Arista Launches Network Automation Software for DevOps

Arista Networks has launched EOS+, a software platform for network programmability and network automation that represents an evolution of the company's EOS (Extensible Operating System).

The software defined networking company said the additional layer of flexibility would appeal to DevOps teams and join the compute, storage, and application teams to integrate with the network. Arista hopes EOS+ will enable use of pre-built and custom EOS applications, as well as integration with a wide range of technology partner solutions.

Arista has built EOS with programmability features from the beginning, and made specific integrations with clouds, technology partners, OpenStack and other environments. Evolving EOS to deliver a formal programming and network automation layer further enhances its offering and helps shift from NetOps to DevOps models of architecting and operating networks.

Arista targets web-scale data center operators, and its customer roster includes Facebook, Morgan Stanley, Netflix, and Equinix. The company had a successful initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in June.

Almost the entire senior management team of Arista comes from Cisco. Earlier this month, the networking giant filed a lawsuit against the SDN company, claiming patent and copyright infringement.

The EOS+ platform is made up of a development framework with native access to all levels of EOS, a vEOS virtual machine instance of EOS, and EOS Consulting Services.

EOS+ use case examples that Arista cites are pre-built applications such as ZTPServer for rapid provisioning and its Network Telemetry Application for Splunk Enterprise. The company also promotes a do-it-yourself cloud networking approach to applications that need to be custom-fit for specific network environments.

Najam Ahmad, vice president of infrastructure at Facebook, an Arista customer, said in a statement, "Arista EOS has proven to be a valuable component of our current designs, providing us with a series of useful features, including better control-plane and data-path programmability, the ability to write traffic steering and monitoring applications that integrate with Sysdb and the entire EOS stack running on our Arista devices, and an SDK framework is fairly easy to develop and test our code in. All this allows us to have more visibility in and greater control over our network — and that helps us continue to move fast as we scale."