Building Network Automation Solutions

The initial module of the course covers the big picture:

• What is network automation?
• How do I build a full-blown network automation solution?
• Network automation services you might need
• Reusable components within these services
• Useful network automation tools (and how to select them)

Although you can use any tool you wish to implement your solutions throughout the course, most presentations and examples will use Ansible. It's therefore highly recommended that you get familiar with Ansible and the best way to do it is with Ansible online course – to start it, click the right arrow in this section

We'll start with some easy wins that require read-only access to network devices and no data model apart from inventory of devices. You’ll collect data from devices using SNMP, show commands or device-specific API, and create summary- or compliance reports.

Data models are the crux of any successful network automation solution, and getting them just right is a mixture of science and art. After finishing this section you’ll create two data models: an infrastructure data model and a services data model, trying to make them as abstract as possible.

Using the data models built in the previous section we’ll generate device configurations and deploy them on network devices to provision transport infrastructure or new services. You’ll also use the same data models to validate successful configuration deployment.

This section describes various approaches to data validation and error handling. We’ll also focus on unit tests - simple tests that verify the correctness of your code, and stress-test it using as many invalid inputs as possible - and figure out how to automate them as part of your deployment process.

After completing your infrastructure- and service deployment solution, you’ll explore the means of integrating your solution with front-end orchestrations systems or back-end databases.

Network Infrastructure as Code is an interesting approach to network automation: use software development techniques to manage your infrastructure.

After you’ve mastered device and service provisioning, and started using it in real-time production environment, it’s time for the next step: automate responses to significant events occuring in your network.

Modern open-source software enables you to build advanced network monitoring and observability solutions based on data acquired from SNMP, CLI commands, and streaming telementry, and stored in time-series databases or Hadoop data stores.

Guest speakers presenting in live course sessions described numerous interesting network automation tools. While the examples in this course usually use Ansible, don’t limit yourself to a single tool. After mastering it, start exploring the alternatives - they might be a better fit for your next challenge.

This section contains the comprehensive list of self-study materials.

Several presentations from the past live sessions are also part of the mandatory or recommended materials - see the individual modules for more details.