Cisco and Ansible Team up to Demonstrate How to Manage Cloud-Scale Networks

We’ve talked about how Cisco is helping network operators leverage the tools of the data center to better manage the network. To show a real world example of this a few weeks back Cisco and Ansible teamed up for SDx Demo Friday. We showed how to manage large-scale networks using Cisco IOS XR application hosting infrastructure and Ansible version 2.2.

Cisco technical marketing engineer, Akshat Sharma, presented a demo to manage large-scale networks by using tools and insights pioneered in the datacenter to simplify network management.

The demonstration focuses on a real-world use case – that of a network operations professional responding to an alert. An issue is causing service degradation and is affecting a large number of routers.

Using the application hosting infrastructure available on IOS XR 6.1.1 and linux tools like iPerf he quickly troubleshoots the issue and resolves it on a pair of routers.

Next, Akshat uses Ansible, a tool that application and infrastructure owners use to orchestrate changes in the data center, and a set of playbooks developed by Cisco to manage network devices, to remediate the issue across a fleet of routers automatically to save time and reduce errors.

To see the full demonstration check out the demo here on SDx Demo Friday and you will see how:

• Large scale networks require investment in DevOps workflows for efficient management
• Integration for Linux tools and support for containers is imperative
• Support for config management tools, such Ansible, is a pre-requisite for large scale deployments

Other resources on Application Hosting and hands-on resources are at @xrdocs on github. To learn more about using Ansible with Cisco IOS XR 6.1.1 see Cisco’s tutorial on github.

Besides the demo we’ve also got a webinar. Akshat recently co-hosted a Cisco Knowledge Network webinar on Cloud Scale Application Hosting, providing a primer on how Cisco IOS XR Application Hosting can benefit you.

What do you think? We’d love to hear from you on what you want for future demonstrations. Give your comments on this SDx Demo Friday Event and about our new IOS XR 6.1.1 Application Hosting software innovations.

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