1. Automating Your Network with Ansible and Cisco NSO Enable Continuous Integration and Deployment with Zero Downtime
John Malzahn – Host, Senior Manager, Cloud and Virtualization Solutions Marketing, Cisco Systems
Carl Moberg – Technical Director, Cisco Systems
Andrius Benokraitis – Principal Product Manager, Networking, Ansible by Red Hat
Ian Hood – Chief Technologist, Global Telco, Red Hat
October 12, 2017

2. Today’s Presenters John Malzahn
Senior Manager, Cloud and Virtualization Solutions Marketing
Andrius Benokraitis Principal Product Manager, Networking
Carl Moberg
Technology Director, Cloud and Virtualization Group
Ian Hood
Chief Technologist Global Telco
Cisco Systems
Ansible by Red Hat
Cisco Systems
Red Hat

3. Agenda 1 2 3 4 5 Red Hat Ansible Automation
Cisco NSO Lifecycle Orchestration 3
Better Together: Ansible and Cisco NSO 4
Demo 5
Wrap-up

4. Automation with Ansible

5. No matter where you are on your path to digital transformation, you can make an impact with automation.
We recognize you’re all on different parts of the path to Digital Transformation
When looking at all the ways to modernization, automation is the most effective way to make an impact
Highest return on investment in IT management
An open approach to automation can transform your organization - helping modernize IT and deploy better applications faster

6. What is your automation strategy?
How are you thinking about management?
What is your automation strategy?
We have hit the tipping point of exponential chaos - We’re trying to manage the unmanageable
We need a change in mentality - a paradigm shift
The pace of innovation pace is unprecedented
Not enough anymore to ask, “Do you have a management strategy?” Now we need to ask, “What is your automation strategy?”
How else can you address:
Accelerating IT demands
Increasing self-service expectations
Compliance/Security
Automation is only way anyone can have any chance of sanely managing a modern IT environment.
Points Tim Yeaton added here in his delivery:
Most companies knew they had to shift their thinking to this because of the advent of the cloud management platforms

7. Everyone is talking about automation
That is why everyone is talking about automation today
Unless you have automation, managing the environments that truly drive innovation will be impossible
Cloud is impossible without automation
Digital Transformation will simply not happen without automation

8. ANSIBLE IS THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE
BUSINESS
DEV
QA/SECURITY
IT OPERATIONS
Ansible is the Lingua Franca of the enterprise
Apple / RH IT story
Use a language to communicate and facilitate between dev and ops
Becomes fact based or system of record once written in a Playbook

9. Engine - helps you automate Tower - enables you to operationalize it
RED HAT ANSIBLE TOWER
Scale + operationalize your automation
CONTROL
KNOWLEDGE
DELEGATION
RED HAT ANSIBLE ENGINE
Support for your Ansible automation
SIMPLE
POWERFUL
AGENTLESS
Ansible Tower customers can add an Ansible Engine subscription to their Ansible Tower subscription at any time to gain support for the underlying Ansible automation that powers Ansible Tower
Engine - helps you automate
Tower - enables you to operationalize it
Now please help me welcome
Peter Sprygada, who I like to call my Ansible Networking CTO, who will discuss now Ansible is changing the game in networking.
FUELED BY AN INNOVATIVE OPEN SOURCE COMMUNITY

10. Cisco NSO The Industry Leading Network Automation & Orchestration Platform

11. Cisco NSO – The Network API
Automation
Frameworks
Network
Engineers
No hard-coded assumptions about:
Network services
Network architecture
Network devices
YANG-based data store driving the north- and southbound interfaces
Southbound multi-protocol support including NETCONF, REST, CLI, SNMP
Massively scalable architecture deployed in networks with 100k+ devices
Northbound: REST, NETCONF, JSON-RPC, Java, Python, Erlang, CLI, Web UI
Cisco NSO
Southbound: 70+ vendors across physical and virtual networks
Metro and Access
WAN
Data Center
CPE

12. Monolithic Versioning
Network Device Stack
Single entry point for configuration, operations
Features
Change Rate
CLI/NETCONF/etc with supporting infrastructure including config master db for inflight changes
High, depends on location in network and service:
Day0/1 on install
Day N for services
Monolithic Versioning
Config Management
In-memory and/or artifacts on disk complicated updates through micro-orchestration
Application Config
Applications
Proprietary applications, lifecycle as integrated product
Low, as part of maintenance or security OS
Non-mainstream (platform HAL, kernel patches, etc), lifecycle as integrated product

