why I am building PixelCake
Networks are drawn first.
Every network starts as a drawing: a whiteboard, a napkin, a slide. Then the drawing gets lost, and the network lives on in config files and in somebody's head. PixelCake is my attempt to keep the drawing alive.
Two tools I could not make peace with
Both are good at what they do. Neither is where I want to think about a network.
It taught half the industry how a network works. It is also ugly, and it only speaks Cisco.
Real networks are a mix of vendors. And a tool you open every day should be one you enjoy looking at.
It builds exactly what you wrote. But nobody thinks a network in a text file.
You decide a network with a marker in your hand. Only then do you write it down.
What I want instead
One place to do three things with a network.
Design
Draw it like on a whiteboard, with the real thing behind every line: ports, addresses, VLANs. Any vendor, or none.
Ask
Ask it a question in plain words. Does this PC reach that server? If it does not, see where the packet stops, and why.
Present
Show it to someone who was not in the room: a colleague, a customer, yourself in six months. A drawing that explains itself, and answers back.
Where it is today
Still young. Here is what is real today, and what is not yet.
| Design | works | Devices, links, ports and network cards, with their addresses, VLANs, routes, firewall rules, NAT, DHCP and DNS, grouped in named areas. Several boards per project, saved as a file you keep. |
|---|---|---|
| Ask | works, on small networks | Ping, web, download and email flows are followed hop by hop through VLANs, routing tables, firewall rules and NAT, and the answer says which device decided what. A device can take its address from DHCP, and be called by its name through DNS. It does not go down to single frames: there is no ARP and no spanning tree, and routes are static. |
| Present | works | A presentation mode puts the editing tools away. You ask by clicking two devices, you break a cable or a device, and you see what stops working. The board goes out as a picture, PNG or SVG. |
| Code | still a sketch | The drawing exports to YAML and loads back. The Terraform export cannot be applied yet. |
It is not trying to be Packet Tracer feature for feature, and it does not build anything the way Terraform does. It is the place before both: where the network is still a drawing, and you can already ask it questions.
The end of the line is still code. Once the drawing is right, it should hand itself over to the tools that build it.
Terraform, I don't hate you. I just want to draw first.