Crocum [WIP]

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TL:DR

Crocum is a PaaS designed to train network engineers on automatically created, deleted, and checked by terms of reference network labs. Educational platforms can access Crocum via the RESTful API written on ~~Flask~~ FastAPI (WIP).

Test instance: crocum.ktp0li.su [WIP, ip whitelist]

Why?

~~Because I can.~~ None of the existing solutions on the market, whether for personal or corporate use, can automate the checking of labs. I was very sad to see my teachers spending hours on manual checks. Crocum is suitable for both personal and corporate use, in which case I take care of the servers, the client only needs to use the provided API.

Architerture

<img src="./pics/architecture.png" width="500"/>

• OpenNebula

Used for globally control VMs, nets, storage, etc on multiple hosts. It is also ideal for horizontal scaling.

• Terraform

Used for declarative description of labs infra (VMs, nets, address ranges, templates, etc).

• PyTest & QEMU Guest Agent

VMs are in isolated networks, making it impossible to use Ansible/Salt. So I decided to use for checking purposes tests written on PyTest with module testinfra. Then tests are run on VMs using QEMU Guest Agent, tracing their output.

• ~~Flask~~ FastAPI (WIP)

Crocum's final form, allowing create, destroy and check labs by one request. PostgreSQL is used for storing info about users and labs.

• DB model

Coming soon...

Example of lab (named lab1)

<img src="./pics/netplan.svg" width="400"/>

Terraform configs for this lab are stored in ./terraform/lab1, tests are stored in ./tests

TODO

• [X] Write a delightful README
• [X] Deploy Crocum on my home server
• [X] Finalize qemu-ga module for API
• [ ] Rewrite API on FastAPI
• [ ] DOCKERIZE!!111!!
• [ ] Deploy a pretty cluster of >= 3 OpenNebula instances
• [ ] Fix phantom problem with Terraform (troubles with OpenNebula provider???)
• [ ] Draw cute logo
• [ ] Maybe create simple frontend???