Development of a custom-made Network Infrastructure with End-User Services and an hyper-converged NLP Assistant

The main purpose of this project is to setup a complete Network Infrastructure providing advanced end-user services, with the addition of an innovative NLP assistant for system management, which goes under the name of David. This thesis will serve as a detailed report for the creation of the entire system, divided in three parts: Network (Chapter 2), Virtual Farm (Chapter 3) and David itself (Chapter 4). This order actually follows the same order of the project development. In fact, the main goal was to provide the basic network access. Later on, many services were introduced to improve the user experience. Finally, the NLP assistant was created to simplify everyday operations of system management. This entire project is a no-profit work, created by students to apply the notions learned during university courses to a practical and challenging project. Being it a free project, the entire creation and implementation was guided by passion and curiosity, resulting in a very custom environment were a lot of services has been integrated as desired to create the actual system. The most innovative idea was born under the name of David: an artificial intelligence-based Virtual Assistant for network infrastructure and production virtual farm management. The main goal of the project is the possibility to give inputs to this software by means of Natural Language, allowing natural conversation with the assistant using vocal or textual messages. David can literally guide the admin to its set of features to help with the resolution of a problem or a fast diagnosis, even using charts and images as output. Moreover, all these functionalities can be exploited without writing a single line of code and without accessing all the components involved in the architecture. To reach this goal, this virtual assistant interacts with many components, in order to accomplish different task regarding different services, software, hardware and configurations. In other words, David is essentially a hyper-converged software for system management and lifecycle. As a centralized software, it can be exploited using different communication tools, like Amazon Alexa and a Telegram bot. All of these tools, software and communication channels are perfectly integrated in the final product, which exploits different services and adopts several methods in order to provide an optimal set of features.