What do we want? More sandboxes! When do we want them? Now!

It is my pleasure to announce the general availability of several new DevNet sandboxes. We’re continuously monitoring sandbox utilization and listening to our community so that we can continuously improve the user experience we are providing with our sandbox environments.

Let’s start with Catalyst Center, formerly known as DNA Center. Historically we were limited in the availability of Catalyst Center sandboxes because of the tight integration between hardware and software that the platform had mandated for many years. As you might know, Catalyst Center could be purchased in the past only as a hardware appliance. In recent times that requirement has been revised and now we can run Catalyst Center as a virtual machine in AWS or even on premise in a VMware virtual environment. This development had made it much easier for our customers as well as our sandbox team to more easily deploy Catalyst Center instances in virtual lab environments. This allows us to scale the Catalyst Center sandboxes to much higher numbers. For the always on Catalyst Center sandboxes, we can now accommodate 100 users at the same time while for the reservable instances we went from 4 to 25 available instances! These sandboxes have been very popular over the years so I am happy that we are able to get much more people to use and take advantage of them. The reservable instances can be all yours for up to 4 days with the small caveat that it takes about 60 minutes to have all the components of the sandbox come online. They are currently running version 2.3.7.4 of Catalyst Center and there is also a Cisco ISE server available if you want to deploy SDA fabrics.

Next, let’s talk about CI/CD pipelines and a brand new sandbox we have for you to build and test automation pipelines. I have been advocating for using CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure automation and programmability for a while and I had the pleasure of running a workshop on exactly this topic at Ansible Fest in Denver earlier this year. As part of the workshop, we had the attendees follow the guide available on https://developer.cisco.com/docs on how to use GitLab together with Ansible, Cisco pyATS, Cisco CML and Cisco NX-OS to build a fully functional CI/CD pipeline for infrastructure automation. I am super excited to share now with all of you that the sandbox we used for that event is publicly available in the DevNet sandbox catalog together with the lab (https://developer.cisco.com/learning/labs/ansible-fest-2024-cicd/introduction/) that guides you on how to build and use these pipelines. We have up to 15 of these sandboxes available at all times for up to 5 days per reservation. Go ahead and give them a try and witness the magic of using network automation with CI/CD pipelines.

Last but not least, the team has done a fantastic job at rebuilding the Meraki sandboxes from scratch. Similar to the Catalyst Center sandboxes of the old, we were limited by hardware on how many Meraki sandboxes we could make available to our community. That has completely changed and now the new Meraki sandboxes are entirely virtual. We have serial numbers available for virtual Meraki devices that we can scale to much larger numbers. For the reservable sandboxes, we kept the two flavors, small business and enterprise. For both of these you get access to an MX, MS and MR virtual devices and for the enterprise one, we have also included an MV camera virtual device.

Go ahead and give all these sandboxes a try and let us know what you think.

P.S. We will have additional announcements about new DevNet sandboxes very soon. I don’t want to spoil too much those announcements but let’s just say that if you were looking to test Catalyst 9000 hardware switches and didn’t have access to a lab environment, that will change very soon :).

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