Huawei CloudEngine Modules for Ansible Aim to Simplify Network Automation
[Shenzhen, China, 6 April, 2017] Huawei today announced the release of its CloudEngine switch networking modules for Ansible, the leading simple, powerful, and agentless open source IT automation framework. Huawei has collaborated with the upstream Ansible open source community to create Ansible networking modules of CloudEngine switches, one of the core components of Huawei’s CloudFabric data center network solution. The networking modules can be deployed in production environments to help customers achieve automated network operation and maintenance (O&M) in a more secure, efficient, and reliable way.
“We introduced network automation support in the Ansible open source project to enable network infrastructure to be managed in the simple, powerful, and agentless manner that systems and applications already use,” said Greg DeKoenigsberg, director, Ansible community. “This can help network teams take advantage of new deployment paradigms, including configuration automation, test-driven network deployment, and continuous compliance. We are pleased that Huawei has created Ansible modules that offer network automation support for CloudFabric.”
“The Huawei CloudEngine switch networking modules for Ansible can help our customers achieve better network automation and integrated management,” said Yu Li, General Manager of the Huawei Data Center Network Domain. “The Ansible open source community is an important part of our CloudFabric Open Ecosystem. We believe that the release of these networking modules is a special milestone in our collaboration with the Ansible project and a great contribution to the open source community. Huawei plans to deepen our collaboration through the upstream Ansible community to help further advance network automation innovation.”
Cloud computing and virtualization have promoted the development of microservice and container technologies, which in turn can help simplify the implementation of DevOps, a model combining development and operations capabilities. Now, many enterprises are focusing their attentions on DevOps. The upstream Ansible project is one of the most popular open source automation projects on GitHub with an active and highly engaged community. Ansible enables developers and IT operators to more easily and quickly deploy IT applications and environments, empowering them to remove barriers between IT teams by automating routine activities such as network configuration, cloud deployments, and creation of development environments. Ansible’s modular code base, combined with ease of contribution, and a community of contributors in GitHub, enables the powerful IT automation platform to manage today’s infrastructure, but also adapt to new IT needs and DevOps workflows.
CloudFabric Open Ecosystem is a project to eliminate barriers between vendors of cloud platforms, management tools, network devices, and network services, combining their strengths to improve the capability of data center network solution integration and promote solution development. The CloudFabric Open Ecosystem is enhanced via open source Ansible networking modules developed and maintained by Huawei for automated deployment and configuration by this tool, aimed at making network O&M simpler and more efficient. The CloudEngine switch networking modules for Ansible can support automated configuration and query of extensive network features, including basic features AAA and SNMP, as well as L2-L4 features VLAN, VXLAN, BGP, EVPN, and ACL. This support improves feature deployment efficiency and reduces configuration error rates.
Huawei is always working to expand the company’s end-to-end partner ecosystem with world-renowned IT service providers and standardization organizations based on open architectures. Huawei CloudFabric has established cooperation with more than 20 world-leading partners to create joint solutions for integrated deployment of IT resources and network services. Together with its partners, CloudFabric is supported by an end-to-end ecosystem, helping users lower integration risks and reduce costs via customized solutions.
These CloudEngine switch networking modules are accessible at the following link in the GitHub open source repository:https://github.com/HuaweiSwitch/CloudEngine-Ansible.
