Blogs

In the last post I outlined the three major updates that we were releasing at that time. One part of that update was a new version of the Antidote platform, which is what powers NRE Labs. In this post, I’d like to dive a bit deeper into this update specifically, as it included a number of important new features and fixes. Antidote v0.4.0 is the first major platform update to take place since we established our formal community standup meetings, and related community engagement channels.

This has been a very busy summer, and unfortunately, the impact of summer travel on the ability to provide regular updates has been felt strongly. However, I’m happy to report that today, we have something to show for it. This is the first blog post of several that will outline the changes that went live today. In this post, we’ll do a high-level summary of the changes, with some teasers for deeper explanations to come.

NRE Labs has a lot of lessons that provide foundational information and skills on a host of automation tools but workflows are where you start bringing together a few of those tools to accomplish a specific task. The three new workflow lessons in release v0.3.2 are meant to help people bring automation to their production in a meaningful way using a crawl, walk, run approach. When companies are first starting with automation it’s better to start with read-only type automation, simple tasks that if they fail are not going to cause an outage.

Yesterday we pushed a small update, v0.3.2. This only included a few minor fixes to the platform - the main highlight here are three new workflow lessons that focus on using PyEZ, Jinja, YAML, and other tools to accomplish very common workflows that are especially useful in environments where configuration and operational consistency is crucial to the outcome of the business objective or other mission. As a result, this will be a short blog post.

Since we launched the Antidote project and NRE Labs in October, we’ve learned a lot on the fly. It’s no secret that we put this project out extremely early, in the hopes that others would get involved in the construction of this project. Antidote - The “Junk Drawer” Repository One of the things we’ve found valuable is talking very precisely about NRE Labs as a curriculum. It’s true, NRE Labs is represented as a tangible website, running on tangible cloud infrastructure that Juniper Networks happens to be paying the bills for, but the true essence of NRE Labs isn’t any of these - it’s the curriculum that we put out there and has been contributed to over the last half year or so.

On a day like today, you might expect that this post is going to contain some kind of fun prank or joke. Indeed, we did have some April 1st plans for today that ended up being a little more ambitious than we had time to execute, and we did have some good, real content to share, so that takes priority. We’ll have to save the April Fools stuff for next year!