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)

Technical requirements

For this section and the remainder of the book, you'll need an installation of Python. Specifically, you'll need a Python interpreter of version 3.6.1 or higher. This book makes use of language constructs of Python 3 and thus is incompatible with Python 2.x. Additionally, you'll need to install the requests package. You can install the newest version of requests by using python3 -m pip install requests. At the time of this writing, the current version is version 2.25.1.

You will also need a code editor. Popular choices include Microsoft Visual Studio Code (VS Code) or Notepad++.

Additionally, you'll need access to a Cisco FMC instance that has the REST API enabled, as well as a valid user account. Please have a look at the reference guide for your FMC installation on how to enable the REST API. You can find the reference guide at this link: https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/security/defense-center/products-programming-reference-guides...