DEVOPSdigest

Cumulus Networks launched the Cumulus Networks Solutions Marketplace, a central repository of community-generated solutions to showcase the openness of the Cumulus Linux platform.

The Marketplace makes it easier for network engineers and cloud architects to standardize and customize their system architecture by bringing a diverse set of existing and new community-led efforts to light.

Customers and community members now have a platform to search, download, or contribute third party solutions that integrate with Cumulus Linux in a way that isn’t possible with proprietary software, which creates vendor lock-in with a closed ecosystem. However, with the power of a Linux operating system optimized for networking, innovation is possible. These third-party solutions extend to Automation, Network Services, Monitoring, Containers, Inventory Management as well as upstream Linux networking projects such as Quagga.

The Solutions Marketplace brings diverse ideas and innovative use cases together in one place, fostering deeper knowledge-sharing and collaboration among the community, while facilitating a “path to production” for engineers and architects aiming to implement next-generation networking solutions. Many solutions in the Marketplace leverage Cumulus VX, which allows for solutions testing and simulation in a virtual environment, prior to production deployment.

Members of the Cumulus Linux community have already been actively submitting, testing and updating how they are utilizing and extending the power of Cumulus Linux with third-party solutions. More than 40 solutions are searchable at launch, which include virtualized demos, migration scripts, and extensions to aid in routine maintenance. Users browsing the Marketplace can contact the original author of a solution to gain further insight into how it was created and implemented, and can also contribute back via collaborative source code tools such as GitHub.

“As staunch advocates of the power of open source technology, we know that having a community that is sharing, collaborating and contributing best practices and learnings is critical to its continued success and progress,” said JR Rivers, CTO and Co-founder, Cumulus Networks. “The real value of the Cumulus Linux platform is in the flexibility it enables when paired with other solutions. We created the Solutions Marketplace to make it easier for our passionate community to foster further innovation, and help our customers in their pursuit of building better, faster, easier networks.”

More than 500 organizations of all sizes – from small businesses to the largest web-scale data centers in the world – use Cumulus Linux, the original operating system for Open Networking, to build affordable, high capacity networks.