Event-Driven Network Automation

After automating device configurations and service provisioning you might start tackling the holy grail of network automation: changing the network behavior based on real-time external event.

In his March 2018 presentation, David Gee described the fundamentals of Event-Driven Automation (EDA), including:

• Why would you want event-driven automation and what are its pitfalls?
• What exactly is an event and what's the difference between signals and events?
• How would the architecture of an event-driven solution look like?
• Why do we need event normalization and correlation?

He concluded with an overview of open-source and commercial tools you could use when building an event-driven solution and demonstrated the concepts with two simple examples using StackStorm and Salt.

In February 2018, Mircea Ulinic described Salt, a highly-scalable automation tool used in very large environments like LinkedIn and CloudFlare.

His presentation covered:

• Salt architecture, terminology, configuration and operations
• Network automation (including configuration and state management)
• Event-driven automation.

Salt Super-Proxy is an extension of Salt architecture that enables large-scale network automation without running a dedicated minion process of every managed device.

In this presentation, Mircea Ulinic, the author of Salt Super-Proxy, described its architecture and demonstrated how to use it to manage multi-vendor environment.

Jeremy Schulman described real-world use cases using Slack to create commands that drive network automation workflows. He discussed the features of Slack he'd used and covered what he'd learned so far in terms of pros-and-cons, including integration with Ansible Tower.

He concluded his presentation with an in-depth description of a test application he created to help you get started.

In 2019, David Gee embarked on a journey to build an auto-remediation, self-healing, and self-driving network. In November 2020 he told us about the copious hype and the hard problems he encountered, concluding with a more realistic understanding of what's feasible and possible.