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)

Setting up the library to interact with your AWS account

When logging into the AWS web console, you are probably used to using a username/password combination to authenticate either for an organization's root user account, or for an IAM user that has been set up with a separate set of credentials and scoped access. When dealing with AWS programmatically using the boto3 SDK, we will use two different credentials, an Access Key ID and a Secret Key, to authenticate against the API. In this recipe, we are going to configure our key pair in the web console, which we'll then use for the remainder of this chapter to authenticate our requests. While there are multiple ways to pass this credential information to boto3, we are going to configure it in a central configuration file for convenient reuse.

Getting ready

You'll need an AWS account, either for a root user or for an IAM account that has been created with the necessary access scopes for you.

How to do it…...