[ixpmanager] Newer version of "supported switchs list" on IXP-Manager

[Barry O'Donovan (INEX)]

Hi Douglas,

Douglas Fischer via ixpmanager wrote on 01/02/2023 19:02:
> I looked in the official IXPManager documentation and I didn't find 
> explicit references about which switch platforms are supported in 
> integrations and automations.
> 
> I also had a quick look on github for the IXP Manager Provision 
> Templates, but could only find references to Arista-EOS and Cumulus.

Correct. As it happens at INEX we still use these platforms and so we
specifically have had no requirements to develop automation for other
platforms.

> The most explicit reference in public documentation that I could find
> was in the PDF of the APRICOT presentation on page 11. But it's been
> 5 years since then. Which makes me believe that probably new
> platforms could have been added.

There's a number of presentations linked from this page which include 
videos also:

https://www.ixpmanager.org/support/talks

> Would it be possible to get any update on this?

There's no specific update really. The IXP Manager project doesn't have 
plans to create specific automation tooling for multiple vendors and 
platforms. I'm afraid we just don't have the resources for that kind of 
thing.

Automation is also a very much layered framework where you can have 
different choices at each level:

- what is your source of truth? (for us it's IXP Manager)
- how do you want your data presented? (yaml / json / ...)
- what language / templating engine are you comfortable with? (for us 
that's Jinja)
- are you going to use SaltStack / Chef / Puppet / Ansible / ... ? (for 
us that's SaltStack)
- do you need an abstraction layer? I.e. we use Naplam for Arista but we 
can run the Salt minion directly on Cumulus
- and what's your target platform?

You can see the problem here if we were to try and provide / dictate 
approaches.


So we made a practical workable decision - what we have done is provided 
production quality automation tooling for two platforms. What's useful 
with these is there's two switch types covered:

1) Arista and so a Cisco-like environment potentially similar to OcNOS.
2) Cumulus and so a Linux-based NOS potentially similar to SONiC.

 From our published implementations we hope people can use them as 
templates to solve their own automation needs.

There was also some talk recently on this mailing list re an approach 
with Ansible - 
https://www.inex.ie/pipermail/ixpmanager/2022-December/003566.html


> We are considering adopting IXP-Manager for a small IXP initiative 
> that we have. But the idea at first would be to use white-label 
> switches with SONiC, or IP-Infusion's OCNOS v6 which is what the 
> switches that were made available to the project are running.

Note re switches: see 
https://www.ixpmanager.org/media/2017/201710-ripe75.pdf slide 21 re 
Idempotent Atomic Session-Based Configuration Merge - not all switches 
will support automation so important to check this before you start.

> A complementary suggestion would be to add the predominant platform 
> in the IXP network to the user-list 

It's a good suggestion and one we'll see if we can implement. However, 
my suspicion is that the vast majority of IXPs - especially smaller ones 
- have not gone down the automation route. In many cases the 
cost/benefit of the devops effort may simple not be worth it.


We also fixed that broken link - thanks for letting us know!

  - Barry





> P.S.: I just used GH issues to get in touch because the link " 
> https://www.ixpmanager.org/support/mailing-list " in on 404. My bad!
>  I have not seen the other link to mailing-lists on the top of the 
> page... Sorry! image.png
> 
> -- Douglas Fernando Fischer Engº de Controle e Automação
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________ INEX IXP Manager 
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> 


-- 

Kind regards,
Barry O'Donovan
Consultant

For and on behalf of INEX

https://www.inex.ie/support/
+353 1 531 3339