Jerikan: a configuration management system for network teams

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2021-05-25 12:30:02

There are many resources for network automation with Ansible. Most of them only expose the first steps or limit themselves to a narrow scope. They give no clue on how to expand from that. Real network environments may be large, versatile, heterogeneous, and filled with exceptions. The lack of real-world examples for Ansible deployments, unlike Puppet and SaltStack, leads many teams to build brittle and incomplete automation solutions.

This work is the collective effort of Cédric Hascoët, Jean-Christophe Legatte, Loïc Pailhas, Sébastien Hurtel, Tchadel Icard, and Vincent Bernat. We are the network team of Blade, a French company operating Shadow, a cloud-computing product. In May 2021, our company was bought by Octave Klaba and the infrastructure is being transferred to OVHcloud, saving Shadow as a product, but making our team redundant.

Our network was around 800 devices, spanning over 10 datacenters with more than 300 Gbps of peak egress bandwidth. The released material is therefore a substantial example of managing a medium-scale network using Ansible. We have left out the handling of our legacy datacenters to make the final result more readable while keeping enough material to not turn it into a trivial example.

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