TL&DR: The new release of netsim-tools includes unnumbered interfaces, configuration modules, and OSPF configuration.

In mid-March, we enjoyed another excellent presentation by Dinesh Dutt, this time focused on running OSPF in leaf-and-spine fabrics. He astonished me when he mentioned unnumbered Ethernet interfaces being available on all major network operating systems. It was time to test things out, and I wanted to use my networking simulation builder to build the test lab.

It’s amazing how easy it is to create a chatbot that will send messages to a Discord channel… just follow John Capobianco’s step by step tutorial.

In the second half of my chat with David Bombal we focused on automation and AI in networking. Even though we discussed many things, including the dangers of doing a repeatable job, and how to make yourself unique, David chose a nice click-bait headline Will AI Replace the Networking Engineers?. According to Betteridge’s law of headlines the answer is still NO, but it’s obvious AI will replace the low-level easy-to-automate jobs (as textile workers found out almost 200 years ago).

While pondering that statement, keep in mind that AI is more than just machine learning (the overhyped stuff). According to one loose definition, “Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think like humans and mimic their actions”

One of the attendees of our network automation course asked a question along these lines:

In a previous Ansible-based project I used Excel sheet to contain all relevant customer data. I converted this spreadsheet using python (xls_to_fact) and pushed the configurations to network devices accordingly. I know some people use YAML to define the variables in Git. What would be the advantages of doing that over Excel/xsl_to_fact?

Whenever you’re choosing a data store for your network automation solution you have to consider a number of aspects including:

It looks like JSON Schema is the new black. Last week I wrote about a new Ansible module using JSON Schema to validate data structures passed to it; a few weeks ago NetworkToCode released Schema Enforcer, a similar CLI tool (which means it’s easy to use it in any CI/CD pipeline).

Here are just a few things Schema Enforcer can do:

A few months ago I described how you could use JSON Schema to validate your automation data models, host/group variable files, or even Ansible inventory file.

I had to use a weird toolchain to get it done – either ansible-inventory to build a complete data model from various inventory sources, or yq to convert YAML to JSON… and just for the giggles jsonschema CLI command requires the JSON input to reside in a file, so you have to use a temporary file to get the job done.

In January, Jason Edelman kindly invited me for a chat about the state of (software defined) networking and network automation in particular. The recording was recently published on Network Collective.

Last year I wrote an article describing data model optimization going from a simple this is what we need to configure individual devices to a highly polished high-level network nodes and links model. Not surprisingly, as Jeremy Schulman was quick to point out, the latter one had Jinja2 templates you wouldn’t want to debug. Ever. You can’t run away from complexity… but you can manage it.

Many successful network automation solutions (example: Cisco NSO) solve the “we’d love to work with high-level data models but hate complex templates” challenge with data transformation: operators work with an abstracted data model describing services, nodes and links, and the device configuration templates use low-level data derived from the abstracted data models through a series of business logic rules or lookups (aka network design).

Long long time ago in a country far far away when traveling was still a thing I led an interesting data center fabric design workshop. We covered tons of interesting topics, including automating network services deployments (starting with VLAN self-service for server admins).

As was often the case in my workshops, we had representatives from multiple IT teams sitting in the room, and when I started explaining how I’d automate VLAN deployments, the server administrator participating in the workshop quickly chimed in: “that’s exactly how I implemented self-service for some of our customers, it makes perfect sense to use the same approach for server port and VLAN provisioning”, and everyone else in the room agreed… apart from the networking engineer, who used a counter-argument along the lines of “we only provision a new VLAN or server port every few days, we can do it by hand” and no amount of persuasion would move him.

When I blogged about release 0.2 of my lab-building tool, Kristian Larsson was quick to reply: “now do vrnetlab”. You could guess what my reply was (hint: “submit a pull request”), but I did realize I’d have to add multi-provider support before that would make sense.

Release 0.3 adds support for multiple virtualization providers. You can run six different platforms on vagrant-libvirt (assuming you build the boxes), and I added rudimentary support for Vagrant provider for VirtualBox:

In the last weeks I described the challenges you might face when converting XML documents that contain lists with a single element into JSON, be it on device (Nexus OS) or in an Ansible module. Now let’s see how we can fix that.

There’s one more thing I feel needs to be done before I go for that coffee break: a webinar focusing on network automation concepts (as opposed to replacing Excel with YAML and Ansible or Becoming a Python Coder). Here’s a rough list of concepts I think should be in there:

• Data models and data stores
• Data model transformations
• Single source of truth
• Abstraction layers
• Idempotency

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.

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).

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.