – Fariman Torkashvand, Senior Software Engineer