13. Subscription-based APIs
From Devices (ConfD)…
Challenges:
Many different APIs and interfaces to the north
Heterogenous environment to the south
One operation may lead to many activities
Solution includes:
APIs and interfaces driven by models
Transaction-engine with flexible rollback
CLI
SNMP
NETCONF
REST
ConfD
Data Models
Data Models
CDB
Subscription-based APIs
A Mess (OS, Apps)

14. …to Networks (NSO)
Challenges are very similar, but larger scale, more distributed
So we added some more to the solution:
Layered models for abstraction
Mapping between layers
Adapters for talking different protocols
CLI
SNMP
NETCONF
REST
NSO
ServiceModels
CDB
Device
Models
NED
NED
NED
NED
A Mess (the Network)

15. So Here We Are – Cisco NSO
Network Engineering
Ops and Provisioning
Service Developers
Model-driven end-to-end service lifecycle and customer experience in focus
Seamless integration with existing and future OSS/BSS environment
Loosely-coupled and modular architecture leveraging open APIs and standard protocols
Orchestration across multi-domain and multi-layer for centralized policy and services across entire network
NSO
Service Manager
Device Manager
Package
Manager
CDB
Device Abstraction
ESC (VNFM)
NED
NED
NED
VNF Lifecycle Manager
VNF Service Monitoring
Multi-domain Networks

16. Automation Better Together with Ansible + NSO

17. Reference Architectures Spanning Applications and Networks
Application Centric
Connectivity Centric
Ansible
NSO
Playbooks
NSO
Ansible
Playbooks
App
App
App
App

18. Ansible Plus Cisco NSO – Better Together
Ansible uses Playbooks to define named tasks that are executed by the ansible-playbook tool. The tasks use modules to perform activities. The NSO modules uses the version JSON-RPC API
NSO uses YANG modules to describe the schema of the data that can be manipulated using JSON-RPC. Clients (in this case an Ansible module) perform operations on the data stored in CDB.
Easily consumed by native Ansible allows application-centric services to unlock the full value of the network
Red Hat Ansible Tower provides playbook-driven IT and network automation
Cisco NSO provides model-driven service orchestration in hybrid networks

19. Ansible + Cisco NSO - Roles and Responsibilities
Devops teams
Owns lifecycle of playbook
Playbook
YANG becomes contract language between teams across infrastructure cycles:
Requirements from apps device provided in YAML-format
New services published by infra team as REST-interface update
NSO module
JSON-RPC
NSO
Infrastructure teams:
Owns lifecycle of network services
CDB
YANG
Hybrid Network

20. Applicable Cisco NSO Features
Ansible
NSO provides a full CRUD interface
Create – easy
Update – hard
Delete – very hard
Transactions – either stuff entirely happens or no stuff happens
Model-based (YANG) so clients can fetch and validate payloads
Playbook
NSO module
JSON-RPC
NSO
CDB
YANG
YANG
Hybrid Network

21. Three Ansible Modules for Cisco NSO
The nso_verify module fetches data from NSO, compares with data in the task and reports any violations
The nso_action module performs RPCs on NSO (e.g. check-sync) and validates the output
The nso_config module is used to create and delete instance data in NSO

22. Module Commonality YAML data encoding for all Ansible features
YAML encoding is straight translation from the JSON data structures natively provided by NSO, e.g:
curl -H "Accept: application/yang-data+json" \ | json2yaml
Input data is runtime validated against applicable subset of NSO YANG modules

23. Value of Ansible Tower + Cisco NSO
Single Ansible module leveraging NSO to support 70+ vendors across domains
Integrated YANG-support for model-driven configuration validation
Full rollback capabilities across vendors and device types
Gain immediate control over the entire network from data center to CPE
Significantly reduce the amount of time spent testing configuration changes
Reduce fallouts requiring manual intervention to a minimum

