The concept of Development Operations (DevOps) relates to optimizing the lifecycle of applications and services through collaboration and cooperation between development and operations teams. The desired outcome for DevOps is to facilitate rapid development cycles, increase application scalability and stability, and enable a flexible and agile infrastructure. Fundamental aspects of DevOps include:

• Simplification of processes and workflows used to deploy infrastructure
• Workload scalability
• Integrated lifecycle management

Infrastructure automation, driven by programmability, is a key enabler for the DevOps tranformation. Open NX-OS introduces a broad set of tools, features, and capabilities to facilitate network automation.

The rest of this section will discuss Open NX-OS features that enable automation and DevOps, including:

• Native Linux-based management of Open NX-OS
• Agent-based Configuration Management Systems (such as Puppet, Chef)
• Agentless Management Systems (Ansible)
• NX-API REST Programmability
• Automation of switch provisioning operations (POAP, Ignite)