A network engineer interested in attending the Building Network Automation Solutions online course sent me this question:

Does the course cover only Ansible, or does it also cover other automation tools like Python?

The course focuses on how you’d build a network automation solution. Selecting the best tool for the job is obviously one of the major challenges, and so one of the self-study modules describes various automation tools and where you could use them to build a full-blown solution.

While the code examples in the course mostly use Ansible playbooks, several guest presentations focus on other network automation tools. Scott Lowe was talking about Git in the spring 2017 course. In the autumn 2017 course we’ll have Pete Lumbis deep-diving into Vagrant, GitLab and Behave, David Barroso focusing on model-driven automation with NAPALM, Jeremy Stretch describing NetBox, and Dinesh Dutt talking about NetQ.

Having said that, you do need a simple tool to illustrate the concepts, and we’re using Ansible most of the time to get the job done. Of course, you’re free to use any other tool of your choice in the hands-on assignments (and if you like doing the heavy lifting in Python, please do so).

Sounds interesting? Explore the detailed course contents and register here.