Originally reported by SDxCentral. Source article published March 2020.
What Cumulus Networks Released
Cumulus Networks released an open source toolkit designed to automate network testing and configuration for data center deployments. The toolkit targets network and DevOps engineers who understand the theory behind CI/CD and infrastructure as code (IaC) but struggle to translate those concepts into production network environments.
“Everyone understands the concepts of CI/CD, everyone understands the value of infrastructure as code, but they struggle to put it into production,” said Partho Mishra, president and chief product officer at Cumulus Networks.
According to Mishra, Cumulus had been using the toolkit internally for approximately two years to design and deploy customer networks before deciding to open source it.
What the Toolkit Includes
The toolkit is described as an out-of-the-box, production-tested package. Its components include:
- A fully populated variables file object model — structured variable definitions that represent network topology and configuration state
- Jinja2 templates — for rendering device configurations dynamically from those variables
- Ansible playbooks — for orchestrating configuration pushes across network devices
- Network validation tests — enabling continuous integration (CI) workflows against live or virtual network environments
- An infrastructure-as-code deployment framework — tying the above components into a repeatable, version-controlled workflow
Importantly, the toolkit relies only on Ansible core modules and does not require any additional plugins or vendor-specific add-ons, lowering the barrier to adoption.
“We are essentially open sourcing a complete, out-of-the-box package of tested scripts and playbooks that can be used to set up typical data center and other network deployments.”
— Partho Mishra, President and CPO, Cumulus Networks
Licensing and Availability
The toolkit was published to GitLab under a Creative Commons license, making it freely distributable and modifiable. Cumulus expressed the intent to grow a community around the codebase, with the expectation that community contributions would accelerate broader adoption of network automation practices.
Why Ansible—and What Comes Next
Cumulus selected Ansible as the automation engine because it was the most widely used tool in their customer base at the time of release. However, Mishra indicated that support for Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack was planned for the following months, allowing teams using those tools to adopt the same framework.
Automated Testing with NetQ and Cumulus VX
A key differentiator of the toolkit is its integrated testing pipeline. When code is committed to the repository, it automatically triggers the creation of a virtual lab environment using Cumulus VX—a virtual instance of Cumulus Linux. The pipeline then runs a suite of validation tests using Cumulus NetQ, the vendor’s telemetry and network validation platform.
Tests performed include:
- Validating Maximum Transmission Units (MTUs) across links
- Verifying that routing sessions (such as BGP peers) come up as expected
- Broader functional validation to catch configuration errors before they reach production
Mishra underscored why automated validation matters in this context: “With automation you can set up 500 switches with the push of a button, but you can also destroy 500 switches with the push of a button. The validation suite looks for functional errors.”
This closed-loop approach—commit code, spin up a virtual lab, run tests, validate before deploying to production—mirrors standard software CI/CD pipelines and brings that discipline to network operations.
Cumulus in the Cloud Updates
Alongside the toolkit release, Cumulus also updated Cumulus in the Cloud, its self-service demo environment. According to the company, the updated environment provides:
- A fully configured spine-and-leaf network topology running Cumulus Linux
- Servers running Ubuntu integrated into the topology
- All nodes connected to and monitored by Cumulus NetQ
- A ready-to-use environment provisioned in under five minutes
- Deployable, production-ready demo scenarios
- Access to the Cumulus NetQ 2.0 CLI and GUI within the demo environment
The demo environment gives network engineers a low-risk way to evaluate the toolkit and NetQ before committing to a production rollout.
Why This Matters for Network DevOps
Network automation has lagged behind application-layer DevOps for years, largely because purpose-built tooling for network IaC was scarce and vendor-specific. By releasing a complete, tested, Ansible-native framework under a permissive license, Cumulus lowered the practical barrier for network teams to adopt GitOps-style workflows for switch configuration and validation.
The use of standard tools—Ansible, Jinja2, GitLab CI—means engineers do not need to learn a proprietary DSL or lock themselves into a single vendor’s management plane. The framework is portable in principle, and community contributions could extend it to support additional platforms and automation engines over time.
Note: Cumulus Networks was acquired by NVIDIA in 2020. Current availability and licensing of this toolkit should be verified against NVIDIA’s current documentation and repositories.