Building a Distribution and Continuous Delivery for Network Devices

At Cisco, we're working to change the way our gear participates in the datacenter ecosystem. Over the next few months, releases of both NXOS and IOS-XR will be released which expose our Linux Hosting environment. This lighting talk is a brief story of our funky embedded linux turning into a faux server distribution and how we built tools to support a CI pipeline along the way. Because Cisco is an enormous company with lots of interesting people and priorities, I'll share some anecdotal stories that should be entertaining or at least amusing (embedded devices are bedeviling in some ways: limited memory, disk, compute, etc.)