Category: automation

Dr. Tony Przygienda left a very valid (off-topic) comment to my Breaking APIs or Data Models Is a Cardinal Sin blog post:

If, on the other hand, the customers would not camp for literally tens of years on regex scripts scraping screens, lots of stuff could progress much faster.

He’s right, particularly from Juniper’s perspective; they were the first vendor to use a data-driven approach to show commands. Unfortunately, we’re still not living in a perfect world:

Imagine you decide to believe the marketing story of your preferred networking vendor and start using the REST API to configure their devices. That probably involves some investment in automation or orchestration tools, as nobody in their right mind wants to use curl or Postman to configure network devices.

A few months later, after your toolchain has been thoroughly tested, you decide to upgrade the operating system on the network devices, and everything breaks. The root cause: the vendor changed their API or the data model between software releases.

A year or two after Damien Garros told me that “he moved to France and is working on something new” we can admire the results: Infrahub, a version-control-based system that includes a data store and a repository of all source code you use in your network automation environment. Or, straight from the GitHub repository,

A central hub to manage the data, templates and playbooks that powers your infrastructure by combining the version control and branch management capabilities of Git with the flexible data model and UI of a graph database.

I’ve seen an early demo, and it looks highly promising and absolutely worth exploring. Have fun ;)

Many network automation solutions generate device configurations from a data model and deploy those configurations. Last week, we focused on “how do we know the device data model is correct?” This time, we’ll take a step further and ask ourselves, “how do we know the device configurations work as expected?”

There are four (increasingly complex) questions our tests should answer:

Every complex enough network automation solution has to introduce a high-level (user-manageable) data model that is eventually transformed into a low-level (device) data model.

The transformation code (business logic) is one of the most complex pieces of a network automation solution, and there’s only one way to ensure it works properly: you test the heck out of it ;) Let me show you how we solved that challenge in netlab.

Urs Baumann invited me to have a guest lecture in his network automation course, and so I had the privilege of being in lovely Rapperswil last week, talking about the basics of real-life network automation.

Urs published the video recording of the presentation on YouTube; hope you’ll like it, and if you don’t get too annoyed by the overly pushy ads, watch the other videos from his infrastructure-as-code course.

Kurt Wauters sent me an interesting challenge: how do we do rollbacks based on customer requests? Here’s a typical scenario:

You might have deployed a change that works perfectly fine from a network perspective but broke a customer application (for example, due to undocumented usage), so you must be able to return to the previous state even if everything works. Everybody says you need to “roll forward” (improve your change so it works), but you don’t always have that luxury and might need to take a step back. So, change tracking is essential.

He’s right: the undo functionality we take for granted in consumer software (for example, Microsoft Word) has totally spoiled us.

Drew Conry-Murray published a excellent summary of his takeaways from the AutoCon0 event, including this one:

Most companies want vendor-supported tools that will actually help them be more efficient, reduce human error, and increase the velocity at which the network team can support new apps and services.

Yeah, that’s nothing new. Most Service Providers wanted vendors to add tons of nerd knobs to their products to adapt them to existing network designs. Obviously, it must be done for free because a vast purchase order¹ is dangling in the air. We’ve seen how well that worked, yet learned nothing from that experience.

Did you find the Network Automation with GitHub Actions blog post interesting? Here are some more GitHub Self-Hosted Runner goodies from Julio Perez: Network CI and Open Source – Welcome to the World of Tomorrow. Enjoy!

George Davitiani put together a lovely proof-of-concept using GitHub actions to deploy modified configurations to network devices. Even better, he documented the whole setup, and the way to reproduce it. I’m positive you’ll find a few ideas browsing through what he did.

Tom Ammon sent me his thoughts on choosing the right level of abstraction in your network automation solution as a response to my What Is Intent-Based Networking blog post, and allowed me to publish them on ipspace.net.

I totally agree with your what vs how example with OSPF. I work on a NOS team where if we wanted, we could say, instead of “run OSPF on these links”, do this:

Roman Dodin wrote an article describing Nokia’s Ansible collection for SR Linux. Although I don’t use SR Linux (even though it was the first container supported by netlab ;), it was still very interesting to read about the design tradeoffs they had to make:

A senior engineer at Juniper Networks wasn’t happy with me mentioning resource hogs and Junos platforms in the same statement. Instead of engaging in never-ending angels dancing on pins deliberations comparing the virtues of Junos with other network operating systems, I decided to throw a bit of real-life data into the mix – I created a simple script that measures:

• The time it takes to execute vagrant up to start a single network device.
• The time it takes to deploy simple initial configuration on that device.

Ish wrote an interesting comment on my Network Automation Expert Beginners blog post. He started with:

[Our network has] about 40 sites, but we don’t do total refresh cycles in bulk, just as needed. Everything we do is sporadic, and I’m trying to see the ROI on learning automation for things that are done once in a while that don’t take much time to do manually anyway.

There are two aspects to this part of his comment:

David Gee couldn’t resist making a few choice comments after I asked for his opinion of an early draft of the Network Automation Expert Beginners blog post, and allowed me to share them with you. Enjoy 😉

Network automation offers promises of reliability and efficiency, but it came without a warning label and health warnings. We seem to be perpetually stuck in a window display with sexily dressed mannequins.