DevOps workflow for networking

Thu Aug 24 15:14:04 UTC 2017

Related I am working on https://github.com/lathama/Adynaton and hope to get
parts into the Python Standard Library with help from some peers. Anyone
who wants to help out ping me off list.

On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 1:08 PM, Pete Lumbis <alumbis at gmail.com> wrote:

> Awesome!
>
> I gave a presentation on CI/CD for networking last year at the Interop
> conference; my demo was based on Gitlab
> https://gitlab.com/plumbis/cumulus-ci-cd/
>
> I use Behave for testing, but it is just a front end for python code under
> the hood to actually validate that everything is doing what it's supposed
> to be doing.
>
> I did a little bit of work to try and get Ansible to do checking and
> validation in a playbook, but since Ansible isn't really a programming
> language it felt like putting a square peg in a round hole. I would
> recommend an actual programming language or testing frame work.
>
> Likely the biggest challenge you'll encounter is a lack of features in
> vendor VMs and the fact you can't change interface names. Generally, in
> production, we don't have "eth1, eth2, eth3" as the cabled up interfaces,
> so you end up needing to maintain two sets of configs (prod and test) or
> something to modify production configs on the fly, both of which are crummy
> options.
>
> From a workflow perspective, you can treat configuration like code and run
> full test suites when pull requests are issued and then use the test
> results as the basis for a change review meeting. Don't let humans talk
> about changes that we already know won't work.
>
> Glad to hear about other people seriously considering CI/CD in the network
> space, good luck!
>
> -Pete
>
> On Wed, Aug 9, 2017 at 8:52 PM, Kasper Adel <karim.adel at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > We are pretty new to those new-age network orchestrators and automation,
> >
> > I am curious to ask what everyone is the community is doing? sorry for
> such
> > a long and broad question.
> >
> > What is your workflow? What tools are your teams using? What is working
> > what is not? What do you really like and what do you need to improve? How
> > mature do you think your process is? etc etc
> >
> > Wanted to ask and see what approaches the many different teams here are
> > taking!
> >
> > We are going to start working from a GitLab based workflow.
> >
> > Projects are created, issues entered and developed with a gitflow
> branching
> > strategy.
> >
> > GitLab CI pipelines run package loadings and run tests inside a lab.
> >
> > Tests are usually python unit tests that are run to do both functional
> and
> > service creation, modification and removal tests.
> >
> > For unit testing we typically use python libraries to open transactions
> to
> > do the service modifications (along with functional tests) against
> physical
> > lab devices.
> >
> > For our prod deployment we leverage 'push on green' and gating to push
> > package changes to prod devices.
> >
> > Thanks
> >
>

-- 
- Andrew "lathama" Latham lathama at gmail.com http://lathama.com
<http://lathama.org> -