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Putting It All Together
The final mandatory module focuses on real-life automation solutions deployed
in production environments.
You'll also learn how to extend Ansible playbooks and integrate them
with transactional databases and front-end orchestration systems.
Building systems from small components usually works better than
tackling a gigantic project, but in the end still need to combine
those components into a bigger system and provide its users
with the expected user experience, be it a simple CLI or GUI.
This section describes how you can combine Ansible playbooks
with front-end orchestrations systems, external databases or
IPAM, and how you can use Ansible Tower (or AWX) to provide a
basic GUI or API to your Ansible environment.
Joe Hlasnik described how his company uses network automation to provision and decomission network services, the benefits of Ansible Tower, and the user interface they developed for their operators.
UBS AG started using network automation to speed up the
data center deployment process. The project was a huge success
and resulted in UBS embracing automation in campus, WAN and
remote office network deployments.
In this section Thomas Wacker described the UBS automation
journey and how far they got in 2017.
Sander Steffann built a complete network automation solution including
integration with NetBox, BGP Peering Manager, and full-blown CI/CD
pipeline.
In his presentation he described the tool selection, business
processes he had to support, and the evolution of his solution from
simple configuration templating to full-blown GitLab-based CI/CD
pipeline with automated configuration deployment.
1:46:01
Service Deployment in Cisco ACI with Ansible
In this presentation Dirk Feldhaus described an Ansible-based solution
to Cisco ACI tenant provisioning he developed as a student of this course.
The solution is used for production deployments within his company.
The structure of Dirk's presentation mirrors the approach you should take
when developing any network automation solution:
Figure out the problem and create a pilot solution;
Define the service you plan to automate;
Describe the service with a data model;
Develop automation scripts that provision the target service;
Develop support scripts to monitor and operate the service.
Ireland Internet Exchange (INEX) uses IXP Manager (an open-source tool
developed by INEX and used by over 60 IXPs worldwide) as the orchestration
layer on top of SaltStack to provision and operate multi-vendor INEX infrastructure.
In his presentation, Nick Hilliard described how to take a practical, hands-on
approach to network automation for live networks, starting at business analysis,
product abstraction and data modeling, and ending up with practical automation
of live configurations.
Mitja Robas and a team of software developers created a fully-automated
disaster recovery solution for a customer who wanted to migrate from
an existing stretched VLAN architecture to a truly redundant
multi-data-center design.
In his presentation Mitja described the underlying network architecture,
automation workflows, and the overall architecture of the automation
solution.
This podcast describes a production-grade large-scale automation
solution orchestrating everything from firewall rules to Windows AD
and VoIP call plans;
