A talk I gave at the Cisco Partner DC-SEVT around what skills Network Engineers need as the world moves to SDN, DevOps, and CI/CD.

1. Next Generation
Network Developer
Skills
Kyle Mestery
Principal Engineer, Office of the Cloud CTO, Cisco
S

2. My
background
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Principal Engineer, Office of the
Cloud CTO
•
•
Chief OpenStack Architect
OpenStack Neutron Core Team
Member
•
•
•
Open vSwitch VXLAN contribution
Modular Layer 2 (ML2) Plugin
OpenDaylight OVSDB Contributor
•
•
OpenDaylight MechanismDriver for ML2
Open vSwitch Contributor
•
•
•
VXLAN
Flow-based tunneling
libvirt contributor
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Open vSwitch Support
•
Live migration support for OVS

4. The Frontier of Networking
Existing
New
S
CLIs
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APIs
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Closed Source
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Open Source
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Vendor Lead
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Customer Lead
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Classic Network
Appliances
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Network Function
Virtualization (NFV)

5. Components of the New
Frontier

6. All of This Leads Us To …
Software Defined
Networking
DevOps
DevOps Defined
Networking

7. People Like SDN Because
SDN promises to make networks:
1. Dynamically provisioned
2. Provide scalable capacity
3. Provide abstracted HW complexity
4. Bandwidth on demand

8. Arming Yourself To Explore This
New Frontier
Transformation of Network
Engineer
1. Programming skills
2. Tools
3. Getting your hands dirty

9. From Engineer to Developer

10. Programming Skills
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11. 5 Reasons Why You Should
Learn Basic Programming
1. You’re already programming, even if you don’t know it
2. Everything has an API
3. It’s all about the applications
4. Prototypes
5. New skills, new opportunities

12. It’s All About the Apps

13. Top 10 Languages on
github.com
Rank
Language
# of Repositories Created
1
JavaScript
264131
2
Ruby
218812
3
Java
157618
4
PHP
114384
5
Python
95002
6
C++
78327
7
C
67706
8
Objective-C
36344
9
C#
32170
10
Shell
28561
[1] As of August, 2013: http://adambard.com/blog/top-github-languages-for-2013-so-far/

14. What are Open Source
Networking Projects Written
In?
Project
Primary Language Written In
Open vSwitch
C
OpenDaylight
Java
Floodlight
Java
Ryu
Python
OpenStack
Python
CloudStack
Java
OpenContrail
C++

15. What Languages To Learn
S Focus on languages for the APIs you are using
S Java
S Python
S Maybe C and/or C++

16. Tools of the Trade
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17. IRC (Internet Relay Chat)
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Open Source projects all use
IRC
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Recommended channels in
Open Source networking:
S #openstack-neutron
S #opendaylight
S #opendaylight-ovsdb
S #openvswitch

18. Mailing Lists
S
Open Source projects all use
mailing lists for communication
S Documents things in the
archives
S Allows searching for new
participants

19. git
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Source code management tool
of choice
S github is used to share code
S Most projects use github
S If github is not used, the
projects likely have their
own git server
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Get a github ID
S https://github.com/

20. Wikis
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All Open Source projects have
Wikis
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Provide an easy way to share
information
S Warning: Information can get
stale
S Warning: Humans don’t like
correcting stale information
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An easy way for new contributors
to help is to update wikis!

21. Getting your hands dirty
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22. Linux
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The kernel of choice in the Open Source
world
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KVM or Xen for virtualization
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OpenStack
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CloudStack
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Prevalent in IaaS world
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Amazon AWS
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Rackspace
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Popular Switch Operating System
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Cisco NX-OS
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Arista EOS
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Cumulus Linux

23. Datacenter On Your Laptop

24. Open vSwitch
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Open vSwitch is an Open Source
extensible virtual switch
S Licensed under the Apache
2.0 and GPL licenses
S
Supports a wide array of
protocols
S Netflow
S sFlow
S SPAN
S RSPAN
S CLI
S LACP

25. Open vSwitch Specifics
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Security
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Overlay network building block
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Monitoring
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Used by many virtualization and
IaaS platforms
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QoS
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Kernel module is upstream
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Many Linux platforms
supported
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Automated Control

26. Sample Open vSwitch Commands

27. OpenDaylight
OpenDaylight’s mission is to
facilitate a community-led, industrysupported open source
platform, including code and
architecture, to accelerate adoption
of Software-Defined Networking
and Network Functions
Virtualization.

28. OpenDaylight Project Framework

29. OpenDaylight “Hydrogen” Release

30. OpenDaylight GUI

31. OpenStack
To produce the ubiquitous open
source cloud computing platform
that will meet the needs of public
and private cloud providers
regardless of size, by being simple
to implement and massively
scalable.

32. OpenStack Official Programs
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Compute (Nova)
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Orchestration (Heat)
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Quality Assurance (QA)
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Object Storage (Swift)
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Database Service (Trove)
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Deployment (TripleO)
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Image Service (Glance)
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Bare Metal (Ironic)
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Devstack (DevStack)
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Identity (Keystone)
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Queue Service (Marconi)
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Release cycle management
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Dashboard (Horizon)
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Networking (Neutron)
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Block Storage (Cinder)
Telemetry (Ceilometer)
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Data processing
(Savanna)
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Common Libraries (Oslo)
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Infrastructure
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Documentation

33. OpenStack CLI: Boot a VM

34. OpenStack CLI: List VMs

35. OpenStack Horizon GUI

36. devstack
DevStack’s mission is to provide
and maintain tools used for the
installation of the central
OpenStack services from source
(git repository master, or specific
branches) suitable for development
and operational testing. It also
demonstrates and documents
examples of configuring and
running services as well as
command line client usage.

37. devstack: local.conf example

38. Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt

39. Where Does This Lead Us?

40. Building Blocks Are Here
Applications!
Yay to applications!
Automation
DevOps at scale!
OpenDaylight
OpenStack or CloudStack or Eucalyptus
or oVirt
Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc.)
Xen or KVM
SDN for the
masses!
IaaS for the
masses!
At the heart of all of
this …

41. References
S VirtualBox
S stackforge
S OpenStack
S devstack
S OpenDaylight
S Puppet Labs
S Open vSwitch
S Chef
S Freenode
S Ansible
S Github
S Saltstack

42. References Cont.
S Brent Salisbury’s Blog:
S http://networkstatic.net/
S Scott Lowe’s Blog:
S http://blog.scottlowe.org/
S Kyle Mestery’s Blog:
S http://www.siliconloons.com/