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5. Building a state comparison engine: intent vs reality at scale
Once you accept that your network is a set of overlapping, imperfect stories about reality, the next logical question is:
How do we keep those stories aligned without burning human eyes on show commands all day?
You don’t do it with another dashboard.
You do it with a state comparison engine.
Think of it as a dedicated service whose only job is to ask continuously:
“Given what we said the network should be, what does the network claim to be, and where do those two disagree?”
Not at the level of “is this interface up”, but at the level of intent, config, control-plane, and data-plane.
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