Cumulus Linux — The Foundation of OpenStack Automation

OpenStack is the de facto open source orchestration standard for modern cloud infrastructure. The foundational components stitch together compute, storage and, of course, networking. Linked together, these components are used for both public and private clouds all around the world. Cumulus Networks naturally fits into this ecosystem, and Cumulus Linux is the universal underlay or enabler for such deployments.

Solution Guide

Over the past two quarters, Cumulus Networks has shared solution guides for our 2.5.x releases. In this post we’re going to dive into how you can automate a proof-of-concept OpenStack deployment. For those who learn by watching, a recent video from the OpenStack Vancouver (May 2015) summit event may be helpful; the presentation summarizes all of the behind-the-scenes tasks described below.

Prerequisites

Our goal is to set up an end-to-end OpenStack deployment with the fewest interactive steps, making it as unattended as possible, and ideally taking no more than 20 minutes. The configuration scope includes all networking, server and storage components.

To facilitate a consistent architecture, we’ve imposed a few basic cabling and physical requirements. To make the PoC easy to implement, we assume no external Internet access is available — the entire solution is autonomous with all prerequisites present or cached.

For our first Continue reading

OCP Summit 2015: Open Networking as the Norm

Open Networking Thrives at the 2015 OCP Summit

A few weeks ago I passed my 2 year work anniversary at Cumulus Networks. In this short amount of time we’ve helped change the networking industry as a whole. This statement may seem a bit bold, but I feel it’s justified and we’ve all earned it. I’ll attempt to back this up with a few anecdotes collected along the journey — the men and women of Cumulus Networks, along with our great partners and customers, deserve the credit here.

When I was first hired, our on-boarding process was a bit … unconventional to say the least. The first week included JR (our CEO and cofounder) taking a headshot photo for the website (at that time it was just a Brady Bunch collage of pictures, not much else) and being issued a switch for “jailbreaking.” Now jailbreaking is a bit of an extreme term, but in these dark days before open networking, the software and hardware for networks were tightly coupled together. Items such as debugging headers, a soldering iron, and even a bit of swearing were all part of the installation process on a fresh hardware platform. Fast forward to today, Continue reading