Give network engineers some nice hardware to play with and you won’t hear them anymore. If they can then experiment endlessly with it in a virtual test environment, the party is complete. At Cortexia, that environment just had to be ‘built’. Edward van Hazendonk and Roald Aelbers managed to do so over the past few months, which was a party in itself.
Facilitating self-development
Of course, the development of that virtual test environment for network equipment is not pure spin, but ultimately in the interest of both customers and our employees. After all, at Cortexia we think it is super important that colleagues continue to develop themselves. How they do that and which certifications they want to obtain, for example, are largely up to them. As a company, we are only too happy to facilitate all such initiatives in the form of licences, online servers, subscriptions, books and courses, among other things.
‘Cortexia is less numbers-focused than most organisations. The emphasis is on employee satisfaction and that manifests itself in, among other things, freedoms like these,’ says Linux engineer Edward.
Link with new colleagues necessary
According to network engineer Roald, those freedoms go a lot further. ‘As an employer, Cortexia also considers a good work-life balance important. For example, I wanted to be able to spend more time with my family and a day off during the week was not a problem. And although we are hardly ever in the office, as employees we are also actively involved in the selection of new colleagues. There has to be a good click right from the start.’
That click was definitely there between Edward and Roald. Together, with the help of Ansible’s open source software, they tinkered together said test environment.
Virtual test environment
Edward: ‘Before we configure a concrete network at customers’ premises, we obviously want to make sure that everything works. In the aforementioned virtual environment, we can simulate everything without having to have the real hardware in house. Those devices are also far too expensive for that, because you’re talking a tonne or more. Virtualized, we can test at least 70 to 80% of all functionalities, because Ansible can interface with almost all components of the major suppliers. This is no unnecessary luxury, because the number of network components is already huge and the number is growing. ‘
Programming tools themselves
The gentlemen also use the test environment to automate configuration for network equipment, known as the Desired State of Configuration (DSC). Roald: ‘We keep track of all the changes we make in a Git environment, which is an open source version control system. Ansible is not a typical programming language, but a more descriptive one. That makes programming a lot more enjoyable for many network engineers. Because documentation is often scarce in IT fields, we are toying with the idea of building documentation dynamically from configuration management. After all, Ansible has no role to play in that either. Surely, it should be possible to explore IT environments and deploy entire networks in an automated way at the press of a few buttons.’
