Easy Wins

You won’t be able to follow the rest of this module without a thorough understanding of Ansible. If you haven’t completed the Ansible for Networking Engineers online course, please do it now.

At the very minimum, you have to understand YAML, Jinja2, basics of Ansible, and Ansible networking modules.

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In Spring 2017 course we covered various ways of creating summary- and compliance reports with Ansible, and in the Autumn 2019 course we added a short primer on dealing with large Ansible inventories.

After watching the videos describing the underlying principles and exploring numerous examples you’ll be ready to solve the Easy Wins hands-on exercises.

One of the simple solutions that can increase the reliability of your network is comparing the network state before and after a change.

This case study describes:

• How you could collect and compare network state
• How to collect network state with Ansible and compare it with diff
• How to remove time-dependent information from the network state

Before moving to hands-on exercises you might want to spend some time exploring the sample Ansible playbooks I created to illustrate the concepts discussed in this module.

Hands-on exercises for the second module are relatively simple: assuming you already built your network automation lab, create a simple summary report. Looking for tougher challenge? Don’t worry, it’s waiting for you.

Once you start working on real-life automation challenges, the single-directory-per-project approach quickly turns into a morass - it's time to organize your code and data into an easy-to-understand hierarchical structure. This section describes several approaches that you might apply to small proof-of-concept solutions or large production-grade projects.

One of the first steps on anyone's automation journey should be tight control of device configurations using a version control system. This section describes how you can use Git and GitLab/GitHub to track changes to device configurations, correlate changes to tickets or business requirements, implement review and approval workflow, and finally use Git as the single source of (configuration) truth.

NetQ is a tool developed by Cumulus Networks that allow you to validate proper operation of your network (BGP and OSPF adjacencies, LLDP neighbors...), log network state changes, inspect network state at any time in the past, and perform end-to-end path tracing including overlay-to-underlay mapping.