What this book covers

This book will look at how networking changes can be made more efficient so as not to slow down the software development lifecycle. It will help outline strategies network engineers can adopt to automate network operations. We will focus on setting up network teams to succeed in an automation-driven environment, enabling the teams to work in a more collaborative fashion, and improve efficiency.

It will also show that network teams need to build new skills and learn configuration management tools such as Ansible to help them achieve this goal. The book will show the advantages that these tools bring, using the network modules they provide, and that they will help make automation easy and act as a self-starter guide.

We will focus on some of the cultural challenges that need to be overcome to influence and implement automation processes for network functions and convince network teams to make the most of networking APIs that are now provided by vendors can be trusted.

The book will discuss public and private clouds such as AWS and OpenStack, and ways they are used to provide networking to users. It will also discuss the emergence of software-defined networking solutions, such as Juniper Contrail, VMWare NSX, CISCO ACI, and focus on the Nokia Nuage VSP solution, which aims to make networking functions a self-service commodity.

The book will also highlight how continuous integration and delivery processes and deployment pipelines can be applied to govern network changes. It will also show ways that unit testing can be applied to automated network changes to integrate them with the software delivery lifecycle.

A detailed chapter overview for the book is detailed below:

Chapter 1, The Impact of Cloud on Networking, will discuss ways in which the emergence of AWS for public cloud and OpenStack for private cloud have changed the way developers want to consume networking. It will look at some of the networking services AWS and OpenStack provide out of the box and look at some of the networking features they provide. It will show examples of how these cloud platforms have made networking a commodity much like infrastructure.

Chapter 2, The Emergence of Software-defined Networking, will discuss how software-defined networking has emerged. It will look at the methodology and focus on some of the scaling benefits and features this provides over and above the out-of-the-box experience from AWS and OpenStack. It will illustrate how one of the market-leading SDN solutions, Nuage, applies these concepts and principles and discusses other SDN solutions on the market.

Chapter 3, Bringing DevOps to Network Operations, will detail the pros and cons of a top-down and bottom-up DevOps initiatives with regards to networking. It will give readers food for thought on some of the strategies that have been a success and which ones have typically failed. This chapter will help CTOs, senior managers, and engineers who are trying to initiate a DevOps model in their company's network department and outline some of the different strategies they could use to achieve the cultural changes they desire.

Chapter 4, Configuring Network Devices Using Ansible, will outline the benefits of using configuration management tools to install and push configuration to network devices and discuss some of the open source network modules available to do this at the moment and how they work. It will give some examples of process flows that could be adopted to maintain device configuration.

Chapter 5, Orchestrating Load Balancers Using Ansible, will describe the benefits of using Ansible to orchestrate load balancers and the approaches to roll new software releases into service without the need for downtime or manual intervention. It will give some examples of some process flows that could be adopted to allow orchestration of both immutable and static servers looking at the different load balancer technologies available.

Chapter 6, Orchestrating SDN Controllers Using Ansible, will outline the benefits of using Ansible to orchestrate SDN controllers. It will outline the benefits of software-defined networking and why it is paramount to automate the network functions that an SDN controller exposes. This includes setting ACL rules dynamically, which will allow network engineers to provide a Network as a Service (NaaS) allowing developers to self-service their networking needs. It will discuss deployment strategies such as blue green networks as well as exploring some of the process flows that could be used to implement a NaaS approach.

Chapter 7, Using Continuous Integration Builds for Network Configuration, will discuss moving to a model where network configuration is stored in source control management systems, so it is easily audited and versioned and changes can be rolled back.

It will look at workflows that can be used to set up network configuration CI builds using tools such as Jenkins and Git.

Chapter 8, Testing Network Changes, will outline the importance of using test environments to test network changes before applying them in production. It will explore some of the open source tooling available and walk through some of the test strategies that can be applied to make sure that network changes are thoroughly tested before applying them to production.

Chapter 9, Using Continuous Delivery Pipelines to Deploy Network Changes, will show readers how to use continuous integration and Continuous Delivery pipelines to deliver network changes to production and put them through associated test environments. It will give some examples of some process flows that could be adopted to deliver network changes to production and how they can easily sit alongside infrastructure and code changes in deployment pipelines.

Chapter 10, The Impact of Containers on Networking, dedicated container technologies such as Docker and container orchestration engines such as Kubernetes and Swarm are becoming more and more popular with companies that are moving to microservice architectures. As a result, this has changed networking requirements. This chapter will look at how containers operate and the impact they have had on networking.

Chapter 11, Securing the Network, will look at how this approach makes a security engineer's job of auditing the network easier. It will look at the possible attack vectors in a software-defined network and ways that security checks can be integrated into a DevOps model.