Blogs

Today we’re publishing a new version of the NRE Labs curriculum, with some new content, as well as a few minor updates. A few weeks ago, we relaunched NRE Labs under a new domain, with a brand new lesson UI, and a bunch of new content. As part of that effort, we doubled down on the project’s goals for 2020, which include a heavier emphasis on more frequent content updates.

(This has been cross-posted from the original post, located at packetpushers.net) Wow, 2019 was a big year for NRE Labs. We had just launched at the end of 2018, so in many ways, 2019 was a year of growing up. We released several new versions of both the NRE Labs curriculum and the underlying Antidote platform, but we also put time and effort into establishing the NRE Labs community itself.

Following NRELabs Community Stream #21, we thought it would be a good idea to list the various Network Automation and Cloud Networking certifications available today. Network Automation and Cloud Networking are becoming valuable skillsets. These certifications offer a path for Network Engineers who want to dabble in the dark art of software engineering. Before heading down this path, be aware that software engineering, DevOps, and automation are vast topics. The training for these certifications provide a brief introduction to a large set of topics, each of which other engineers have built entire careers out of.

Last month I teased the three major updates we had released at that time. One of those updates was the new Antidote v0.4.0 platform, which was covered in the following blog post. In this post, I’d like to discuss another of those three updates, which was the migration of the NRE Labs production environment to a new infrastructure host. Note that this blog post discusses the flagship deployment of the NRE Labs project, hosted at https://labs.

It’s hard to believe, but a year ago today, we unveiled NRE Labs to the world. A year later, we’re still committed to providing a “source-neutral” approach–from any relevant vendor as well as open source projects–to learning network automation for the last mile of IT infrastructure. NRE Labs focuses on operations patterns that transcend specific vendor platforms or products. Since May, we’ve held regular weekly standups, where individuals from a range of different backgrounds and organizations have attended and participated in planning, content creation and feedback, testing, contributions, and more.

Each lesson in NRELabs includes a sandbox environment for learners to interact with so they can explore lesson concepts on real systems. This environment consists of one or more docker images. An image could be a linux host, a virtual network appliance, an IP PBX, or really anything that a lesson creator can dream up. But how do these images get created? In this post, we’ll walk through the three stages of image creation.