For network emulation there are many approaches using VM's for emulation of a hardware router. Arista, Cisco and Juniper have multiple implementations of their network operating system and various generations of hardware emulation. These systems are very good for most validation of vendor control plane implementations and data plane for limited certifications. The idea of this project is to provide a standard "interface" so that vendors can produce a standard container implementation which can be used to build complex topologies.
The main use case of this infrastructure is for the development of tests to validate control plane / configuration of network devices without needing real hardware.
The main use case we are interested in is the ability to bring up arbitrary topologies to represent a production topology. This would require multiple vendors as well as traffic generation and end hosts.
In support of the testing we need to be able to provide every tester, engineer and continuous automated run a set of environments to validate test scenarios used in production. These can also be used to pre-validate hardware testing as well. This can reduce cycle time as there will be no contention for the virtual testbed vs. the hardware testbed. This also allows for "unit testing" the integration test.
For the development of new services or for offering a better environment to developers for existing services, virtual testbeds would allow for better scaling of resources and easier to use testbeds that would be customized for a team's needs. Specifically workflow automation struggles to have physical representations of metros that need to be validated for workflows. A virtual testbed would allow for the majority of workflows to be validated against any number of production topologies.
- Install go
- Build CLI
cd kne_cli
go build