ArcOS IaaC Automation & Orchestration
From power-on to production-ready: a zero-touch provisioning pipeline for whitebox switches
Rack it, power it, walk away
Compute and storage moved to Infrastructure-as-Code years ago. Network fabric bring-up still depends on console cables, manual configuration and tribal knowledge. Manually provisioning a single 32-leaf, 4-spine pod can take more than 40 engineer-hours, and most ZTP implementations stop once DHCP hands out an IP address.
This technical whitepaper shows how Arrcus ArcOS closes that gap with a fully autonomous, four-phase pipeline:
Bare-metal NOS deployment via ONIE. DHCP-driven firmware and ArcOS installation, with no USB drive or console needed.
- Zero-Touch Provisioning (Day-0). A Python bootstrap script discovers the platform, upgrades the image if needed, renders config from Jinja2 templates and stages it through ArcAPI.
- Event-driven callback orchestration. After boot, the switch announces itself to a central controller, which automatically runs the right leaf or spine Ansible playbook.
- Day-1/2 lifecycle management via Git and Ansible. Every change is version-controlled, tested in CI/CD and applied atomically with candidate/commit semantics, so it’s rollback-safe.
Built on open standards (YANG, OpenConfig, NETCONF, RESTCONF and gRPC), ArcOS works with any northbound orchestrator and needs no proprietary agents. The paper also covers troubleshooting, monitoring and validation, plus appendices with sample ZTP scripts, callback listener code, DHCP configuration and base templates.
Download the whitepaper to see how to take a whitebox switch from cold power-on to production-ready without a single operator keystroke.
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