I know many networking engineers who went into networking because they didn’t want to write code the rest of their lives. I also know a few awesome engineers who decided to keep coding while designing networks.

Andrea Dainese (author of UNetLab – the tool you might know as EVE-NG) is one of the latter and practiced network automation for years, dealing with all sorts of crappy device configuration and monitoring mechanisms, from screen- and web scraping to broken REST APIs.

He decided to write a series of articles describing individual mechanisms, starting with an overview and zero-touch provisioning.