It’s my pleasure to announce the overall availability of a number of new DevNet sandboxes. We’re repeatedly monitoring sandbox utilization and listening to our neighborhood in order that we are able to repeatedly enhance the consumer expertise we’re offering with our sandbox environments.
Let’s begin with Catalyst Heart, previously often known as DNA Heart. Traditionally we had been restricted within the availability of Catalyst Heart sandboxes due to the tight integration between {hardware} and software program that the platform had mandated for a few years. As you may know, Catalyst Heart could possibly be bought prior to now solely as a {hardware} equipment. In current occasions that requirement has been revised and now we are able to run Catalyst Heart as a digital machine in AWS and even on premise in a VMware digital atmosphere. This growth had made it a lot simpler for our clients in addition to our sandbox crew to extra simply deploy Catalyst Heart situations in digital lab environments. This permits us to scale the Catalyst Heart sandboxes to a lot increased numbers. For the at all times on Catalyst Heart sandboxes, we are able to now accommodate 100 customers on the similar time whereas for the reservable situations we went from 4 to 25 obtainable situations! These sandboxes have been very fashionable through the years so I’m pleased that we’re capable of get way more individuals to make use of and benefit from them. The reservable situations might be all yours for as much as 4 days with the small caveat that it takes about 60 minutes to have all of the elements of the sandbox come on-line. They’re at the moment operating model 2.3.7.4 of Catalyst Heart and there’s additionally a Cisco ISE server obtainable if you wish to deploy SDA materials.
Subsequent, let’s speak about CI/CD pipelines and a model new sandbox we have now so that you can construct and take a look at automation pipelines. I’ve been advocating for utilizing CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure automation and programmability for some time and I had the pleasure of operating a workshop on precisely this matter at Ansible Fest in Denver earlier this yr. As a part of the workshop, we had the attendees comply with the information obtainable on https://developer.cisco.com/docs on how you can use GitLab along with Ansible, Cisco pyATS, Cisco CML and Cisco NX-OS to construct a totally purposeful CI/CD pipeline for infrastructure automation. I’m tremendous excited to share now with all of you that the sandbox we used for that occasion is publicly obtainable within the DevNet sandbox catalog along with the lab (https://developer.cisco.com/studying/labs/ansible-fest-2024-cicd/introduction/) that guides you on how you can construct and use these pipelines. We’ve got as much as 15 of those sandboxes obtainable always for as much as 5 days per reservation. Go forward and provides them a try to witness the magic of utilizing community automation with CI/CD pipelines.
Final however not least, the crew has achieved a improbable job at rebuilding the Meraki sandboxes from scratch. Much like the Catalyst Heart sandboxes of the previous, we had been restricted by {hardware} on what number of Meraki sandboxes we may make obtainable to our neighborhood. That has utterly modified and now the brand new Meraki sandboxes are solely digital. We’ve got serial numbers obtainable for digital Meraki units that we are able to scale to a lot bigger numbers. For the reservable sandboxes, we saved the 2 flavors, small enterprise and enterprise. For each of those you get entry to an MX, MS and MR digital units and for the enterprise one, we have now additionally included an MV digicam digital system.
Go forward and provides all these sandboxes a try to tell us what you assume.
P.S. We can have extra bulletins about new DevNet sandboxes very quickly. I don’t wish to spoil an excessive amount of these bulletins however let’s simply say that should you had been trying to take a look at Catalyst 9000 {hardware} switches and didn’t have entry to a lab atmosphere, that may change very quickly :).
Share: