Book Image

Mastering Python Networking - Second Edition

By : Eric Chou
Book Image

Mastering Python Networking - Second Edition

By: Eric Chou

Overview of this book

Networks in your infrastructure set the foundation for how your application can be deployed, maintained, and serviced. Python is the ideal language for network engineers to explore tools that were previously available to systems engineers and application developers. In this second edition of Mastering Python Networking, you’ll embark on a Python-based journey to transition from traditional network engineers to network developers ready for the next-generation of networks. This book begins by reviewing the basics of Python and teaches you how Python can interact with both legacy and API-enabled network devices. As you make your way through the chapters, you will then learn to leverage high-level Python packages and frameworks to perform network engineering tasks for automation, monitoring, management, and enhanced security. In the concluding chapters, you will use Jenkins for continuous network integration as well as testing tools to verify your network. By the end of this book, you will be able to perform all networking tasks with ease using Python.

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Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Preface
Preface
Who this book is for
What this book covers
To get the most out of this book
Get in touch
Free Chapter
1
Review of TCP/IP Protocol Suite and Python
Review of TCP/IP Protocol Suite and Python
An overview of the internet
The OSI model
Client-server model
Network protocol suites
Python language overview
Summary
2
Low-Level Network Device Interactions
Low-Level Network Device Interactions
The challenges of the CLI
Constructing a virtual lab
Python Pexpect library
The Python Paramiko library
Looking ahead
Summary
3
APIs and Intent-Driven Networking
APIs and Intent-Driven Networking
Infrastructure as code
The Cisco API and ACI
The Python API for Juniper networks
The Arista Python API
Vendor-neutral libraries
Summary
4
The Python Automation Framework – Ansible Basics
The Python Automation Framework – Ansible Basics
A more declarative framework
A quick Ansible example
The advantages of Ansible
The Ansible architecture
Ansible networking modules
The Ansible Cisco example
The Ansible Juniper example
The Ansible Arista example
Summary
5
The Python Automation Framework – Beyond Basics
The Python Automation Framework – Beyond Basics
Ansible conditionals
Ansible loops
Templates
Group and host variables
The Ansible Vault
The Ansible include and roles
Writing your own custom module
Summary
6
Network Security with Python
Network Security with Python
The lab setup
Python Scapy
Access lists
The Syslog search
Other tools
Summary
7
Network Monitoring with Python – Part 1
Network Monitoring with Python – Part 1
Lab setup
SNMP
Python for data visualization
Python for Cacti
Summary
8
Network Monitoring with Python – Part 2
Network Monitoring with Python – Part 2
Graphviz
Flow-based monitoring
Elasticsearch (ELK stack)
Summary
9
Building Network Web Services with Python
Building Network Web Services with Python
Comparing Python web frameworks
Flask and lab setup
Introduction to Flask
Network resource API
Network dynamic operations
Security
Additional resources
Summary
10
AWS Cloud Networking
AWS Cloud Networking
AWS setup
AWS network overview
Virtual private cloud
Direct Connect and VPN
Network scaling services
Other AWS network services
Summary
11
Working with Git
Working with Git
Introduction to Git
Setting up Git
Git usage examples
Git with Python
Automating configuration backup
Collaborating with Git
Summary
12
Continuous Integration with Jenkins
Continuous Integration with Jenkins
Traditional change-management process
Introduction to continuous integration
Installing Jenkins
Jenkins example
Jenkins with Python
Continuous integration for Networking
Summary
13
Test-Driven Development for Networks
Test-Driven Development for Networks
Test-driven development overview
Topology as code
More on Python testing
Writing tests for networking
Pytest in Jenkins
Summary
14
Other Books You May Enjoy
Other Books You May Enjoy
Leave a review - let other readers know what you think

Writing tests for networking

So far, we have been mostly writing tests for our Python code. We have used both the unittest and pytest libraries to assert True/False and equal/Non-equal values. We were also able to write mocks to intercept our API calls when we do not have an actual API-capable device but still want to run our tests.

A few years ago, Matt Oswalt announced the Testing On Demand: Distributed (ToDD) validation tool for network changes. It is an open source framework aimed at testing network connectivity and distributed capacity. You can find more information about the project on its GitHub page: https://github.com/toddproject/todd. Oswalt also talked about the project on this Packet Pushers Priority Queue 81, Network Testing with ToDD: https://packetpushers.net/podcast/podcasts/pq-show-81-network-testing-todd/.

In this section, let's look at how we can write...

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