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)

AI in IT operations

There was a time when troubleshooting or even deployments were limited to a specific set of infrastructure devices. In real-world scenarios, we have multi-vendor devices as well as numbers of devices growing from hundreds to thousands. For an engineer to identify a problem in this scenario and to fix it is highly time consuming. To add to this, as we add more complex configurations and technologies, it becomes near impossible at a certain point of time for an engineer to scale both in terms of handling the huge set of devices as well as different technology domains.

A possible solution to this problem is through tackling the tasks by machine. As a machine starts to learn from other machines, it becomes smarter to handle complex tasks and ensure only high-level (or very complex) tasks need to be escalated to engineers. All the low-hanging fruit (repeatable and...