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 6: Automating Complex Multi-Vendor Networks with NAPALM

When we consider the landscape of a modern networking infrastructure, one thing quickly becomes apparent: we are almost never dealing with a greenfield deployment. Equipment from different vendors gets upgraded and slotted into continuous cycles. Almost no network is powered purely by the solutions of one vendor, and even if you are doing a completely new greenfield deployment, most companies opt for multi-vendor solutions. However, this poses a problem for our network automation efforts. Without one single vendor to provide the equipment for our infrastructure, we don't have one common operating system running on the devices themselves. Therefore, due to the different operating systems of our devices, we have to write different scripts that interact with our devices differently.

In Chapter 5, Model-Driven Programmability with NETCONF and ncclient, we discussed one approach to solve this problem. Here, the devices...