Pictured above is an awesome CI/CD DevNet Sandbox that unfortunately glitched out!
The CI/CD Pipeline Sandboxes seem glitch prone from my experiences tonight, which is not surprising given the complexity, however I will leave the lab up to the point Drone / Gogs glitched out as there was a basic getting it started guide which failed to Deploy.
In working with DevNet Sandboxes this weekend and Cisco Learning Labs that were sprinkled into my Cisco DevNet Study Group, I believe the best order to learn topics would be:
- Learning Labs – Generic Interface, teaches concepts thoroughly probably enough to pass the exam, but really needs to be reinforced by a real interface
- Sandboxes – Awesome resource for techs you can’t get exposure to otherwise, Sandboxes include basic guide to get started, though in my experience these have been glitchy
- Home Lab / Cloud Lab – While you need to know the Cisco tech for exam day, most DevNet topics seem to be the same thing with a different name across vendor platforms, and having no guide (building it from scratch) will really reinforce the real world aspects
I will be turning my attention back to Learning Labs next to get the basics down, and with the basic concepts of components needed, I think I’ll jump to configure from scratch possibly even just on my Linux VM with Jenkins / Docker / Kubernetes / GitHub / Ansible.
A little more detailed explanation of DevNet Sandboxes if you’ve never used them
Even the “Reservation Required” Sandboxes were ready to spin up immediately, took about 15 minutes for them to complete setup (when they worked), and having real Cisco Applications to work with even if some are glitchy is amazing.
I did feel the setup guide was great to understand exactly what needed to be done where, I felt it made completing the objective almost too easy, so I will be working on my home gear / AWS platform as much as possible where possible
Be sure to open the Sandbox and check Learning Lab pre-reqs to get the most out of Sandboxes!
Some of the Learning Labs have you setup accounts / systems used in conjunction with the Sandbox Guide, so I’d recommend doing the pre-req Learning Labs before the Boxes.
With that I will take a stroll through the CI/CD Pipeline DevNet Sandbox!
The first step in creating the CI/CD Pipeline is logging into the pre-configured Sandbox user account for Gogs Web GUI, and a new GIT term or mechanism is introduced here of “Create Migration” from a DevNet GitHub Repository as shown below once “Migrated” :
This repository came from https://github.com/CiscoDevNet/iox-docker-python-web for future reference, however for this Lab I grabbed iox-docker-python-web Repo.
Next I log in with the pre-canned “Drone” account for the Sandbox, it auto-detects Gogs test GIT Repository, and within this test I jump in and associate a Docker account to utilize:
Under “Secrets” you will have to add the username and password separate as shown here, with the “Name” being docker_username and docker_password and then the values are the actual username and password of whichever account you decide to use.
At this point I am trying to get into Kubernetes within the lab, but the Web GUI is refusing the connection, so I am stuck with SSH and see how far I can get into the lab with this:
Aside from noticing this hiccup the next step is to put in my labbing Docker account into the “drone.yml” file in the Sandbox Repository as shown here, and commit the change:
Also a quick side screen shot I wanted to add on here is from one of the IOx devices that is managed by Fog Director is shown here for future reference:
I have never seen this dashboard before, its pretty straight forward in terms that its running on Linux and target storage is going to be coming from Docker, I am not entirely sure at this point what to have rocking on my Docker Hub to feed into this but forward we march!
Aaaaand then I hit my second DevNet Sandbox for the lab session:
At this point Drone should be showing activity here, I did some troubleshooting but I am not sure what to look for in this SandBox pre-canned scenario, so I unfortunately was stopped here at this point.
There is a lot the screenshots do not show like navigating around the technologies shown
It was a bummer to have the first sandbox completely fail, then the second show signs of glitches followed by brick wall glitch shown above, but it was definitely worth just logging into the systems to navigate the systems so I’d definitely recommend giving them a spin.
I am sure I’ll be labbing quite a bit in them for DNA / NSO / UCS / Etc.
Until next time! 🙂
The DEVNET GRIND! 