Using Vagrant with CumulusVX
Cumulus recently announced their CumulusVX platform, which is a virtualized instance of their operating system typically found on network switches. They’ve provided a few options to run this, and in this blog post, I’ll be exploring the use of Vagrant to set up a topology with Cumulus virtual devices.
Brief Review of Vagrant
In software development, there is a very crucial need to consistently and repeatably set up development and test environments. We’ve had the “but it worked on my laptop” problem for a while, and anything to simplify the environment set up and ensure that everyone is on the same page will help prevent it.
Vagrant is a tool aimed at doing exactly this. By providing a simple CLI interface on top of your favorite hypervisor (i.e. Virtualbox) you can distribute Vagrantfiles, which are essentially smally Ruby scripts, and they provide the logic needed to set up the environment the way you want it. In addition, it can call external automation tools like Ansible and Puppet to go one step further, and actually interact with the operating system itself to perform tasks like installing and configuring software.
What we get out of a tool like Vagrant is a Continue reading
Using Vagrant with CumulusVX
Cumulus recently announced their CumulusVX platform, which is a virtualized instance of their operating system typically found on network switches. They’ve provided a few options to run this, and in this blog post, I’ll be exploring the use of Vagrant to set up a topology with Cumulus virtual devices.
Brief Review of Vagrant
In software development, there is a very crucial need to consistently and repeatably set up development and test environments. We’ve had the “but it worked on my laptop” problem for a while, and anything to simplify the environment set up and ensure that everyone is on the same page will help prevent it.
Vagrant is a tool aimed at doing exactly this. By providing a simple CLI interface on top of your favorite hypervisor (i.e. Virtualbox) you can distribute Vagrantfiles, which are essentially smally Ruby scripts, and they provide the logic needed to set up the environment the way you want it. In addition, it can call external automation tools like Ansible and Puppet to go one step further, and actually interact with the operating system itself to perform tasks like installing and configuring software.
What we get out of a tool like Vagrant is a Continue reading
Cisco Switch Sales Rebound Under New CEO
Chuck Robbins' first earnings report is a good one.
Adtran Stakes a Claim on NFV Turf
Adtran assures us it isn't stuck in telecom's old world.
IT/IT: The Future of Network Engineering
Two different articles caught my attention this last week. They may not seem to be interrelated, but given my “pattern making mind,” I always seem to find connections. The first is an article from Network Computing discussing the future of network engineering skill sets.
Patrick Hubbard goes on to talk about the hand grenade John Chambers left in the room 3 that there would be major mergers, failures, and acquisitions in the next twenty years, leaving the IT industry a very different place. The takeaway? That individual engineers need to “up their game,” learning new technologies faster, hitting the books and the labs on a more regular basis. Given the view in the industry of Cisco as a “safe harbor” for IT skills, this is something of a hand grenade in the room, coming from Chambers at Cisco Live.
The second article predicts a hand grenade, as well, though of a Continue reading
See Juniper Networks’ New SDxCentral Digs
Find the info you need to start transforming your legacy network into an open, automated, agile, and secure infrastructure that address your toughest networking challenges.
Why My Water Droplet Is Better Than Your Hadoop Cluster
We’ve had computation using slime mold and soap film, now we have computation using water droplets. Stanford bioengineers have built a “fully functioning computer that runs like clockwork - but instead of electrons, it operates using the movement of tiny magnetised water droplets.”
By changing the layout of the bars on the chip it's possible to make all the universal logic gates. And any Boolean logic circuit can be built by moving the little magnetic droplets around. Currently the chips are about half the size of a postage stamp and the droplets are smaller than poppy seeds.
What all this means I'm not sure, but pavo6503 has a comment that helps understand what's going on:
Logic gates pass high and low states. Since they plan to use drops of water as carriers and the substances in those drops to determine what the high/low state is they could hypothetically make a filter that sorts drops of water containing 1 to many chemicals. Pure water passes through unchanged. water with say, oil in it, passes to another container, water with alcohol to another. A "chip" with this setup could be used to purify water where there are many contaminants you want separated.
Getting to Know Robyn Bergeron, Community Architect at Ansible
Knowing the members of our Ansible community is important to us, and we want you to get to know the members of our team in (and outside of!) the Ansible office. Stay tuned to the blog to learn more about the people who are helping to bring Ansible to life.
This week we're happy to introduce you to Robyn Bergeron, who recently joined Ansible as a Community Architect. Her prior role was as a Developer Advocate at Elastic, where she worked closely with the ELK stack community. And many of us at Ansible know her from her days at Red Hat, where she was the Fedora Project Leader -- a role that her illustrious boss once himself had.
What’s your role at Ansible?
Open source communities work best when contributors are empowered and enabled to make things happen; the easier it is to contribute, the more likely they’ll continue to do so, and enjoy doing it. As a community architect, it’s my job to ensure that contributors, both long-time and new, are connected with the opportunities, ideas, tools, and people to make great things happen in the Ansible community, with minimal bureaucracy.
A good deal of my focus will Continue reading