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)

Revisiting the concept of testing

So, why do we need testing and, more specifically, why would we want to automate it? A lot of the ideas that have been proposed for network automation have their roots in software engineering, so it is worth having a brief look at how modern software is developed and deployed on a continuous basis. When developing software, most engineers go through four basic phases, outlined as follows:

  1. The development stage is where the code is first designed and then written.
  2. The testing stage is where the code that has been written is tested extensively.
  3. The deployment stage is where the code that has been developed and tested is deployed to the servers.
  4. The monitoring stage is where data such as access times, occurring errors, and load on the system of the new change is closely monitored. Any insights that have been identified in the monitoring stage (such as the need to optimize a certain portion of the code) are fed back into the next development...