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

Network automation use case


As we have now interacted with multiple sections of Python and device interaction, let's create a use case to incorporate what we have learned so far. The use case is as follows:

Log into the router and fetch some information:

  1. task1(): Show the version, show the IP in brief, show the clock, and show the configured usernames on the router.
  2. task2(): Create another username on the test router with the password test and check whether we can log in successfully with the newly created username.
  3. task3(): Log in with the newly created username test, and delete all the other usernames from the running-config. Once this is done, return all the current usernames configured on the router to confirm whether only the test username is configured on the router.

Let's build a script to tackle these tasks one by one:

from netmiko import ConnectHandler

device = ConnectHandler(device_type='cisco_ios', ip='192.168.255.249', username='cisco', password='cisco')

def task1():
    output ...