Category: automation

Remember Nicky Davey describing how he got large DMVPN deployment back on track with configuration templating? In his own words…:

Configuration templating is still as big win a win for us as it was a year ago. We have since expanded the automation solution, and reading the old blog post makes me realise how far we have come. I began working with this particular customer in May 2017, so 2 years now. At that time the new WAN project was on the horizon and the approach to network configuration was entirely manual.

Here’s how far he got in the meantime:

Last week I covered network security groups, application security groups and user-defined routes in the second live session of Azure Networking webinar.

We also had a great guest speaker on the Network Automation course: Damien Garros explained how he used central source-of-truth based on NetBox and Git to set up a network automation stack from the grounds up.

Recordings are already online; you’ll need Standard ipSpace.net Subscription to access the Azure Networking webinar, and Expert ipSpace.net Subscription to access Damien’s presentation. Azure Networking webinar is also part of our new Networking in Public Clouds online course.

A while ago Ruben Tripiana tried to configure BGP on Cisco IOS using IETF YANG data models… and failed. In Spring 2019 Building Network Automation Solutions online course Chris Crook decided to deploy BGP routing on multiple platforms using YANG data models instead of configuration templates. Not only did he succeed, he also documented his work and the tools he used, and published the solution so you can replicate his efforts.

You can find many more network automation solutions created by the attendees of our automation course in solutions showcase.

I had a fantastic chat with David Bombal a while ago in which we covered tons of network automation topics including “should I use Nornir or NAPALM or Netmiko?”

The only answer one can give would be “it depends… on what you’re trying to do” as these three tools solve completely different challenges.

Paramiko is SSH implementation in Python. It’s used by most Python tools that want to use SSH to connect to other hosts (including networking devices).

Someone working for a network automation startup desperately tried to persuade me how cool their product is. Here’s what he sent me:

We let network engineers build their own network automation solutions in no time without requiring coding or scripting knowledge. It’s all GUI based, specifically geared towards network engineers - they can simply model services or roll-out networks “as-designed”.

The only problem: I’ve seen that same argument numerous times…

Last week we started the Autumn 2019 Building Network Automation Solutions online course with an interesting presentation from Matthias Luft focused on open-source supply chain security

TL&DR: Can I download whatever stuff I found as my first Google hit and use it in my automation solution? ****, NO!

Matthias covered these topics:

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

Have you ever seen a presentation in which a startup is telling you how awesome their product is because it allows you to simulate your whole network in a virtual environment? Not only that, you can use that capability to build a test suite and a full-blown CI/CD pipeline and test whether your network works every time you make a change to any one box in the network.

Sounds awesome, right? It’s also dead wrong. Let me explain why that’s the case.

Andrea Dainese decided to describe a series of mechanisms and protocols you can use in network automation. He started with Zero-Touch Provisioning and continued with screen scraping. Next one on his list: NETCONF and RESTCONF

I was saying “you’ll get the best network automation (or SDN) results if you pair network engineers with software engineers” for ages, but there’s always someone else saying it more eloquently, in this case Jeremy Schulman in his recent blog post.

Jeremy will talk about ChatOps in Autumn 2019 Building Network Automation Solutions online course, but of course you’re more than welcome to ask him other questions as well.

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: