[RPKI] Gantry: proving the Routinator in the wild

[Ximon Eighteen]

Fellow RPKIers,

I'd like to introduce you to Gantry[0].

Gantry is a tool for automating the deployment and integration testing
of virtual service routers with supporting components such as the NLnet
Labs RPKI tools Routinator[1] and Krill[2].

Gantry is intended initially to answer the question "Does the Routinator
work with real routers?". As the NLnet Labs tools evolve so will the
need increase to test them against a broader set of real routers and to
compare them to similar tools from other providers, and Gantry is
intended to support this vision. However, the use cases go beyond that
and so the thinking is to make it extensible and to gather feedback from
a wider audience such as yourselves.

The 0.1-alpha release[3] of Gantry yesterday is integrated with Travis
CI to demonstrate how Gantry can automatically deploy Nokia SROS and
Juniper VMX virtual service routers to consume VRPs from a Routinator
instance and verify that the router VRP set matches that of the
Routinator, and then tear everything down when finished.

The technology stack is a combination of Docker to run the components,
Docker Engine to provision the hosts in the Digital Ocean cloud and
Ansible to automate the component configuration and testing. Docker is
also used to package the various tools into an easy to use command line
tool aka the Gantry CLI. By using router Docker images built by the
vrnetlab project[4] we can abstract away the differences in router
deployment procedure, and by using Docker Engine the target hosting
environment can easily be switched if needed to something other than
Digital Ocean. Ansible allows for configuration and testing in parallel
of multiple components built upon stock Ansible support for various
virtual service routers[6].

We'd love to get your feedback and to get you involved (pull requests
welcome!). Please take a look at the GitHub site[0] and the latest
Travis CI build result[5], and watch this space for updates!

Thanks,

Ximon

---
[0] https://github.com/NLnetLabs/gantry/
[1] https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/rpki/routinator/
[2] https://www.nlnetlabs.nl/projects/rpki/krill/
[3] https://github.com/NLnetLabs/gantry/releases/tag/v0.1-alpha
[4] https://github.com/plajjan/vrnetlab/
[5] https://travis-ci.com/NLnetLabs/gantry/
[6]
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/network/user_guide/index.html#network-advanced