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 8: Configuring Devices Using RESTCONF and requests

In Chapter 5, Model-Driven Programmability with NETCONF and ncclient, we already saw how you can use Yet Another Next Generation (YANG) modules to model a network device's configuration and then use the network configuration (NETCONF) protocol to either retrieve or change the configuration of your device. The aim of NETCONF was to provide a unified interface for these operations. However, one major drawback of NETCONF is its rather unmodern reliance on Extensible Markup Language (XML) as the language of choice for describing the data as well as the operations you want to carry out. To solve this, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) came up with the concept of REpresentational State Transfer (REST) configuration (RESTCONF). Built to use the same concepts as NETCONF, RESTCONF allows you to use the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) to interact with your device instead of the Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) used by NETCONF...