Category: Automation

I love hearing real-life “how did I start my automation journey” stories. Here’s what one of ipSpace.net subscribers sent me:

• Make peace with your network engineering soul and mind and open up to the possibility that the world has moved on to something else when it comes to consuming apps and software. Back in 2017, this was very hard on me :)

I know the title sounds like a buzzword-bingo-winning clickbait, but it’s true. Adrian Giacometti decided to merge the topics of two ipSpace.net online courses and automated deployment of AWS security rules using Terraform within GitLab CI pipeline, with Slack messages serving as manual checks and approvals.

Not only did he do a great job mastering- and gluing together so many diverse bits and pieces, he also documented the solution and published the source code:

• Part 1: Cloud & Network automation challenge: Deploy Security Rules in a DevOps/GitOps world with AWS, Terraform, GitLab CI, Slack, and Python (special guest FastAPI)
• Part 2: AWS, Terraform and FastAPI
• Part 3: GitLab CI, Slack, and Python
• Source code: aegiacometti/devops_cloud_challenge · GitLab

Want to build something similar? Join our Network Automation and/or Public Cloud course and get started. Need something similar in your environment? Adrian is an independent consultant and ready to work on your projects.

The reader asking about infrastructure-as-code in public cloud deployments also wondered whether he has any chance at mastering on-premises network automation due to lack of programming skills.

I am starting to get concerned about not knowing automation, IaC, or any programming language. I didn’t go to college, like a lot of my peers did, and they have some background in programming.

First of all, thanks a million to everyone needs to become a programmer hipsters for thoroughly confusing people. Now for a tiny bit of reality.

Some networking engineers breeze through our Network Automation online course, others disappear after a while… and a few of those come back years later with a spectacular production-grade solution.

Stephen Harding is one of those. He attended the automation course in spring 2019 and I haven’t heard from him in almost two years… until he submitted one of the most mature data center fabric automation solutions I’ve seen.

Not only that, he documented the solution in a long series of must-read blog posts. Hope you’ll find them useful; I liked them so much I immediately saved them to Internet Archive (just in case).

One of my readers sent me a series of “how do I get started with…” questions including:

I’ve been doing networking and security for 5 years, and now I am responsible for our cloud infrastructure. Anything to do with networking and security in the cloud is my responsibility along with another team member. It is all good experience but I am starting to get concerned about not knowing automation, IaC, or any programming language.

No need to worry about that, what you need (to start with) is extremely simple and easy-to-master. Infrastructure-as-Code is a simple concept: infrastructure configuration is defined in machine-readable format (mostly text files these days) and used by a remediation tool like Terraform that compares the actual state of the deployed infrastructure with the desired state as defined in the configuration files, and makes changes to the actual state to bring it in line with how it should look like.

Ansible and Jinja2 are not an ideal platform for data manipulation, but sometimes it’s easier to hack together something in Jinja2 than writing a Python filter. In those cases, you might find the Data Model Transformation with Jinja2 by Philippe Jounin extremely useful.

A while ago, someone made a remark on my suggestions that networking engineers should focus on getting fluent with cloud networking and automation:

The running thing is, we can all learn this stuff, but not without having an opportunity.

I tend to forcefully disagree with that assertion. What opportunity do you need to test open-source tools or create a free cloud account? My response was thus correspondingly gruff:

TL&DR: Client clock skew could result in AWS authentication failure when running terraform apply

When I wanted to compare AWS and Azure orchestration speeds I encountered a crazy Terraform error message when running terraform apply:

module.network.aws_vpc.My_VPC: Creating...

Error: Error creating VPC: AuthFailure: 
AWS was not able to validate the provided access credentials
	status code: 401, request id: ...

Obviously I did all the usual stuff before googling for a solution:

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”