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)

Technical requirements

It is recommended that you have a basic understanding of how YANG and NETCONF work before diving into this chapter. For an introduction to both topics, please refer to the Revisiting NETCONF and YANG modules recipe in Chapter 5, Model-Driven Programmability with NETCONF and ncclient.

Since RESTCONF is built on top of HTTP requests, we will need the ability to make HTTP requests with Python. While we could implement the HTTP protocol ourselves or use one of the low-level modules that come with the Python standard library to perform these requests, the Python community has developed a package called requests that makes dealing with HTTP requests and responses much easier. Under the slogan HTTP for Humans™, this has abstracted most of the difficult tasks of dealing with HTTP on top of the standard library and has become the de facto standard for consuming HTTP-based resources from Python. We'll be using requests for this chapter as well as for Chapter...