We’ve got a new sandbox for you today and it’s a beauty! Perfect for NetDevOps enthusiasts... The new Multi-IOS Cisco Test Network provides you with a 15 node network including XR, XE and Nexus, leveraging Cisco VIRL. This network is perfect for testing out NetDevOps scenarios and all types of network programmability use cases. But, if you want to create your own topology you can! We’ve also included the ability to simply create a clean VIRL simulation, where you can add your own VIRL file to create your own network topology, up to 15 nodes. There are details on how to get you started down that path on the sandbox instructions itself. As always, we hope you enjoy the sandbox and it helps you explore our network programmability interfaces and toolsets in the innovation and operational improvements you’re looking to acheive. The team hasn’t updated our lovely sandbox community in a while as we’re working on a host of new sandboxes as we approach CiscoLive Orlando next month, we hope you’ll be glad to hear. Stay tuned for more new sandboxes soon and keep the feedback coming! TBM. ... View more

We’ve now got available Cisco Unified Communications manager (CUCM) 12 ready and waiting for you to use in the DevNet Sandbox . The new CUCM 12 Sandbox gives you a full call manager solution in minutes for you to explore, with new features (full notes here ) to develop around, including: Centralized deployment options and clustered deployments OAuth Login Refresh support Improved Database management utilities for admins Further integration capabilities with Cisco Spark Services. Improved UI Branding Customization capability …And you can even have an IPv6 only deployment! CUCM comes with a great API to help you integrate into your current environments and build solutions on top of and you can learn more about them here . You’ll also get the Jabber SDK to play with – this let’s integrate the comms capabilities into web applications super quick, including voice, video, IM and more. So, get started! Log into DevNet Sandbox and spin up your own environment with a single button press – FREE! If you’re coming to CiscoLive Barcelona, be sure to hit the DevNet Zone and the Sandbox booth! You can meet a bunch of the team and also take part in a few fun challenges, including a collaboration play! We can also offer a game of IoT Table Football that we’ve rigged up, using the technology available in our own sandboxes – See you there! TBM. ... View more

We're starting the week off the right way for our community and serving up another new sandbox! Today, we're providing you with some collaboration and bot developer fun, with Jabber and our new open source Jabber Bot SDK. Folks are actively still building the SDK out, but thought you might like a look as we head into CiscoLive Barcelona. You also get to play with the shiny new Jabber v12 client. So, now you can create a bot, build it's brains and then chat away all from the Jabber client. We've created one for you to show off some basic commands. But if you want to get straight into an example bot brain build of your own, follow our hello world instructions that will take you through creating a bot that will tell you the weather - we're using node and a few middleware libraries, but we give you full instructions, so that won't take you long. From there, the world is your bot oyster. You can access and reserve the JabberBot Sandbox now! Hope you enjoy it and keep the sandbox feedback coming. TBM. ... View more

Most of the development world is aware of the microservices and containerisation movement, given we’re now in 2018! When folks start working with microservices, they quickly realise that they proliferate fast. One application can contain a large number of microservices that all need to interact and talk to each other for lots of different reasons in order to make the application work as intended. They need to do this securely, and they need to be able to manage traffic for balancing and testing/rollout purposes too. This network of microservices needs managing, specifically around areas of service discovery and communication to build a working “service mesh.” Istio provides an open source implementation of a ‘service mesh manager.’ It has been built to control communication, secure, and manage microservices that need to work together. It’s kind of like the beginning of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) for the microservice architecture world. You can learn much more about Istio here. Istio essentially lets you manage traffic between your microservices — which services can talk to which and when, what policy they should use. It also provides nice telemetry and reports through the Grafana interface that Istio is implemented with. Right now, Istio supports Kubernetes, but is already being extended to other container management platforms later. I’ve been playing with Istio recently and it’s pretty cool. So, we wanted to give you a place to try it out for yourself! You can hit the Istio DevNet Sandbox now. (If you’re not already a DevNet member, just sign in with any one of the social login options and you’re good to go!) In the Sandbox, we give you a Kubernetes cluster at 1.8, with Istio 0.4 already installed and ready to go. Just hit ‘reserve’ and we’ll set that up for you in minutes. From there, there’s a ‘Hello World’ example to follow that riffs off of a standard containerised app that is great for deploying and then starting to play with the Istio functionality and to understand what makes it tick and why it’s so useful (and really, will be more required as micro service architectures grow.) As usual, we’ve also provided a little DevBox for you to use. It’s crammed with Dev Tool goodies you might find useful, but may not want to deploy to your local machine to begin with – just log into the DevBox and the tools are yours. Hopefully, you’re enjoy learning and creating with the Sandbox. Keep in touch with us and let us know what you think! TBM. ... View more

