CTO Daily Dose - Network Infrastructure as Code
Transcript
hey how's it going - Steve Hauser from the CTO advisor comm with today's CTO daily dose we're gonna X a question that I don't think it's X and the mainstream pretty often tip of the cap to my good Twitter friend Meriden or Matt Oswalt who brought this up at Interop at least to the mainstage a couple of years ago and the question is can we bring C ICD or better yet infrastructure is cold to traditional networks this is a question that doesn't get x2 often because
some of the big web skill or hyper skill vendors are now in doing this so all of your ISPs where weather is AT&T Verizon CenturyLink etc starting to get into this adoption of NFV network function virtualization where they take virtualization attributes from x86 virtualization apply that to their network so that they can whirl out services faster with the abstraction with the abstraction of their network that also means that they can implement infrastructure it's cold because they're no one working with these physical devices only but these
logical constructs load balancers routers firewalls even virtual switches and they can now create versions and version controls of each configuration of each device roll that out programmatically so the question that Matt proposed a couple of years ago was can regular enterprises do this with traditional command line based API or even API driven switch Hardware top of the right rack switches can I approach this from a infrastructure as a as cold perspective can I have cold vaults and as such and create versions of configurations which limits
the number of mistakes that are made in configuring switches you know what I think it's a good question in practice is it possible well Matt worked for eBay at the time that's public knowledge and eBay was doing much of this they were taking physical switch configurations and using infrastructures cold sea icd continuous integration continued development methodologies to apply that to their operations this meant that high-level engineers so the architects could design workflows and solutions that they could then hand off to lower skilled engineers or administrators
to implement so instead of administrator going in and creating a VLAN creating ACLs that automation was created higher the stack they put in a ticket and that automation was done via the automation system and then it was then then they were using something like a jenkins to make sure that it passed basic configuration tests and then you could have somewhat of a CI CD environment I'm not gonna answer that question fully I think mat does a really great job over on his website keeping it classy
list.com pun intended on going at these development questions he's had a whole open source project in which he's contributed basically cold to allow your own environment to leverage CI CD hooks into Jenkins automation strips scripts and the like this is more or less a plug for that type of mentality when it comes to approaching network infrastructure that's it for this CTO daily dose more of a hat tip to met for pioneering a lot of this stuff Tati guys next CTO daily dose you can visit me
on the web the CTO advisor comm course you can follow me on twitter at CTO visor talk to you guys next daily dose
