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GitNops

Git Operations for Network Automation

GitNops

GitNops is an operational framework that takes DevOps best practices used for application development, such as:

and applies them to network automation.

Public Appearances

GitNops has been the topic of conversation on a number of recent podcasts.

Packet Pushers Heavy Networking Podcast #706

The GitNops Approach to Collaborative Networking direct download to the podcast. Packet Pushers Heavy Networking link to GitNops podcast.

Packet Pushers Total Network Operations #3

Packet Pushers Heavy Total Network Operations DevOps, NetOps and Batman Part 1 link.

Packet Pushers Total Network Operations #4

Packet Pushers Heavy Total Network Operations DevOps, NetOps and Batman Part 2 link.

F5 DevCentral Interview with Buu Lam and Jason Rahm

Link to discussion about GitNops.

Training

GitNops trainings have been provided in the past and you can schedule them here.

Previous GitNops Trainings

GitNops was presented to the Open Network User Group (ONUG Board) and was a four hour training at ONUG Spring 2023.

Collaborative Automation is Key

Collaborative automation is simply teams of engineers and administrators working together, towards a common goal, utilizing automation tooling to make their jobs easier, more efficient, and stress free. A secondary DevOps practice, configuration management, is important to I2aC, and has undergone a fundamental shift over the last few years as social coding via sites like github.com have become increasingly popular. Network teams are able to share their software modeled BIG-IPs with other team members, solicit feedback, find bugs, and squash those bugs all because their BIG-IPs are modeled in code.

“Agile is about embracing change, treating it as an expected thing, and even a positive, as opposed to old-school, viewing change as a problem,” says Kief Morris. “If you use automation tools but still manage your infrastructure with the Iron Age approaches to change management, you’re losing the benefit. IAC is more reliable, particularly if you use Agile engineering practices like test driven development, continuous integration and continuous delivery.”

Learning and understanding how to manage your network infrastructure as a software project is incredibly valuable. Software development has reached a level of maturity allowing its techniques to be utilized in fields such as network engineering. A GitNops workflow can be managed via Agile methodologies such as Scrum and Kanban. This allows network engineers to coordinate and manage their infrastructures with agility and achieve project velocity. Social coding techniques such as peer review increase the quality of the network designs and configuration. Automated tests can be run against the GitNops configurations, finding defects and alerting engineers to bugs found. As GitNops software development maturity increases, there will be fewer bugs and errors, but most importantly project velocity will increase and the network and operations environment will keep pace with the velocity of the ever-increasing software projects they are meant to support.

Benefits of GitNops

A Call to Arms

Now is the time to get involved and learn GitNops! Feel free to star this project, and/or schedule a meeting with Thomas via his calendly - https://calendly.com/mcgonagle