While I have stock homework assignments prepared for every module of the Building Network Automation Solutions online course I always encourage the students to pick a challenge from their production network and solve it during the course.

Pavel Rovnov decided to focus on consistency of network management parameters (NTP, SNMP, SSH and syslog configuration) across Extreme and Cumulus switches, Fortinet firewalls and several distributions of Linux.

His choice of vendors was definitely interesting – he has to support uncommon platforms (I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else automate Extreme switches), and it was nice to see he added logging to his playbooks… but he went one step further and added unit tests as well, which is quite rare to see in today’s let’s-hack-this-together-and-move-on scripting culture.

Want to become a successful network automation engineer like Pavel? We’re starting on February 13^th.