ProVision’s IPAM Module continues to get feature updates, so here are some highlights of recent additions that you may find interesting.
One idea that customers brought up was Sparse Allocation support for IPv6. The challenge we ran into was that after talking to several customers about their use cases, we ended up with several different legitimate approaches to sparse allocation. Then the fun began – how could we provide flexibility to perform sparse allocation duties without sacrificing performance, data accuracy and consistency?
Enter – the Numbering Authority!
The Numbering Authority (accessible from the Admin -> IPAM Admin menu) is a big step up in aligning IP engineering allocation policies to usable API endpoints. Typically this type of flexibility required significant programming or scripting – which increases complexity just to ensure that your allocation workflows work as intended. With these features, 6connect is trying to make the policy embedded as automated as possible so that day-to-day operations don’t have to be allocation policy experts. For typical provisioning users, this makes life easier for common tasks. For automated integrated systems, this approach provides a significant improvement for provisioning speed and accuracy across clouds.
With some of the number sequencing features, we were then able to augment this capability to bring in data validation at a different level. Our new Constraints features allow for enforcement of a variety of different metadata to ensure that automated or manual data entry gets the same treatment and doesn’t get stale in high volume multi-user provisioning environments.
Constraints introduce the ability to tie into UI binding with your metadata. This means that you get more levers to tie things together and build out policies. Initially, the Constraints system was focused on IPAM metadata, but customer feedback allowed us to drive forward additional definitions as part of the ProVision Resource System – which greatly increases the ability to keep the back end accurate as you integrate with third-party technologies and systems.
Constraints allow a variety of expressions to validate metadata as part of any provisioning workflow. Since these can be applied independent of the API call, different constraints can be applied in a straightforward manner to the same workflow. This eases the development overhead of developing specific workflows or API calls for every use case and simplifies unit testing.
Keep an eye out for this feature, and feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions or additional functionality you would like to see!