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Juniper Apstra Part II - Building a data center rack

In this post, we'll start designing the building blocks for our data center deployment with Juniper Apstra. We'll look at how to design a rack.

Introduction

Designing a rack is a fairly involved process. To be completely thorough, we're going to define new logical devices, create interface maps for these and then put it all together to build a rack. Naturally, some of these terms (logical devices, interface maps and so on) are Apstra specific - not to worry, we'll break it all down and understand what these are and how they are used.

Before we dive into this, I'd like to talk about why Apstra does things this way and what the methodology is. Why build these abstracted models? Why racks?

When you're building out a data center (physically), you'd know that there are a lot of things that simply repeat. Racks are usually identical - or at best you have a few types of racks servicing specific things, and those types of racks repeat. This can include how many leafs per rack, the redundancy model is usually common across the organization, how many servers and so on. You're typically buying identical physical racks as well (like a 42RU rack) and so on.

Juniper Apstra Part I - Introducing a true IBNS

With this post, we kick off a new series based on Juniper Apstra. This post serves as an introduction to Apstra - we'll look at what a true IBN system is, how relational and graph databases are different (and why graph databases are ideal for network infrastructure), concluding with some general workflows in Apstra.

Introduction

It's that time again - time for a new series! And I am really excited for this one. I am going to be kicking off a Juniper Apstra series with this first post. This post will look at what Intent Based Networking truly is, and what an Intent Based Networking System (IBNS) looks like.

We'll then take a bit of a detour and talk about databases - I felt it was important to (at minimum) gain a basic understanding of relational and graph databases and why one is better suited than the other for network infrastructure. Graph databases form a crucial pillar of Apstra.

Finally, we'll close this out by looking at some generic workflows within Apstra - I've broken this down into simple, high level flows without going into too much detail. Not to worry, the details will come in subsequent posts.

Let's get started!

Disclaimer

As a disclaimer, I'd like to say that a lot of what I've written about IBN and IBN systems here, comes from reading papers and book(s) written by the fantastic Jeff Doyle. There is no intent to plagiarize his work.