Book Image

Practical Network Automation - Second Edition

By : Abhishek Ratan
Book Image

Practical Network Automation - Second Edition

By: Abhishek Ratan

Overview of this book

Network automation is the use of IT controls to supervise and carry out everyday network management functions. It plays a key role in network virtualization technologies and network functions. The book starts by providing an introduction to network automation, and its applications, which include integrating DevOps tools to automate the network efficiently. It then guides you through different network automation tasks and covers various data digging and performing tasks such as ensuring golden state configurations using templates, interface parsing. This book also focuses on Intelligent Operations using Artificial Intelligence and troubleshooting using chatbots and voice commands. The book then moves on to the use of Python and the management of SSH keys for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, all followed by practical use cases. The book also covers the importance of Ansible for network automation, including best practices in automation; ways to test automated networks using tools such as Puppet, SaltStack, and Chef; and other important techniques. Through practical use-cases and examples, this book will acquaint you with the various aspects of network automation. It will give you the solid foundation you need to automate your own network without any hassle.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we covered the working examples of various terminology/techniques that we will use while performing network automation. This chapter also introduced readers to writing a good program, which is a key requirement in a collaborative environment. This chapter also explained the use of Git and GitHub as a code check-in, and why it is important and advantageous to publish the code on a server as compared to a local copy. Readers were also introduced to making a choice between two popular scripting languages, Python and PowerShell, while working on mixed environments or platforms. The short examples given will help the reader to understand the practical usage of Python; they also expose multiple concepts that will be used regularly when writing a program.

Finally, the use cases are a summation of all the previous learning and show how to use that knowledge in a bigger project. Some of the concepts given in the use cases are key to network-automation programs that will be developed further in the next chapter.

The next chapter will go deeper into how to write scripts using Python, with a specific focus on usability for network engineers. There will be samples, tips, and best practices as well.