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 7: Automating Your Network Tests and Deployments with pyATS and Genie

In previous chapters, we have seen how we can use Python and open source packages to automatically retrieve and change a configuration on one or more network devices. When we think about the normal process we go through when manually updating infrastructure configuration, the next step would be to test that the configuration change we just initiated didn't have any unwanted side effects. How could we automate this step? With the packages we previously discussed, this would be quite cumbersome since we'd have to manually retrieve the state of the device before and after our change and then do the differentiation between the two versions ourselves.

This is where pyATS and Genie come into play. Originally developed as an internal testing framework at Cisco, the framework was open sourced and now supports the deployment and testing of changes for network devices. Build-agnostic by design, the framework...