This is part 3 of how to run your own demo using CI/CD pipelines for network configuration management. Previous posts in the NetDevOps Series are availablehere.

In the last two posts we have setup our server and local environments. So, it is now time to look at the actual demonstration on the power of CI/CD pipelines applied to network configurations. Our demo will include the following architecture and elements, to show how a completely automated CI/CD pipeline could be applied to a network configuration environment end-to-end, including test and production environments.

The flow will be as follows: our network operator will interact with GitLab to propose any candidate configuration changes. Ansible and NSO will deploy those changes into a virtual test environment (with VIRL) and run automated tests (with pyATS) to verify the expected results after the change. If everything goes well, then our VCS will run the same process in the production environment to implement those changes in the real network.Nice!

Integrating that environment with the local setup we built in the previous section, will result in a comprehensive architecture where your local environment uses the same tools (NSO & Ansible) as the remote ones. Locally it will only do the syntax checking, and once configurations are pushed to the remote GitLab, the same set of tools will also deploy and test the proposed changes, first into a test environment and then into production.Talk about consistency