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

Summary


In this chapter, we learned what Ansible is, its installation, and basic usage of Ansible. This chapter also introduced concepts and terminology used in Ansible, with reference to how to create playbooks, tasks, and other basic functions in Ansible. We also got familar with ad-hoc commands and understand the concept of facts and their usage in Ansible.

Finally, using Jinja templates we understood how to create a full configuration using templates with reference to device/role specific information using roles in Ansible.

In the next chapter, we will see how to call miscellaneous other aspects of automation, such as using Splunk for syslog collection and fetching information from Python, working with basic automation on BGP, UC integration examples, and other relevant examples that can be used for ready reference when creating automation scripts.