You’re probably heard of Blockchain by now – the relativity new technology underpinning a whole host of cryptocurrencies and distributed apps, promising exciting solutions across a range of markets, from IoT and machine to machine communication and healthcare, to identity management, supply chain and more. But, have you got to grips with how they work? How you use them? What they can do? How you code apps on them? Well, now’s your chance to get started! This week on DevNet Sandbox, we’re excited to release a Blockchain Sandbox to give you your very own private blockchain based on the Linux Foundation’s HyperLedger Fabric .    Intended as a foundation for developing applications or solutions with a modular architecture, Hyperledger Fabric allows components, such as consensus and membership services, to be plug-and-play. HyperLedger Fabric leverages container technology to host smart contracts called “chaincode” that comprise the application logic of the system. As part of the Sandbox, we’ll provide you with an Ubuntu VM that has four docker containers containing the peers of the blockchain, split across two separate organisations. Each one of these peers is capable of hosting your chaincode that can be used to execute code on Fabric that support well, any app or logic that you wish!   Of course, feel free to re-configure the peers and organisations as you wish, along with build more channels to communicate on (hit the Hyperledger Fabric link earlier to learn more about these concepts or fire directly over here ). We also provide you with a short example of how to transact on the blockchain and move some value across peers taking part in the chain, to get you started, should you need. There’s also the CLI that you can use should you wish to explore this method of interaction further. Note that we're using LevelDB as the data store on our deployment of HyperLedger fabric. It's a light-weight, single-purpose library for persistence with bindings to many platforms, including Fabric. As always, let us know what you think of the Sandbox and provide us any feedback through the Sandbox forums . Cisco are a premier member of the HyperLedger effort, so we’d love to know what you think! Enjoy… TBM. ... View more

Want to skill up on IoT application development and deployment in the ‘Fog’? Then, you’ll be glad to hear we’ve just updated the IOx Sandbox to the latest 1.4 release! IOx provides an application enablement framework and compute platform on devices operating at the network edge with the ability to host applications and services, connecting them securely and reliably to applications in the cloud. Essentially, it brings your applications to the generation points of IoT data, so you can overcome key challenges to IoT app deployment, like high volumes of data creation and movement and the need for near–real time system responsiveness. You’ll get to work in a Linux application environment that’s great for picking up the functionality of IOx fast and for combining with common open-source dev tools. Win! In the Sandbox you’ll get access to: IOx: IOx for hosting Fog Applications across network infrastructure Including the Cisco IOx Application Framework (CAF) for orchestrating and managing applications on Fog nodes. Fog Director: Manage, administer, monitor, and troubleshoot Fog applications running in the IOx environment remotely over the network. There’s a guide to getting started and you can also use the DevNet Learning Labs as you would expect to continue your knowledge building! This sandbox should be great fun for deploying apps to the Fog and testing out your next big creation! Enjoy! TBM. ... View more

We know you’ve probably been chomping at the bit to be able to get hands-on as fast as possible with the new Catalyst 9000 series announced last month at CiscoLive US – and now you can! The Catalyst 9000 family functionality was built with the challenges of building apps and a support network in a world of IoT, mobility, cloud and all the security implications that bundle up with them. With the new “IOS XE on Catalyst 9000” sandbox, you can explore all the latest app hosting and programmability options that IOS XE 16.6.1 provides, on the very latest switching platform generation, including: Application Hosting with Guest Shell to support running Linux Applications directly at the edge Develop and execute Python scripts on-box using Guest Shell Model Driven Programmability with YANG Data Models and NETCONF and RESTCONF** Day Zero Provisioning with Network Plug and Play (PnP) and Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP) If you want to know more about the latest IOS XE functionality and what it offers (including application hosting on-box!) hit the IOS XE microsite and if that wasn’t enough we’ve got a stack of learning labs to take you through NETCONF / YANG basics if model driven configuration and automation is what you’re looking for! As always, we popped a DevBox in the Sandbox for you loaded with DevTool goodies that should help you get to grips with the fun app and infra development you can have with the Cat9K… As always, we hope you enjoy the sandbox and getting to know the tech! Keep the feedback coming… TBM. ** Just so you know - In IOS XE 16.6.1 on the Catalyst platform, RESTCONF is currently pre-8040 standard and should be considered preview or beta. ... View more

