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)

Chapter 5: Model-Driven Programmability with NETCONF and ncclient

In previous chapters, we learned how to connect to a network device and either retrieve or change the configuration of our device using the same CLI commands that we can also issue manually. Now, let's take a step back and examine what we are actually doing when we issue configuration commands. Fundamentally, a device has a certain state, which is the sum of all the configuration variables and their values. Every time we issue a command, we either retrieve this state or change the state by creating, modifying, or deleting variables within that state.

While CLI commands are a great way to modify states for humans, as they are easy to read and, therefore, easy to remember and type, they are not ideal for computers. In Chapter 4, Configuring Network Devices Using Netmiko, in the Retrieving command outputs as structured Python data using netmiko and Genie recipe, we learned that we need an entire library (for example...