Category: automation
XML-to-JSON Information Loss, Cisco Nexus OS Edition
Last week I wrote about the interesting challenges you might encounter when using data generated by a Junos device in an Ansible playbook. Unfortunately it’s not just Junos – every system built around XML-based data structures might experience the same issues, including Cisco Nexus OS.
Build Virtual Lab Topology: Dual Stack Addressing, ArcOS and Junos Support
In mid-December I announced a set of tools that will help you build Vagrant-based remote labs much faster than writing Vagrantfiles and Ansible inventories by hand.
In early January I received a nice surprise: Dave Thelen not only decided to use the tool, he submitted a pull request with full-blown (and correctly implemented) ArcOS support. A few days later I managed to figure out what needs to be configured on vSRX to make it work, added Junos support, and thus increased the number of supported platforms to six (spanning five different operating systems).
Beware XML-to-JSON Information Loss (Junos with Ansible)
When you want to transport a complex data structure between components of a distributed system you’re usually using a platform-independent data encoding format like XML, YAML, or JSON.
XML was the hip encoding format in days when Junos and Cisco Nexus OS was designed and lost most of its popularity in the meantime due to its complexity (attributes, namespaces…) that makes it hard to deal with XML documents in most programming languages.
JSON is the new cool kid on the block. It’s less complex than XML, maps better into data structures supported by modern programming languages, and has decently fast parser implementations.
… updated on Thursday, January 14, 2021 08:01 UTC
Imperative and Declarative API: Another Pile of Marketing Deja-Moo
Looks like some vendor marketers (you know, the same group of people who brought us the switching/routing/bridging stupidity) felt the need to go beyond the usual SDN and intent-based hype and started misusing the imperative versus declarative concepts. Unfortunately some networking engineers fell for the ploy; here’s a typical feedback along these lines I got from one of my readers:
I am frustrated by most people’s shallow understanding API’s, especially the differences between declarative (“what”) and imperative (“how”) API’s, and how that impacts one’s operations. Declarative APIs are the key pillar of what many vendors call “policy” or “intent-based” networking.
Let’s try to unravel that.
Automation Win: Chatops-Based Security
It’s amazing how quickly you can deploy new functionality once you have a solid foundation in place. In his latest blog post Adrian Giacometti described how he implemented a security solution that allows network operators to block source IP addresses (identified by security tools) across dozens of firewalls using a bot listening to a Slack channel.
Would you be surprised if I told you we covered similar topics in our automation course? 😇
Build Your Virtual Lab Faster with My Network Simulation Tools
I love my new Vagrant+Libvirt virtual lab environment – it creates virtual machines in parallel and builds labs much faster than my previous VirtualBox-based setup. Eight CPU cores and 32 GB of RAM in my Intel NUC don’t hurt either.
However, it’s still ridiculously boring to set up a new lab. Vagrantfiles describing the private networks I need for routing protocol focused network simulations are a mess to write, and it takes way too long to log into all the devices, configure common parameters, enable interfaces…
Lessons Learned: Automating Site Deployments
Some networking engineers renew their ipSpace.net subscription every year, and when they drop off the radar, I try to get in touch with them to understand whether they moved out of networking or whether we did a bad job.
One of them replied that he retired after building a fully automated site deployment solution (first lesson learned: you’re never too old to start automating your network), and graciously shared numerous lessons learned while building that solution.
Updated: Getting Network Device Operational Data with Ansible
Recording the same content for the third time because software developers decided to write code before figuring out what needs to be done is disgusting… so it took me a long long while before I collected enough willpower to rewrite and retest all the examples and re-record the Getting Operational Data section of Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar.
The new videos explain how to consume data generated by show commands in JSON or XML format, and how to parse the traditional text-based show printouts. I dropped mentions of (semi)failed experiments like Ansible parse_cli and focused on things that work well: TextFSM, in particular with ntc-templates library, pyATS/Genie, and TTP. On the positive side, I liked the slick new cli_parse module… let’s hope it will stay that way for at least a few years.
On a totally unrelated topic, I realized (again) that fail fast, fail often sounds great in a VC pitch deck, and sucks when you have to deal with its results.
Video: NetQ and Cumulus Linux Data Models
In the last part of his Cumulus Linux 4.0 Update Pete Lumbis talked about using NetQ to capture streaming telemetry and increase network observability, and the new model-driven configuration approach (including all the usual buzzwords like NETCONF, RPC, YAML, JSON, and OpenConfig) coming in 2020.
New Ansible for Networking Engineers Content
When restructuring our online courses we decided to make the video content that was previously part of Ansible online course available with Standard ipSpace.net Subscription.
If you haven’t enrolled into our automation online course (which always included the extra bits) you’ll find the following additional content in our Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar:
Yet Again: CLI or API
Carl Montanari recently published an interesting blog post on the punditry of network APIs (including hilarious fact that “SNMP is also an API"), and as someone sent me a link to that post he commented “it reminds me of a few blog posts you wrote a while ago”.
Speaking of those blog posts… last July I was getting bored and put together a list of interesting blog posts I published on that topic. Enjoy!
Validate Ansible YAML Data with JSON Schema
When I published the Optimize Network Data Models series a long while ago, someone made an interesting comment along the lines of “You should use JSON Schema to validate the data model.”
It took me ages to gather the willpower to tame that particular beast, but I finally got there. In the next installment of the Data Models saga I described how you can use JSON Schema to validate Ansible inventory data and your own YAML- or JSON-based data structures.
To learn more about data validation, error handling, unit- and system testing, and CI/CD pipelines in network automation, join our automation course.
Zero-Touch Provisioning with Nornir
In early 2018 I described how Hans Verkerk implemented zero-touch provisioning with Ansible. Recently he rewrote his scripts as a Python-only solution using Nornir. Enjoy!
Automation Win: Recreating Cisco ACI Tenants in Public Cloud
This blog post was initially sent to the subscribers of our SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.
Most automation projects are gradual improvements of existing manual processes, but every now and then the stars align and you get a perfect storm, like what Adrian Giacommetti encountered during one of his automation projects.
The customer had well-defined security policies implemented in Cisco ACI environment with tenants, endpoint groups, and contracts. They wanted to recreate those tenants in a public cloud, but it took way too long as the only migration tool they had was an engineer chasing GUI screens on both platforms.
Validating Data in GitOps-Based Automation
Anyone using text files as a poor man’s database eventually stumbles upon the challenge left as a comment in Automating Cisco ACI Environments blog post:
The biggest challenge we face is variable preparation and peer review process before committing variables to Git. I’d be particularly interested on how you overcome this challenge?
We spent hours describing potential solutions in Validation, Error Handling and Unit Tests part of Building Network Automation Solutions online course, but if you never built a network automation solution using Ansible YAML files as source-of-truth the above sentence might sound a lot like Latin, so let’s make it today’s task to define the problem.