What do we wish? Extra sandboxes! When do we wish them? Now!

It’s my pleasure to announce the overall availability of a number of new DevNet sandboxes. We’re constantly monitoring sandbox utilization and listening to our neighborhood in order that we are able to constantly enhance the consumer expertise we’re offering with our sandbox environments.

Let’s begin with Catalyst Heart, previously often known as DNA Heart. Traditionally we had been restricted within the availability of Catalyst Heart sandboxes due to the tight integration between {hardware} and software program that the platform had mandated for a few years. As you would possibly know, Catalyst Heart could possibly be bought previously solely as a {hardware} equipment. In latest occasions that requirement has been revised and now we are able to run Catalyst Heart as a digital machine in AWS and even on premise in a VMware digital atmosphere. This growth had made it a lot simpler for our clients in addition to our sandbox workforce to extra simply deploy Catalyst Heart cases in digital lab environments. This permits us to scale the Catalyst Heart sandboxes to a lot increased numbers. For the all the time on Catalyst Heart sandboxes, we are able to now accommodate 100 customers on the identical time whereas for the reservable cases we went from 4 to 25 out there cases! These sandboxes have been highly regarded over time so I’m pleased that we’re in a position to get rather more folks to make use of and benefit from them. The reservable cases may be all yours for as much as 4 days with the small caveat that it takes about 60 minutes to have all of the elements of the sandbox come on-line. They’re at the moment operating model 2.3.7.4 of Catalyst Heart and there’s additionally a Cisco ISE server out there if you wish to deploy SDA materials.

Subsequent, let’s speak about CI/CD pipelines and a model new sandbox we have now so that you can construct and check automation pipelines. I’ve been advocating for utilizing CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure automation and programmability for some time and I had the pleasure of operating a workshop on precisely this matter at Ansible Fest in Denver earlier this 12 months. As a part of the workshop, we had the attendees observe the information out there on https://developer.cisco.com/docs on the right way to use GitLab along with Ansible, Cisco pyATS, Cisco CML and Cisco NX-OS to construct a completely purposeful CI/CD pipeline for infrastructure automation. I’m tremendous excited to share now with all of you that the sandbox we used for that occasion is publicly out there within the DevNet sandbox catalog along with the lab (https://developer.cisco.com/studying/labs/ansible-fest-2024-cicd/introduction/) that guides you on the right way to construct and use these pipelines. We’ve as much as 15 of those sandboxes out there always for as much as 5 days per reservation. Go forward and provides them a attempt to witness the magic of utilizing community automation with CI/CD pipelines.

Final however not least, the workforce has performed a improbable job at rebuilding the Meraki sandboxes from scratch. Just like the Catalyst Heart sandboxes of the outdated, we had been restricted by {hardware} on what number of Meraki sandboxes we may make out there to our neighborhood. That has utterly modified and now the brand new Meraki sandboxes are totally digital. We’ve serial numbers out there for digital Meraki units that we are able to scale to a lot bigger numbers. For the reservable sandboxes, we stored the 2 flavors, small enterprise and enterprise. For each of those you get entry to an MX, MS and MR digital units and for the enterprise one, we have now additionally included an MV digicam digital gadget.

Go forward and provides all these sandboxes a attempt to tell us what you assume.

P.S. We could have further bulletins about new DevNet sandboxes very quickly. I don’t need to spoil an excessive amount of these bulletins however let’s simply say that when you had been seeking to check Catalyst 9000 {hardware} switches and didn’t have entry to a lab atmosphere, that may change very quickly :).

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