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...