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)

Retrieving your device's current state using pyATS

With pyATS, we have the ability to retrieve the output of a network device command as structured Python data. With this structured data, we can get a full picture of what the configuration of our device looks like. Now, could we use this ability of pyATS to learn the state of a network device? Using this learned state, we could take a snapshot of our device after applying a configuration change, and then, the next time we want to apply a change to this device, we can verify that no one has manually applied changes to the configuration by comparing the snapshot we took before with the current state of the device. This is exactly the scenario that we are going to cover in the Comparing your device's current state to a previously learned state recipe, and in this recipe we are going to cover the first part of this, learning the state of a device using pyATS.

Getting ready

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