Category: automation

David Gee (whom I finally met in person during recent ipSpace.net Summit) published a fantastic series of articles on what someone bringing together networking, development and automation should know and do.

In every SDDC workshop I tried to persuade the audience that the virtual appliances (particularly per-application instances of virtual appliances) are the way to go. I usually got the questions along the lines of “who will manage and audit all these instances?” but once someone asked “and how will we upgrade them?”

Short answer: you won’t.

In one of the previous blog posts I described the playbook I use to collect SSH keys from network devices. As I use it quite often, it became tedious to write ansible-playbook path-to-playbook every time I wanted to run the collection process.

Ansible playbooks are YAML documents, and YAML documents use # to start comments, so I thought “what if I’d use a YAML comment to add shebang and turn my YAML document into a script”

TL&DR: It works. Now for the longer story…

With all the intent-based hype (and the previous SDN-will-rule-the-world-hype) you’d think that the network is the ultimate ossified roadblock on the path to agile nirvana.

You’d be totally wrong (and you’d deserve it – never trust a vendor peddling a product).

Here’s an amazing discovery I made when I was still running on-site SDN and network automation workshops.

Here’s a common scenario I’m encountering on Ansible-related forums:

Q: I cannot connect to network devices with my Ansible network modules. I keep getting these weird error messages…

Me: Are you sure you have the device SSH keys in known_hosts file?

Q: How did you know?

A while ago I got a kind email from Kireeti Kompella, CTO @ Juniper Networks, saying “A colleague sent me an email of yours regarding SDN, the trough of disillusionment, and the rise of automation. Here's a more dramatic view: the Self-Driving Network -- one whose operation is totally automated.”

Even though Software Gone Wild podcast focuses on practical ideas that you could deploy relatively soon in your network, we decided to make an exception and talk about (as one of my friends described it) a unicorn driving a flying DeLorean with a flux capacitor.

If you’re a long-time reader of my blog you probably know that I believe in learning the fundamentals before trying to do anything else (like Google-and-Paste spaghetti wall approach), so you could imagine my delight when I got this feedback from an engineer watching (free) Network Programmability 101 webinar:

I was expecting a technical webinar, so I was a little bit disappointed at first with a “meta” webinar, but as I got through I was more than happy; learning such a meta sphere or getting to know other mindsets is very useful for me. The webinar pushed me to think outside of my little world and to open my mind.

That's exactly what I'm trying to achieve with the high-level webinars. So glad to hear it worked ;))

Long story short: I’m offering a few free seats in my Ansible for Networking Engineers online course to undergraduate or master’s students.

Interested? Check out the details, and apply before October 1^st.

Too old? Please spread the word ;)

PowerShell is a great scripting environment if your vendor provided PowerShell libraries to control their software or devices… but what if all you got is REST API (example: Nexus switches)?

We’ll conveniently ignore the challenges of managing devices that use 30-year-old non-scriptable CLI.

The featured webinar in September 2017 is the Ansible for Networking Engineers webinar, and in the featured videos you'll learn what Jinja2 is and how you can use it to generate network device configurations with Ansible.

If you already have an trial subscription, log into my.ipspace.net, select the Ansible webinar from the first page, and watch the videos marked with star. To start your trial subscription, register here.

Plenty of new stuff was added to the Ansible for Networking Engineers online course and webinar since the last update.

Fun things first: I needed adjustable check mode behavior and change tracking in some playbooks, and documented these features in two new videos (online course and webinar).

It all started with a realistic response I got to my automation and orchestration blog post (here’s a unicorn-driving-a-DeLorean one in case you missed it):

Maybe you could also add the “intent-based network” which is also not so far from orchestration?

It got me thinking. The way I understand intent-based whatever, it’s an approach where I tell a system what I want it to do, not how to do it.

A network engineer interested in attending the Building Network Automation Solutions online course sent me this question:

Does the course cover only Ansible, or does it also cover other automation tools like Python?

The course focuses on how you’d build a network automation solution. Selecting the best tool for the job is obviously one of the major challenges, and so one of the self-study modules describes various automation tools and where you could use them to build a full-blown solution.

A network architect working for a system integrator sent me a number of questions along the lines of “what would be an interesting alternative to pursuing another CCxE certification?”

He wrote:

One of the use cases we covered in Network Automation Use Cases webinar is a fully-automated data center fabric deployment. Dinesh Dutt (Cumulus Networks) started this section with an overview of challenges you might face in data center fabric deployments.