Fully Automated Testbed of Cisco Virtual Routers in Cloud Based Environments

This paper examines a solution for the automatic deployment of a virtual router network topology in cloud-based environments. The Cisco routers, configured using Ansible, run on virtual machines provisioned with Terraform. By employing configuration management and Infrastructure as Code techniques we managed to devise a fully automated solution to deploy a virtual router infrastructure on several cloud infrastructures. Our approach reduces human intervention, repetitive workloads and errors. The experimental results confirm the efficiency of our solution as the time needed for a minimum router configuration decreased three folds compared to a manual approach. Note that this factor increases even more for more complex configurations.