Category: Automation

One of the most important aspects of the introductory part of my Building Network Automation Solutions online course is the question should I buy a solution or build my own?

I already described the arguments against buying a reassuringly-expensive single-blob-of-complexity solution from a $vendor, but what about using point tools?

In the Business Impact of Network Automation podcast Ethan Banks asked an interesting question: “what will happen with older networking engineers who are not willing to embrace automation”

The response somewhat surprised me: Alejandro Salisas said something along the lines “they’ll be just fine” (for a while).

Let me recap his argument and add a few twists of my own:

In the Network Automation 101 webinar and Building Network Automation Solutions online course I described one of the biggest challenges the networking engineers are facing today: moving from thinking about boxes and configuring individual devices to thinking about infrastructure and services, and changing data models which result in changed device configurations.

The $1B question is obviously: and how do we get from here to there?

One of my readers sent me a vivid description of his interactions with one of the so-called next-generation firewall vendors. Enjoy!

We’re using their highly promoted Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) management solution. New cutting edge software, centralized manager… but no CLI for configuration (besides some initial bootstrap commands). "You don't need that because everything is managed from our centralized manager GUI", says $vendor sales managers.

A while ago I was enjoying a few beers with a longtime friend of mine who happens to be running the networking team for one of the rare companies that understands how infrastructure should be built and operated.

Of course, I had to ask him what he thinks about the imminent death of CLI and all-encompassing automatic provisioning from some central orchestration system. Here’s the gist of his response:

This is a guest blog post by Carl Buchmann, Managing Solution Consultant at TeraMach. Carl attended the Building Network Automation Solutions online course in 2017.

There is one thing I regret not doing sooner during my automation journey, and that is adopting Git and a proper IDE/text editor that has built-in source control management. I personally use Microsoft Visual Studio Code, as it has Git built in and has many great extensions to validate code syntax.

PowerShell started as a tool to automate Windows servers. It was picked up by VMware (and others) as a platform on which they built their own solutions (PowerCLI and PowerNSX)… but did you know you can use it to configure data center infrastructure, including NX-OS switches, SAN networks, and Cisco UCS?

In the Configuring Data Center Devices with PowerShell video, Mitja Robas described how to do that, and provided source code for all his examples.

You’ll need at least free ipSpace.net subscription to watch the video.

The first car I got decades ago was a simple mechanical beast – you’d push something, and a cable would make sure something else moved somewhere. I could also fix 80% of the problems, and people who were willing to change spark plugs and similar stuff could get to 90+%.

Today the cars are distributed computer systems that nobody can fix once they get a quirk that is not discoverable with level-1 diagnostic tools.

I always encourage the students attending the Building Network Automation Solutions online course to create solutions for problems they’re facing in their networks instead of wasting time with vanilla hands-on assignments.

Francois Herbet took the advice literally and decided to create a solution that would configure PE-routers and create full-blown device configurations for CE-routers.

One of the beauties of VMware NSX is that it’s fully API-based – you can automate any aspect of it by writing a script (or using any of the network automation tools) that executes a series of well-defined (and well-documented) API calls.

To make that task even easier, VMware released PowerNSX, an open-source library of PowerShell commandlets that abstract the internal details of NSX API and give you an easy-to-use interface (assuming you use PowerShell as your automation tool).