Announcing Emulation Cloud: The Ultimate DIY Playground for Web-Scale IT

Fady Masoud is Senior Advisor for Technical Marketing within Ciena's Portfolio Solutions Group responsible for data center interconnect (DCI) solutions. He is co-author of the Experts Guide to OTN and brings 20 years of expertise and insights on architecture and requirements of next-gen optical platforms.

If you’re fed up with sluggish development, disjointed software pieces and endless API cloud integration issues then keep reading for some seriously good news. Ciena’s new Emulation Cloud is here to put a stop to the inefficiencies and guesswork of the past and allow users to create, test, and fine-tune customized network applications in a sandbox-style environment.  

Cloud-based services, content distribution, and new IT offerings emerging from virtualization are all creating web-scale traffic demands — this is no secret. We’re seeing an increase in our customers’ requirements for flexibility and programmability in order to accommodate these demands. Making the shift to web-scale IT requires a new generation of networking platforms specially designed to carry the heavy load. Today, that new generation of platforms arrives.

Introducing Emulation Cloud

In simple terms, Ciena’s Emulation Cloud is an open application development environment — a one-stop-shop for customers and third-party developers when creating new tools with Ciena’s rich and open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

This DIY playground was designed to unlock the full potential of these APIs by providing a development portal where customers can innovate and develop new applications without investing in IT infrastructure. Much like smartphones and their associated application development environments, the Emulation Cloud can be used to develop any application that leverages Ciena’s APIs, such as apps for enhanced network visualization, fault and capacity notification, data center cluster management, or even detailed performance monitoring.

The platform also functions as a virtual lab where users can specify the specific equipment configuration they want to use, and then connect to the emulated network elements through a Ciena-provided Swagger GUI or directly from the user’s development environment through direct links to the virtual machines. This allows the emulation of Ciena products for testing code and scripts ahead of deployment in “real world” environments. Plus, by innovating, experimenting, and testing new service models on virtual network resources, users dramatically lower their exit and entry costs.

Connectivity & Collaboration in the Cloud

The Emulation Cloud opens up access to a variety of tools and capabilities designed to ease development efforts, such as chat groups and forums for collaboration, as well as a library full of code snippets, video tutorials, and complete sets of documentation for all open APIs—including Ciena’s Waveserver, a stackable interconnect system for data center interconnect (DCI) applications.

Ciena’s Emulation Cloud empowers its users with the tools to emulate specific Ciena product and network configurations, model what-if scenarios, and overlay different information sources to create intelligent and innovative software tools that redefine the operational paradigm.

The Emulation Cloud supports the Waveserver and will extend to other Ciena platforms throughout the year.

If you’re ready to add some torque to your cloud development workflow then Emulation Cloud is your ticket. For DIY data center managers and DevOps teams, you’ll feel right at home putting this tool to work for you.

Ready to get started? Check out the Emulation Cloud webpage and register for my upcoming API webinar on April 28 at 11am ET.