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Try EDA#

We believe that EDA embodies what a network automation of the modern age should look like - declarative and programmable abstractions for both configuration and state, streaming-based engine, equipped with network-wide queries, extensible and multivendor-capable.
And we don't want you to blindly take our word for it, instead we made EDA easily accessible1 so that both network engineers and cloud practitioners could be the judge.
With no license and no registration required, you are mere couple commands away from having the full EDA experience wherever you are - with your laptop, in the cloud or logged in the VM.

To deliver the "Try EDA" experience, we have created an EDA playground - a repository that contains everything you need to install and provision a demo EDA instance with the virtual network on the side. Let us guide you through the installation process.

  1. Choose where to run EDA

    Since EDA uses Kubernetes as its application platform, you can deploy the EDA Playground anywhere a k8s cluster runs.
    The most popular way to install the demo EDA instance is on a Linux server/VM, but you can also run it on macOS, in an existing Kubernetes cluster, or on Windows using WSL.

  2. Ensure minimal system requirements are met

    Regardless of whether you run EDA Playground locally on a laptop, or in a VM locally or in the cloud, the underlying k8s cluster should have the following resources available to it2:

    10 vCPUs
    16GB of RAM
    30GB of storage

    For a VM-based installation, this means that the VM should be provisioned with (at the minium) this amount of resources.

  3. Clone the EDA Playground repository

    Proceed with cloning the EDA playground repository that contains everything you need to install and provision a demo EDA instance.

    If you are using a Linux VM or a server to deploy the Playground, you should clone the repository on that VM/server.

    You will need git3 to clone it:

    git clone https://github.com/nokia-eda/playground && \
cd playground

  4. Prepare the VM/Server

    If you are deploying the EDA Playground on a VM/Server, you should take care of the following:

    Install make that orchestrates the installation of the EDA Playground.

    sudo apt install -y make

    sudo yum install -y make

    Install docker using our automated installer, if you don't have it already installed:

    make install-docker

    Or install it manually, by following the official Docker installation guide for your OS. If you installed docker via the package manager of your distribution, remove it and install as per the Docker installation guide.

    Ensure sudo-less docker access

    After completing the docker installation, check if you can run docker commands without sudo by running:

    docker ps

    If you get a permission denied error, then you need to add your user to the docker group:

    1. Create the docker group.

      sudo groupadd docker

    2. Add your user to the docker group.

      sudo usermod -aG docker $USER

    3. Log out and log back in so that your group membership is re-evaluated.

    Ensure the relevant sysctl values are properly sized by pasting and running the following:

    make configure-sysctl-params

  5. Install the EDA Playground

    To configure the EDA Playground installation you need to provide a single variable - the domain name or IP address of the machine where you install EDA.

    • In case of a VM, it is the IP address or a domain name of the VM.
    • If you are using ssh tunnel to access the VM, then provide localhost as the EXT_DOMAIN_NAME value4.

    With the IP/domain-name noted, set the EXT_DOMAIN_NAME environment variable in your shell:

    export EXT_DOMAIN_NAME=<Insert-DNS-name-or-IP-of-the-VM/server>

    LLM Key for the Natural Language Query

    If you want to enable the Natural Language support for the EDA Query functionality, provide the LLM key (OpenAI) with an additional environment variable5:

    export LLM_API_KEY=<your-OpenAI-API-key>

    Now, run the EDA installer:

    make try-eda #(1)!

    1. If EXT_DOMAIN_NAME environment variable left unset, the hostname of the machine where you executed the make command will be used.

      preferences file

      Instead of providing the configuration values such as EXT_DOMAIN_NAME and EXT_HTTPS_PORT on the command line, you can also provide them in a prefs.mk file that comes with the playground repository.

    The installation will take approximately 10 minutes to complete. Once it is done, you can optionally verify the installation.

    EDA License

    As you may have noticed, the EDA Playground installation does not require a license. We wanted to ensure that automation with EDA is accessible to everyone, anytime.
    The EDA system can perfectly run without a license with the following caveats:

    • Only virtual, CX-nodes can be onboarded. These are SR Linux nodes that will be deployed for you by the time make try-eda step finishes. No hardware, nor containerlab nodes can be used in an unlicensed EDA mode.
    • No integration with the cloud systems such as Openstack, VMware, etc.

  6. Access the UI

    EDA is an API-first framework, with its UI being a client of the very same API. At the end of the make try-eda output you will find the URL to access the UI.

    --> Exposing the UI to the host across the kind container boundary
--> The UI can be accessed using https://10.10.1.1:9443 #(1)!
--> Started background port forward with process id: 897027
--> INFO: EDA is launched
    1. Instead of 10.10.1.1 IP you will see the value you provided in the EXT_DOMAIN_NAME environment variable.

    Open your web browser and navigate to provided URL to access the EDA UI. As you would expect, credentials are required in order to log in. The default credentials are as follow:

    • Username: admin
    • Password: admin

Now that you completed the installation, you can either read more on the installation details, or continue with creating your first unit of automation with EDA.

Production installation

For a production installation instructions, please refer to the Software Installation document.

  1. As no other framework of comparable scale. ↩

  2. This as well accounts for the playground network topology. ↩

  3. Many distributions come with git preinstalled, but if not you should install it via your package manager.
    For instance with apt-enabled systems:

    sudo apt install -y git
     ↩

  4. In case of a local port forwarding you will access EDA UI via https://localhost:9443 when establishing the tunnel with:

    ssh -L 9443:localhost:9443 -N -f demo-vm
     ↩

  5. You can provide the LLM key after the installation as well. ↩