Book Image

Practical Network Automation

By : Abhishek Ratan
Book Image

Practical Network Automation

By: Abhishek Ratan

Overview of this book

Network automation is the use of IT controls to supervise and carry out every-day network management functions. It plays a key role in network virtualization technologies and network functions. The book starts by providing an introduction to network automation, SDN, and its applications, which include integrating DevOps tools to automate the network efficiently. It then guides you through different network automation tasks and covers various data digging and reporting methodologies such as IPv6 migration, DC relocations, and interface parsing, all the while retaining security and improving data center robustness. The book then moves on to the use of Python and the management of SSH keys for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, all followed by practical use cases. The book also covers the importance of Ansible for network automation including best practices in automation, ways to test automated networks using different tools, and other important techniques. By the end of the book, you will be well acquainted with the various aspects of network automation.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Functions


For any recurring set of instructions, we can define a function. In other words, a function is a closed set of instructions to perform a specific logic or task. Depending upon the input provided, a function has the ability to return the results or parse the input with specific instructions to get results without any return values.

A function is defined by the def keyword, which specifies that we need to define a function and provide a set of instructions related to that function.

In this task we will print the greater of two input numbers:

def checkgreaternumber(number1,number2):
    if number1 > number2:
      print ("Greater number is ",number1)
    else:
     print ("Greater number is",number2)
checkgreaternumber(2,4)
checkgreaternumber(3,1)

As we can see in the preceding output, the first time we call the checkgreaternumber(2,4) function, the function prints the greater value as 4, and the second time we call the function with different numbers, the function prints the greater...