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)

Collecting information about your cloud networking resources

With our programmatic connection to AWS set up, we can now start using the boto3 library to gather some facts about the deployments that are currently running in the account. This is a common task that can come in useful when we are trying to answer questions about how many Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) we have, or what Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance is associated with which private cloud. While all this information is also available in the graphical user interface provided by the AWS console, being able to retrieve such information programmatically can then enable us to automate maintenance tasks such as deleting VPCs that do not have any EC2 instances associated with them. In this recipe, you are going to learn how to programmatically retrieve all the VPCs that are associated with your account and, for each of these VPCs, retrieve the EC2 instances that are currently part of that specific VPC. AWS and the boto3 library...