DevNet Is Out of This World!

DevNet is now on Mars!

OK, not really. But DevNet is now in the Mars Network Challenge game. Have you tried it? It’s great!

What got me interested was a discussion we were having around the NetDevOps trend and I jokingly inquired with the Mars Network Challenge team, “so what happens when there is a transmission to Mars to upgrade the production network, what do they do?”

Well, it seemed like my joke hit the nail on the head, and the next thing I know we’ve started working on this integration. The idea is that there is a transmission coming in to upgrade the network. In a production environment, we all know you can’t just upgrade the network anytime. What if there are bugs? What if it brings everything down? We can’t possibly afford that on Mars!

That’s where the thought came in to figure out how developers would handle this in a real environment.

So now DevNet has a base on Mars! Working on the logistics. DevNet is the latest base within the game, in level 3, called “Base Mu.”

So wondering what we do on Mars within the game? We receive a code transmission, fork off the main branch, make the changes/updates and then run the code to make sure it all goes ok. Once the testing has passed the code is then deployed to the production network.

What would you do if you, or your team, were on Mars? What challenge would you face? How would you solve it? If you haven’t already, join the game. Just go to challenge.cisco.com to sign up. And look for Base Mu to interact with DevNet!

Base Mu, Mars Network Challenge