Category: Automation

Daniel Teycheney attended the Spring 2019 Building Network Automation Solutions online course and sent me this feedback after completing it (and creating some interesting real-life solutions on the way):

I spent a bit of time the other day reflecting on how much I’ve learn’t from the course in terms of technical skills and the amount I’ve learned has been great. I literally no idea about things like Git, Jinja2, CI testing, reading YAML files and had only briefly seen Ansible before.

I’m not an expert now, but I understand these things and have real practical experience on these subjects which has given me great confidence to push on and keep getting better.

When I was still at university the fourth-generation programming languages were all the hype, prompting us to make jokes along the lines “fifth generation will implement do what I don’t know how”

The research team working in Networked Systems Group at ETH Zurich headed by prof. Laurent Vanbever got pretty close. The description of their tool says:

One of my readers sent me this question:

How can I learn more about reading REST API information from network devices and storing the data into tables?

Long story short: it’s like learning how to drive (well) - you have to master multiple seemingly-unrelated tasks to get the job done.

I always love to hear from networking engineers who managed to start their network automation journey. Here’s what one of them wrote after watching Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar (part of paid ipSpace.net subscription, also available as an online course).

This webinar helped me a lot in understanding Ansible and the benefits we can gain. It is a big area to grasp for a non-coder and this webinar was exactly what I needed to get started (in a lab), including a lot of tips and tricks and how to think. It was more fun than I expected so started with Python just to get a better grasp of programing and Jinja.

In early 2019 we made the webinar even better with a series of live sessions covering new features added to recent Ansible releases, from core features (loops) to networking plugins and new declarative intent modules.

We got pretty far in our data deduplication in network data model journey, from initial attempts to network modeled as a graph… but we still haven’t got rid of all the duplicate information.

For example, if we have multiple devices connected to the same subnet, why should we have to specify IP address and subnet mask for every device (literally begging the operators to make input errors). Wouldn’t it be better (assuming we don’t care about exact IP addresses on core links) to assign IP addresses automatically?

The No Scripting Required to Start Your Automation Journey blog post generated lively discussions (and a bit of trolling from the anonymous peanut gallery). One of the threads focused on “how does automation work in real life IT department where it might be challenging to simplify operations before automating them due to many exceptions, legacy support…”

Here’s a great answer provided by another reader:

This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

At the end of my vNIC 2018 keynote speech I made a statement along these lines:

The moment you start using GUI with an SDN product you’re back to square one.

That claim confused a few people – Mark left this comment on my blog:

Remember the avoid duplicate data in network automation data models challenge and the restructuring we did to represent a network as a graph.

Well, I was not happy with the end result - I hated the complexity of supporting Jinja2 templates that had to check left- and right nodes of a link, so I generalized the data structure a bit, and all of a sudden I could model stub interfaces, P2P links and multi-access networks.

I hate listening to “this is what we were doing this year” podcasts as they usually turn into pointless blabbering, self-congratulations and meaningless plans (think New Year resolutions). The Full Stack Journey Episode 28 with Scott Lowe was an amazing deviation from this too-common template.

If you don’t have time to listen to the podcast (but you OUGHT TO do it) here’s what I loved most: “When faced with the onslaught of new technologies, don’t panic. Wait a few months to see which ones survive”.

Last week I explained how you could take a typical first attempt at a network automation data model and reduce the amount of duplicate data… but the data model we used was still describing a set of seemingly disconnected boxes.

How about restructuring the whole thing and describing what networks really are - graphs made of nodes (network devices) and links?