Thanks to the work of the IOx engineering team and the DevNet Sandbox team, Cisco Fog Director is now available in the DevNet Sandbox. The IOx lab was updated to include a second IOx-enabled device instance and a separate third instance to run Fog Director. With this Sandbox lab, a developer can get experience with accessing the Fog Director APIs and deploying/managing fog applications on IOx-enabled devices.
When you now login to the IOx Sandbox lab, it looks like the following:
In addition to showing off the capabilities of Fog Director, it was important to create a realistic environment for developers to not only create but deploy their applications. This is because, in reality, a typical fog deployment is not likely to have a sole application. In fact, a fog deployment is likely to have tens, hundreds or even thousands of applications deployed across an environment. Knowing how a developer can utilize the deployment process, manage the application life-cycle, and test applications that use the configuration values as part of their deployment are core skills for IOx development.
For testing, the IOx Sandbox makes it trivial to deploy and test multiple applications against two separate devices. If you still just need a single instance for testing - it works the same as before.
Finally, a new bit of sample code has been added to the iox-app-template repository on the Cisco DevNet GitHub page. Located at https://github.com/CiscoDevNet/iox-app-template/tree/master/paas-python-config, the paas-python-config project is a simple Platform-as-a-Service application showing how a developer might customize a configuration during deployment from Fog Director. This is inherently useful for deploying the same code with variables or other information passed in when the application is actually deployed.
If you are interested in edge computing and want to see the latest work from Cisco on how applications are managed in the fog, I encourage you to visit the Sandbox Remote Labs via https://developer.cisco.com/site/devnet/sandbox/ and reserve a free IOx instance for yourself. From there, visit the DevNet portal for IOx at https://developer.cisco.com/site/iox/ for an overview, documentation, and other useful pointers.
Kudos to the IOx engineering and DevNet Sandbox support teams for making this happen.
About Cisco Fog Director
Cisco Fog Director delivers the capability to manage large-scale production deployments of IOx-enabled fog applications. Control the IOx application life-cycle from initial deployment through ongoing change management and application retirement. Choose to use the product functionality through a visual web environment or integrate with existing management systems through APIs. Fog Director supports both application-centric and network infrastructure-centric views to optimize productivity.
http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/cloud-systems-management/fog-director/index.html
About the Cisco DevNet Sandbox
The Cisco DevNet Sandbox provides free hosted labs for integrating and working with Cisco Technologies. The developer-focused labs offer dedicated hardware for use in testing, evaluation, testing, and building proof of concept projects in areas like Networking, Collaboration, IoT, Cloud, Security, Data Center, Analytics and Automation.
https://developer.cisco.com/site/devnet/sandbox/