Book Image

Python Network Programming Techniques

By : Marcel Neidinger
Book Image

Python Network Programming Techniques

By: Marcel Neidinger

Overview of this book

Network automation offers a powerful new way of changing your infrastructure network. Gone are the days of manually logging on to different devices to type the same configuration commands over and over again. With this book, you'll find out how you can automate your network infrastructure using Python. You'll get started on your network automation journey with a hands-on introduction to the network programming basics to complement your infrastructure knowledge. You'll learn how to tackle different aspects of network automation using Python programming and a variety of open source libraries. In the book, you'll learn everything from templating, testing, and deploying your configuration on a device-by-device basis to using high-level REST APIs to manage your cloud-based infrastructure. Finally, you'll see how to automate network security with Cisco’s Firepower APIs. By the end of this Python network programming book, you'll have not only gained a holistic overview of the different methods to automate the configuration and maintenance of network devices, but also learned how to automate simple to complex networking tasks and overcome common network programming challenges.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Chapter 12: Automating your Network Security Using Python and the Firepower APIs

Security has become a central concern for every network operations team in the world. Whether you are securing the network of a global corporation or the wireless access of your local coffee shop, network security touches every aspect of network operations. In this chapter, we are going to focus on the automation abilities of Cisco's Firepower Management Center (FMC) by using its Representational State Transfer (REST) application programming interface (API). Using automation together with FMC allows us to constantly check our enacted access policies or automatically update them.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following recipes:

  • Exploring the API Explorer
  • Authenticating against the FMC REST API
  • Retrieving access policies
  • Changing access policies
  • Retrieving access rules
  • Changing access rules
  • Deleting access rules