Book Image

Network Automation Cookbook

By : Karim Okasha
Book Image

Network Automation Cookbook

By: Karim Okasha

Overview of this book

Network Automation Cookbook is designed to help system administrators, network engineers, and infrastructure automation engineers to centrally manage switches, routers, and other devices in their organization's network. This book will help you gain hands-on experience in automating enterprise networks and take you through core network automation techniques using the latest version of Ansible and Python. With the help of practical recipes, you'll learn how to build a network infrastructure that can be easily managed and updated as it scales through a large number of devices. You'll also cover topics related to security automation and get to grips with essential techniques to maintain network robustness. As you make progress, the book will show you how to automate networks on public cloud providers such as AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Azure. Finally, you will get up and running with Ansible 2.9 and discover troubleshooting techniques and network automation best practices. By the end of this book, you'll be able to use Ansible to automate modern network devices and integrate third-party tools such as NAPALM, NetBox, and Batfish easily to build robust network automation solutions.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Validating user input using Ansible

In this recipe, we will outline how to validate input data using Ansible. We rely heavily on the information that we either retrieve from the network or declare in host or group variables, in order to execute different tasks in Ansible such as generating configuration or provisioning devices. Before we start to use this information, we need to be able to validate the structure and validity of this data before further processing our playbooks.

How to do it...

  1. Create an ACLs definition in ACLs.yml, as shown in the following code block:
---
ACLs:
INFRA_ACL:
- src: 10.1.1.0/24
dst: any
dport: ssh
state: present
- src: 10.2.1.0/24
dst: any
app: udp
dport...