AVD Provisioning on CVaaS

Provisioning Workflow Demo
Petr Ankudinov
                                      Sep 2023

$ whoami

• Petr Ankudinov github.com/ankudinov

  • Advanced Services Engineer at Arista Networks
  • Over 20 years of experience in IT with a bit of everything
  • ACE: L5, CCIE 37521
  • Passionate DC and network automation engineer
  • Daily (and nightly) VSCode user

Agenda

• Ansible AVD collection overview
• The demo
• Credits and references

What is Ansible AVD?

• AVD stands for Arista Validated Design as it was based on the EVPN Deployment Guide
• A very successful community project used to deploy EVPN based Data Center fabrics
  • Over 200 stars on Github and 79 contributors as of Sep 2023
  • The most active Arista collection on Ansible Galaxy
• High level workflow:
  • Define abstracted group/host vars using AVD data model
  • Generate low level device specific variables (aka structured configs)
  • Parse templates, build plain text configs
  • Deliver configs to network devices using Ansible arista.eos.eos_config

Facts About CVaaS

• CVaaS is cloud based
• Customers are assigned to a region with disaster recovery plan relying on availability zones (AZ)
• CVaaS backups are multi-region
• CVaaS is maintained by a dedicated Cloud SRE team and is always up to date
• Users authenticate to CVaaS via OAuth/SAML providers: Google, Okta, OneLogin, Microsoft Azure AD and custom SAML/OAuth providers
• The API access for AVD orchestration, etc. is authenticated using service account tokens
• The only traffic required is HTTPS initiated by switch to CVaaS with cert based authentication and HTTPS from AVD host to CVaaS with token based authentication
• References:
  • CVaaS Configuration Guide
  • CVaaS Quick Start Guide
  • CVaaS Security Whitepaper

The Demo

• Start container as Github Codespace (or on any host with dev container supporting tool)
• Start a simple leaf-spine topology in Containerlab
• Build EVPN configuration with arista.avd Ansible collection
• Wait until the lab switches will start streaming using a pre-defined token
• Deploy configuration to CVP using arista.avd Ansible collection and pre-defined API token
• Create change control, review and execute the change

Credits and References

This repository is based on many awesome open source repositories and some free/commercial Github features:

Q&A

• Ansible AVD
• This repository