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Practical Network Automation

By : Ratan

4.4 (8)

Buy this Book

Practical Network Automation

4.4 (8)

By: Ratan

Buy this Book

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.

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

Fundamental Concepts

Network automation

DevOps

Software-defined networking

OpenFlow

Program concepts

Language choices (Python/PowerShell)

Representational State Transfer (REST) framework

Summary

Python for Network Engineers

Python interpreter and data types

Conditions and loops

Writing Python scripts

Functions

Python modules and packages

Multithreading for parallel processing

Using Netmiko for SSH and network device interaction

Network automation use case

Summary

Accessing and Mining Data from Network

Device configurations

Multi-vendor environments

IP configs/interface parsing

Device OS upgrades

IPv4 to IPv6 conversion

Site rollouts

Office/DC relocations

Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) configs for switches

Summary

Web Framework for Automation Triggers

Why create web-based scripts/frameworks?

Understanding and configuring IIS for web framework

Creating web-specific scripts

Accessing a script from dynamic HTML

Creating the backend API in C#

Consuming the API in Python

Sample summary task

Summary

Ansible for Network Automation

Ansible overview and terminology

Summary

Continuous Integration for Network Engineers

Interaction with Splunk

Automation examples on various technology domains

Example and use case

Summary

SDN Concepts in Network Automation

Managing cloud platforms

Programmable network devices

Controller-based network fabric

Network automation tools

Summary

Customer Reviews

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Web Framework for Automation Triggers

As we move on and get better at understanding the coding techniques and Python, the next step is to ensure that scripts are executed without the end users actually running the code locally, and ensure a platform or OS independent approach in code execution. This chapter focuses on putting our scripts on a web platform. We will cover the following topics:

Creating a web accessible script with examples
Accessing the script from HTML/dynamic HTML
Understanding and configuring the environment for the web framework using IIS
The basics of APIs and creating a sample API using C#
Using the API in Python
Creating a task to understand the full end-to-end functionality of a web framework