As we continue our journey of openness that is summarized by ZK Research: Cisco's Data Center Strategy is Built on Openness, we announced the Open NX-OS at Cisco Live San Diego in June 2015 that runs on Nexus 3K andNexus 9K platforms.

The Open NX-OS extensibility supports:

• Object store and model-driven NX-API enhancements. NX-API enables common programmatic approach across entire Nexus switch portfolio (Nexus 2000 through Nexus 9000 switches)
• Built-in third party DevOps automation tools like Puppet
• Secure SDK enabling third party and custom application development running natively on NX-OS

The new programmability features in Open NX-OS, such as the bash shell environment, python interpreter and NX-API access, it enables the built-in DevOps Puppet tool to be extended to automate anything on the platform.Cisco and Puppet Labs are excited to make available the Puppet Cisco[NX-OS agent] http://docs.puppetlabs.com/pe/latest/install_nxos.html

and Cisco[Puppet Forge Module] http://forge.puppetlabs.com/puppetlabs/ciscopuppet

Companies are embracing software defined networking (SDN) and DevOps practices to deploy network changes repeatedly and consistently. Customers who run mega scale data centers like Web2.0/OTT and fortune 100 are looking to do more with less, increase "device:admin" ratio and agility, and respond faster to business needs in a world where continuous application update grows by the hour without breaking infrastructure operation.

Using Puppet Enterprise, you can not only realize those SDN benefits, but you also extend DevOps practices to network administration across mega scale data centers, commercial and  large enterprises by defining your desired network configuration with infrastructure as code.  Using infrastructure as code enables cross-team change collaboration, automated infrastructure testing, and automated application deployments that span compute, storage, and network.