Using TaaS to Empower Engineers

The unprecedented growth of the Internet and the associated need for a complex set of network platforms that brings Enterprise, Data Center, and Service Provider networks together demands a software development environment that not only scales but seamlessly supports testing of changes across a myriad of platforms. Most of our software code base doesn’t have an end of life (EOL), which presents a unique set of challenges.

To put things in perspective, for a given software change—whether it’s a new platform enablement or feature development or bug fixes—our developers and testers should have a better view of dependent platforms, controllers, topologies, and use cases that need to be validated. This may quickly become an N dimensional problem for a human mind to deal with, let alone the unique needs of 10K+ software engineers. A TaaS solution is our attempt to solve this at-scale problem by:

• Profiling code execution and mapping the test cases
• Linking the changes made in the source code to the affected products and use cases
• Identifying and deploying network infrastructure resources (supported by Lab as a Service) required to test the changes
• Running the tests relevant to the changes using our test framework powered by pyATS, shared libraries, and test suites
• Collecting and analyzing test results
• Presenting the results back to the developer just in time to take appropriate action

We’re building this as a microservices-based, cloud-native application on the foundation of containerized tools communicating via the REST API that feature high-availability and enterprise-grade security. TaaS epitomizes everything Cisco is famous for—consistency at scale.

We’re proud of our achievements so far and will continue towards our journey of enabling customer specific test runs in our lab prior to software release for our customer by our customers! In my next post, I’ll share our approach to Lab as a Service (LaaS), which is an important part of TaaS.

Thoughts and how are you approaching a similar set of challenges?