Arista-cats curl up in cloudy containers

Painting the boxes white

Bowing to the inevitable, Arista has decided to risk cannibalising its hardware sales and is making its Extensible Operating System (EOS) available for container deployment as cEOS).

cEOS uses the same software image as the EOS baked into the company's hardware. HPE is on board, supporting EOS running on its Altoline white-box range, and Microsoft is putting cEOS on its SONiC (software for open networking in the cloud) to handle BGP.

Other platforms should follow, since the initiative has also been endorsed by chip vendor Broadcom.

It will run on Arista's own platforms, naturally enough, but the company expects support on other bare metal switch and standard VMs and containers will follow.

Running cEOS alongside other containers means it can sit alongside other virtual network functions like network monitoring or automation. The company says the core EOS module has been extended to “provide a lightweight module for use in network modelling, development and validation in the cloud”.

That's handy for network designers, Arista says, because they can develop in cEOS before deploying to an existing EOS-based production network.

Other aspects of container support include:

• EOS can run concurrently with other applications as a VM, native Linux application, or in containers; and
• EOS's Container Tracer handles automatic discovery and provisioning of container workloads in EOS or in external containers. ®