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)

Building an Ansible inventory

In this recipe, we will outline how to build an Ansible inventory to describe the network infrastructure setup that we will build across the GCP public cloud. This is a mandatory step that we need to take in order to define all our VPC networks across all the regions that we will deploy our infrastructure in.

How to do it...

  1. Create the hosts file inside the ch9_gcp directory with the following data:
$ cat hosts

[gcp_vpc]
demo_gcp_vpc
  1. Create the ansible.cfg file with the following content:
$ cat ansible.cfg

[defaults]
inventory=hosts
retry_files_enabled=False
gathering=explicit
host_key_checking=False
action_warnings=False
  1. Create the group_vars folder and the gcp_vpc.yml, which will host all the variables...