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)

Validating deployments using NAPALM

We have learned how NAPALM allows us to, very conveniently, issue commands, load and replace configurations, and gather facts. But what happens after you have carried out your changes? How do you verify that your device is still compliant with the state that you want to have? We'll take an even deeper look at automating the testing of your network devices in Chapter 7, Automating Your Network Tests and Deployments with pyATSand Genie. However, NAPALM also offers you a way to describe the desired state of your device in a human-readable format and make sure that the device actually complies.

The mechanism NAPALM uses to implement these are getters. Recall that these functions return well-formatted and structured Python data and have a unique function name. NAPALM leverages that by allowing you to describe what the output of this getter should be in a .yaml file and then runs the getter to find out what the device is currently running on.

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