Athos
The final part of Holistix is the push-on-green module, which builds and automates network testing and verification. Push-On-Green is a method for automatically updating production systems in a secure and controlled manner. Push-on-green processes are intended to maintain software systems in production with minimum effort and downtime.
Athos will configure, based on the Miru’s file, a fully emulated network, which includes the control and data planes. It will then proceed to go through each of the members and ensure their connectivity over IPv4/6, with or without VLAN tagging, works. Then the failure detection, the redundancy mechanism will be tested by cutting off links and turning off switches.
In figure 2, we could see that Athos can be called from within Miru. The goal was to create one place for the operator to plan, test, and evaluate their network. Figure 3 shows the architecture diagram for Holistix, where Miru and Athos are designed as separate modules and communicate with each other via IXP Manager. As part of the Holistix design, Athos uses the OpenFlow Faucet controller and supports OpenFlow switches as well as Umbrella core switches programmed in p4_lang.