24. Automating Your Infrastructure with Ansible Tower and Cisco NSO

25. AUTOMATION >> Ansible + Cisco NSO Use Cases
Continuous Compliance
Network Automation
IoT
NFV / SDN

26. Automating Mobile Services – vIMS / vEPC Use Cases
Service Provider Cloud
Service Provider Cloud
Service Orchestration
SDN / Network Automation
RHOSP Deployment Automation
Ceph Storage Automation
VNF / Workload Placement
Orchestration/Automation
CloudForms
Ansible Tower
Cisco NSO
Customers
Mobile Devices
Open APIs
Cisco NSO
vEPC
vIMS
vPCRF
vSMS
Business Location / Venues
NFVI
RH OSP
RHEL KVM
RH Storage
OVS/DPDK
Tmobiile just starting to use Ansible for NFV – IMS/VEPC
Sprint using for vIMS
Verizon using for IT, Mobile , and Business Services -- plus Cloud Forms for 70,000 Nodes
Compute
Storage
Network
RHEL HOST

27. Demo Time!

28. Demo Setup – Cisco NSO
CLI
JSON-RPC
REST
Three groups of three routers each, running in netsim (management only, no packets passed)
Appropriate NEDs loaded to support the router types and protocols
I’ll use the CLI and REST for manual steps, and Ansible will use the JSON- RPC interface
NSO
CDB
XE (CLI)
XR (CLI)
NETCONF
IOS-XE
IOS-XR
Juniper

29. Demo Setup – Ansible
Playbook
Playbooks
Three NSO modules interacting with device- and service level abstractions
A set of example playbooks using the modules
Ansible
NSO Configuration Module
NSO Verification Module
NSO Action Module
JSON-RPC

30. Summary

31. What You Gain Cisco Network Services Orchestrator + Ansible Tower
Cisco Live 2017
9/11/2018
What You Gain Cisco Network Services Orchestrator + Ansible Tower
Agility Throughout Service Lifecycle
Strict YANG model-driven solution
Auto-rendered business logic results in 90% less code
Effortlessly re-deployment of updated service and device models
DevOps for differentiation
Full automation of Applications and Networks
Robust and Proven in tier-1 Deployments
Industry’s Broadest Multivendor Support
Relevant in today’s and tomorrow’s networks
Let’s review what you gain with Cisco NSO + Ansible.
First, I hope we’ve demonstrated the kind of agility you can achieve with this solution. That agility extends across the service lifecycle—not just when you implement a service, but when you refine it over its lifetime as well.
We do this through our model-driven approach, with strict YANG-YANG service-to-device mapping, which allows you to model and automate just about any device or service you can imagine.
This is something you’re not going to get with other orchestration solutions, which are based on much less flexible CLI templates that limit what you can model and create a lot of complexity.
Our patented FASTMAP technology enables NSO to render business logic for all of the devices and services in your environment automatically. Which translates to greatly increased speed, and 90% less code that you have to manage.
And our minimum diff engine makes re-deploying and updating service and device models effortless, with no service interruption.
We can support new ways of working, and provide an ideal platform for DevOps environments.
From the perspective of your network operations teams, we give them access to all of the advanced features and functions in their multivendor network devices.
Unlike today, where it’s common to invest in a new physical or virtual device, only to find that you can’t implement all the features you want because your management and orchestration systems are hard-coded and inflexible.
And this has a direct effect on your ability to differentiate, because it means you can offer the most advanced capabilities, as well as create unique bundles with value-added services that your competitors relying on less advanced orchestration can’t support.
We’ve talked about how we can deliver true end-to-end automation, even in complex environments and for complex services.
This is what allows you to give your customers self-service network provisioning on demand.
And it’s what brings your cycle times down from weeks or months to days or minutes.
We discussed how NSO is a robust, proven solution that’s running today in large, Tier-1 operator environments around the world.
And I showed you how we provide the broadest multivendor support in industry, which is so crucial to your ability to automate network services in real-world networks.
Last but not least, NSO is equally relevant in today’s operator environments as well as tomorrow’s.
We can automate the programmable networks of today, and deliver significant improvements in speed, efficiency, and agility.
But we can bring the same benefits to the virtualized and elastic environments of the future as well.
This is so important, because the last thing you want to do is build a silo of new equipment and OSSs on top of an isolated legacy environment.
NSO can help you dramatically improve your agility with your legacy environment right now, and integrate newer NFV and SDN technologies whenever you choose.

32. For more information www.cisco.com/go/nso www.redhat.com/ansible
Visit:
And contact your Cisco and Red Hat account representatives