[ixpmanager] How is consistency maintained between the information in IXP manager and the switch configurations?

[Nick Hilliard (INEX)]

Haider,

With some effort, you can get IXP Manager to interact with Arista or 
Cumulus switches.  INEX does this to the point that the effort required 
in making this work is less than the effort required to maintain good 
quality manual configurations on each of our switches.

What this means in practice is that it takes a lot of effort to make 
automation work, but the benefit of this automation can be worth the 
effort in some circumstances.

Given some more effort, it would be possible to use IXP Manager data to 
configure other switch types.  If you're talking about a traditional 
switch vendor with a traditional switch network operating system (NOS), 
and where the switch vendor has good support for automation, then that 
effort might not be very large.  If the switch vendor doesn't provide 
good support for automation (e.g. many traditional NOS's) or the 
configuration mechanism is much more complicated (e.g. openflow), then 
this may be a good deal more difficult or even impossible to do properly.

In INEX's case, we also use vendor NOS's other than Arista EOS and 
Cumulus Linux, but have made a conscious decision not to automate these 
platforms because the effort required to make them work properly will 
not return enough value to make it worth our while.

All of this is the traditional engineering conundrum of balancing effort 
and return.

IXP Manager exports the data required to configure switches via 
vendor-neutral APIs.  At INEX, we happen to use SaltStack and NAPALM, 
but there is no reason you couldn't use another automation stack which 
can consume either JSON or YAML.  E.g. I'm sure Ansible would work fine 
and Ansible is a very high quality automation tool, but we happen to 
prefer SaltStack.

In general, our advice on automation is that IXP Manager provides a 
baseline abstraction layer which allows the operator to create their own 
tools to configure their network devices.  However before you set out to 
do anything, you will need a very clear and detailed understanding about 
how all the individual components work, along with a full overview of 
how IXPs work in general, and several years experience of operating IXPs 
at an architectural level. If you don't have all these things, then you 
are likely to run into serious problems which will cause your attempts 
to automate an IXP platform to fail.  In other words, this is not 
something that INEX can casually help out with a script here or there - 
this is advanced level IXP operations and only a tiny handful of IXPs 
around the world use automation in this way.

Nick
> Haider Ali <mailto:haiderrana45 at gmail.com>
> 19 August 2019 at 19:46
> Dear Nick,
>                  I have seen your presentation along with the video. I 
> also have seen this below link:
> https://github.com/inex/ixp-manager-provisioning
>
> So, I need AristaOS or Cumulus to use above repository for automation. 
> If I am not wrong, then INEX is not currently providing support on the 
> switch automation. So, currently, INEX is providing an IXP manager 
> which needs operator to configure switch manually and put information 
> on portal manually too. Kindly correct me if I am wrong.
>
> --------------------------------------------------
>
> Also, If I will use the same things as INEX is using, will I be able 
> to configure switch directly through IXP manager admin portal?
> The above link says that NAPALM and SaltStack should be learnt first. 
> But, after learning or become fluent with them, how will we link the 
> whole thing together and how will everything be connected to IXP 
> manager database and GUI of IXP manager? I have gathered the high 
> level view of how is the automation of switch designed? But if we want 
> to deploy automation to our switch then is there any support or 
> scripts or documentation that could help us ? So, summarizing, Are 
> there any scripts or documentation to get done with this automation so 
> that we can configure the switch through GUI of IXP manager and 
> maintain consistency?
>
> Sincerely,
> Haider Ali
>

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