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 9: Consuming Controllers and High-Level Networking APIs with requests

Why do we have to always connect to each of our devices individually to carry out some operation? This is a question you might have asked yourself throughout this book. And while device-by-device configuration remains a common way to interact with networking device configuration, controller-based approaches, where a central component coordinates and controls all devices on a network, are on the rise. And these control components usually offer us an application programming interface (API) that we can use to interact with the controller. The controller then goes out to all the devices we have registered on it and retrieves the required information or applies the required configuration change, without us having to explicitly apply this configuration change to all our devices. The controller takes over the job of connecting to each of the devices.

The common architectural style these APIs use is REST, short...