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Why Automate Using Pipelines to Develop and Manage Network Configurations

Continuous Delivery: No Rest for the Wicked

Now that we have:

We now can achieve Infrastructure As Code, where we can take a few artifacts from source control and turn them into a live, viable network device.

This is handy, but what about maintaining it? CI/CD Pipelines

In simplest terms, CI/CD tools provide an automated way to “do a thing” to make it pretty easy to perform repetitive tasks. For this example, I’ll be using Jenkins CI, but the steps we’ll be performing are pretty simple.

Pipelines aren’t the only things that a CI tool can do, but there are some pretty big differences between a traditional pipeline and managing a network - for example, there’s no code to compile. Instead, it’s best to map out the steps that we want a CI tool to perform. Jenkins has a project type - Freestyle that lends itself well to applications like this, but it can also get fairly messy/disorganized.

A more comprehensive definition of a pipeline (from Red Hat) is here: https://redhat.com/en/topics/devops/what-cicd-pipeline

Installing Tools

In this case, I am leveraging a purpose-build CentOS host with Ansible, Jenkins, Jinja, and Python3 installed. Since this prerequisite list is fairly short, it should lend itself rather well to containerization.

Network infrastructure tends to have inbound access restrictions that most container platforms cannot meet in an auditable, secure method. This capability can be provided with VMware NSX-T or with Project Calico, but these capabilities are pretty advanced. I’d consider containerization an option for those willing to take it on in this case, and am keeping this guide as agnostic as possible.

Perhaps later I’ll build on this and provide a dockerfile. Starring the repository will probably be the best way to keep track!

Executing Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery

Let’s start with the specifications for what we want to do. This doesn’t need to be excessively convoluted.

Steps:

I have added an example CI Project file to this repository. https://github.com/ngschmidt/vyos-vclos It does not contain testing or validating steps yet, as those are considerably more complex - writing a parsable logger will take quite a bit more time than I feel an individual post is worth.

The CI Project

We’re not asking much of Jenkins CI in this case, so you can easily replicate this configuration by:

People want new stuff, and some of it might be new networking Features

Now that we have an easy way of keeping all of our networking gear (2-N nodes) managed and in baseline with the same level of effort, it’s pretty straightforward to automatically roll out Features.

Features in this case don’t need to be a large, earth-shaking new capability in more traditional software development parlance. Instead, let’s consider a Feature something smaller:

Some Examples of Network Features:

In the world of continuous delivery, these can be done out of order, or to a roadmap. When you’re done with a capability, deliver it instead of waiting for the next major code drop.

I’m a network guy, what’s a code drop?

Honestly, infrastructure teams never really followed more traditional software development approaches - Continuous Delivery is a better fit, because of our key problems:

There’s no true hand-off from development to operations, just the people who run the network, and those who don’t. We are afflicted by an industry of either change fear or CAB purgatory where once something is built, it can no longer be improved. This builds up a lot of indebtedness that is rarely fixed by anything short of a forklift. Ideally, we can leverage CI tools in this way:

I have attached a Jenkins Project that performs most of these tasks here. There are some caveats to this method that I’ll cover below.

This should result in much higher quality work being released, and in the networking world, reliability is king. This is the key to becoming free of CAB Purgatory in large organizations.

A Day in the life of a Feature

Since the majority of the muscle work with Jenkins has already been programmed, we simply need to focus on the source code (device configuration), and work from there:

Example 1: Fix an issue where BGP NLRIs are not being imported due to no policy

Pull Request #1

For this, we ran into a particularly odd behavior change - VyOS was somewhat recently rebased from Quagga to FRR, which picked up the following behavior: http://docs.frrouting.org/en/latest/bgp.html#require-policy-on-ebgp

Require policy on EBGP  
[no] bgp ebgp-requires-policy  
This command requires incoming and outgoing filters to be applied for eBGP sessions. Without the incoming filter, no routes will be accepted. Without the outgoing filter, no routes will be announced.  
  
This is enabled by default.  
  
When the incoming or outgoing filter is missing you will see “(Policy)” sign under show bgp summary:  
  
exit1# show bgp summary  
  
IPv4 Unicast Summary:  
BGP router identifier 10.10.10.1, local AS number 65001 vrf-id 0  
BGP table version 4  
RIB entries 7, using 1344 bytes of memory  
Peers 2, using 43 KiB of memory  
  
Neighbor        V         AS   MsgRcvd   MsgSent   TblVer  InQ OutQ  Up/Down State/PfxRcd   PfxSnt  
192.168.0.2     4      65002         8        10        0    0    0 00:03:09            5 (Policy)  
fe80:1::2222    4      65002         9        11        0    0    0 00:03:09     (Policy) (Policy)

This was preventing BGP route propagation, and was a result of an upstream change. In Software Development, this is called a “breaking change” because it implements major functional changes that will have potentially negative effects unless action is taken.

To mitigate this, we can develop a solution iteratively, using our lab environment, and test, re-test, and then test again until we get the desired result. 24 Commits later, I’m satisfied with the result. Once a solution is sound (passes automated testing) it is best practice to submit a solution for peer review. Git calls this action a pull request. Here’s the one for this change:

Example 2: Roll out IPv6 Dynamic Routing

Pull Request #2

Like with the previous pull request, this particular implementation isn’t huge.

By code volume, this was about 200 lines, but the real difference here is in the multiplier. From those 284 lines:

The history of this pull request is publicly available. I made a few mistakes, and then caught them with automated testing, as everyone can see.

About two-thirds of the way through this I realized I was rolling out IPv6 will a pull request. Neat.

Conclusions

This generates quite a bit of code, repeatably and reliably.

Value in Volume

All in all, we’re generating 1,020 lines of configuration with 833 lines of code. The ratio becomes more favorable for a developer in terms of sheer work more homogenous your environment or custom configurations are. If you’re only evaluating saved time:

Value in Consistency

The real value here is consistent configurations. Using traditional methods I’d normally have a ton of frustration trying to configure things consistently, un-doing and re-doing copy-paste errors, and re-testing. If you configure both sides with Jinja2, they’ll match exactly and peer up, every time

Value in Documentation

This is the part where I truly value this approach. If an engineer or architect designs variable definitions well, the end result summarily defines the device. This can be attached in-line or as meta-data to a diagram, or easily verified against a diagram to ensure things are consistent. The few issues I had were quickly resolvable by comparing YAML to a diagram. I’m probably going to use this method to generate diagrams as well.

Downsides

I trivialized the network driver aspect of this work. The one I chose, vyos.vyos.vyos_config, is not idempotent and was causing serious issues as a result (BGP neighbors dropping constantly as I re-applied the configuration). Off-the-shelf network drivers are perfectly well suited for prototyping, but substantial development is required to use them in production. This would take a full team to become reality, but a middle ground is readily achievable.

We can use this guidance to come up with a plan, for example:

People who are at #4 aren’t better than people who have finished #1. Use what’s useful.