SDN Isn’t Magic – It’s Collaboration with Core Networking at Heart
Since 2015 when first question I asked from my NOC team are they getting MAC on particular VLAN, I learn something new about networks/IT. First time I heard about SDN from my teacher he was a Cisco TAC Engineer knowing very little the first task assigned to us was find out how ansible works and what is the use case of it. We took two weeks to understand it and then successfully used it to configure a Router in our lab environment, We were too happy you can imagine a network Engineer doing configuration without a cli is kind of magic for us. Afterwards in same training we deployed OpenStack opensource code using blue stack and use it most of services to deploy a image and then use it as router with power of Linux, anyhow training finished and we did our all lab testing and it was end of SDN for us as we didn't get any more time for RND and don't have any solution and that time which were based on SDN in our data centers.
Fast forward in 2019 first time I used SDN base solution that was deployed by Cisco, Cisco ACI and was using it so we don't need to login to switches and all policy were still pushing to it by just clicks quite fascinated and quick for network Engineer at that time I knew there are API calls and all this is done with collaboration of a network Engineer and software Engineer for Network logic they discussed with Network team and do deployed the front end or GUI developer use their skills to create a solution in short there are different teams when they worked together the create these solution.
Recently I need to do a process automatically from one of over core device and it was Linux base solution so I again re-visit my skills of Linux and use it to do the process automatically also I used Ansible for some configuration by using the scripts as last time I did the same so it was easy for me and I did it quickly but I was not happy this time and not much excited so I decided to go one step ahead use a front end GUI and way that I should not need to login to my Linux machine to run the ansible playbook. As during all that time i had colleagues who worked in DevOps i knew Jenkins can help me to run a script by creating the pipelines i used ChatGPT and google to set the environment and within 2 days i was able to successful run my first job just by clicking on via running a Jenkins pipeline created locally i didn't stop here as still i had the visibility of code in Jenkins i want to have feeling of a solution where user only click and task should be completed. I took another step and integrate my Jenkins pipeline with nodejs which one of my developer friend told me to use as front end and backend for a user who can have a Portal for this after spending two days on it i did it and run my first job from a portal by just adding the values and it was configured on my network devices and it was done without logging to the network device.
Point which I want to make is that all Software define solution are built by a team effort with strong networking concepts you can be the part of that team and no Software define Network can be design or deployed without a network Engineer at the end of the day basic concept of networks are there yes you can automate and visualize the changes but at the end of the VLAN will be VLAN and BGP will be BGP.
Flow use for Configuration
Hybrid Data Center Network & Security Operations and Planning
Happy Learning
The limit is the sky.
Comments