Transcript -
Other Parts :
2. https://raaki-88.medium.com/free-cloud-router-part-2-e5714fa13557
Intro — I secretly always wish that I had access to an online cloud router to quickly verify things, many of us tried installation of GNS3, lab-routers and whatnot, but having the power to connect to one special cloud router to quickly check a few things and play with API to power-off and power-on and try few things around cloud automation is also cool, besides no matter how fast our laptops get, the browsers also evolve to compete with RAM, CPU and Memory and running a bulky router which takes 4 VCPU’s and 8 Gig’s of RAM is not the best effort.
This 5 part series will explain and show what I did, how you could also do the same to have a free cloud router (for a limited amount of time) wherein you can play around API and command-line aspects, to stay within the free tier, the choice of the router will be Juniper vMX, this is fantastic as we will leverage the usage of logical systems and logical-tunnel interfaces to build multiple routers which can do all of the L3 Routing with ease, you should never need complicated setups to learn Routing protocols
First Things :
First things first, let’s quickly register ourselves with Digital-Ocean Platform, the reason for choosing Digital ocean is by default Digital Ocean Droplets does KVM which helps virtualisation of our vMX, other clouds do support it but probably they are not in the free tier limits.
It is important that you search for digital ocean free credit and have a 100$ developer credit if you want to try the platform first, the normal sign-up process will mostly not grant this start-up credit and you will end up paying for the droplet.
Choice of Router:
Our Choice will always be the below one in the free-range
It’s under Shared CPU with 8GB / 4 CPUs / 160GB SSD Disk / 5 TB Transfer — This will be a perfect candidate for running vMX trial image which by default has most of the features required for Certification and also verifying protocols but obviously, you won’t be able to run that in production.
This Choice will cost us 80$/month if we plan to use it all through the month costing us 0.119$/hour, but practically speaking we won’t be running it on a daily basis 24x7, hence the initial 100$ credit that Digital ocean provides is more than enough to get this router up to two months of aggressive usage as the restriction is that Credit has to be spent in 2 months from the date of sign-up, I had run into problems and came up with a small Python script which can be used to manage Docker, VRNET lab will be the package that we will use to make a Docker container based on vMX image and it has some limitations on configuration persistence, we can address it easily with some scripting.
Let’s spin the Droplet :
Spinning the droplet is easy, Create new, select the nearest Data Center and indicate a few connectivity options, I would suggest giving it a floating IP so that it’s always the same and the script that we use can use the same IP to power on and power-off the device.
Once we access the Droplet, we will install python3-pip and docker.io packages for our next steps, commands are in the description.
Links
My Blog: https://r2079.wordpress.com My Git: https://github.com/yukthr Links: Search Engine — Digital ocean 100$ Developer credit sign-up https://www.digitalocean.com/
vMX — https://www.juniper.net/us/en/products/routers/mx-series/vmx-virtual-router-software.html VRNET lab