You’ve probably all heard of CI/CD by now. But if not, it stands for Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (or Deployment, depending on how you’re inclined). And we’ve got a Sandbox for you to skill up on it! Taking CI first, CI is the development practice of merging code into a mainline version at very frequent intervals. This is to avoid the pain of integrating code that has been developed over far longer periods back into a mainline other team members may have been working on, where the cost of merging outweighs the cost of doing the integration in the first place. CD’s aims are to build, automatically test (through a pre-written test suite) and deploy software as fast as possible, again very frequently, into a development or production environment. Together, the CI/CD approach allows developers to write, merge, test and deploy code frequently and quickly. Often many times a day. CI/CD practices compliment the practice of DevOps methodology and form a core part of modern application development. There are many CI/CD orientated toolchains that can be constructed, from many different developer tools, to accomplish a slick CI/CD pipeline (‘pipeline’ being referring to the point when a developer is finished with writing code to having it deployed on the relevant target environment). We’ve chosen a few common ones and combined them together in this Sandbox for you to get familiar with CI/CD and how they work as a toolchain. Here’s what we’re using: Gogs. Gogs is a private source code control system anyone can deploy locally, written in Go. We use it as a public GitHub alternative here, so you have your own playground! Drone. Drone is a CI/CD tool, which can pull your code from Gogs and build/publish/deploy it to Kubernetes nodes or other targets. We also use Drone to provide a private container registry in our hello world example, though you could use a public one like docker hub (you might need to do some reading there, if you’re totally new to CI / CD and containers!) Kubernetes. Kubernetes is a platform designed to automate deploying, scaling, and operating application containers All of these tools are open source and popular, so that you’ve got good support as you continue learning and becoming bolder with CI/CD! We’ve configured them to work together as a toolchain for you and provided you with a cool hello world example with some simple scripts to get you started! As always, we’ve added a DevBox that provides a host with a number of common and useful developer tools on that you can use as a jump in point to the Sandbox, without having to download tools to your own laptop if you prefer not too. We really hope you enjoy the CI/CD Sandbox and it proves to be a great first step into the world of CI/CD that you can continue on from. We've added it into the open source area of the sandbox catalog. Look out for more DevNet learning labs on this topic in the future. Enjoy! TBM. ... View more

We’ve just finished up doubling the number of available networks in out Meraki Always-On Sandbox! You’ve now got access to 6 complete network stacks, all through the super-slick cloud-managed Meraki UI! Not only that, you’ve now got access to some of the latest Meraki stack, including: MX65 Firewall MR30H, 53 & 84 Access Points MS22x POE + Switch MC74 Cloud IP Phone MV21 Cloud IP Camera But we haven’t stopped there – to help you guys get started with meraki development, we’ve also included a number of NodeRED instances that can be used to run some documented fun demos. The demo code is available for you to download and there’s API documentation and getting started guides included for good measure! The Meraki Portfolio of networking devices are centrally managed from the cloud. Locate devices in real-time, collect marketing data, engage customers with Bluetooth, and automate your network deployment. Meraki makes it simple with our development partners, APIs, and sample code. With this super-sized sandbox, you’ve got everything you n eed to start learning Meraki development! You can also pick up additional help over in the DevNet learning labs. Enjoy! TBM. ... View more

We thought we’d start the week off well for you guys and let you know that we’ve upgraded our hardware based APIC-EM Sandboxes to version 1.5. The Application Policy Infrastructure Controller Enterprise Module (bit of a mouthful, so let’s keep to APIC-EM) is our Software-Defined Networking (SDN) controller for enterprise networks (in the campus or branch and the WAN). It delivers an elastic platform for policy-based automation that simplifies and abstracts the network. The platform is built to host multiple, easy-to-use SDN applications that use open, northbound REST APIs and drive core network automation solutions. The APIC-EM platform supports both wired and wireless enterprise networks across the WAN, and access and wireless infrastructures. You can find lots more information, including getting stuck into some learning labs by hitting here on DevNet’s portal. Don’t worry if you still want access to an older version of APIC-EM, too. We’ve kept our v1.3.1 simulated infrastructure labs just how they are for you, to give you some choice around which version you want to target. As with all of our Sandboxes, we hope you enjoy them! Keep firing over your feedback! TBM. ... View more

We're letting our users know that we've just finished upgrading the Kubernetes with Contiv Sandbox to the latest versions of each for you! The Sandbox is now powered up with Kubernetes 1.6.7 and Contiv 1.1.1. Hit the Sandbox Catalog and reserve yourself your very own Kubernetes Cluster with Contiv plugged in and ready to go - FREE. Follow these links to find out more about Kubernetes & Contiv and also hit the original blog I posted on this Sandbox to gather up some more information and get you started. Visit: DevNet Sandbox for all our available Sandboxes or jump direct to the Kubernetes & Contiv Sandbox! to explore and reserve now! TBM. ... View more