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.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Graphviz

Graphviz is an open source graph visualization software. Imagine if we have to describe our network topology to a colleague without the benefit of a picture. We might say, our network consists of three layers: core, distribution, and access. The core layer comprises two routers for redundancy, and both of the routers are full-meshed toward the four distribution routers; the distribution routers are also full-meshed toward the access routers. The internal routing protocol is OSPF, and externally, we use BGP for peering with our service provider. While this description lacks some details, it is probably enough for your colleague to paint a pretty good high-level picture of your network.

Graphviz works similarly to the process by describing the graph in the text format that Graphviz can understand, then we can feed the file to the Graphviz program to construct the graph...