Network Automation Use Cases

This section describes numerous real-life network automation solutions, most of them created by the attendees of the Building Network Automation Solutions online course

In this part of the Network Automation Use Cases webinar David Barroso walks you through layers of network automation abstraction: from abstracting vendor-specific APIs with NAPALM to abstracting device configuration differences, and finally abstracting device state into infrastructure data model.

Want to automate IPv6 deployment in your network? This section will give you a few ideas on how you could make your IPv6 deployment smoother and more error-proof.

In another network automation use case Dinesh Dutt talked about automated data center fabric deployments. Focus on how simple his data model is and how he builds a whole fabric from just a few configurable parameters.

Why could cloud providers like Amazon automate deployment of load balancing and firewalling rules, and yet the enterprise IT continuously struggle with the same challenge?

This section will answer that question and describe a number of solutions, ranging from "deployable in production" to "works best in PowerPoint".

In this section we are going to look at two things:

• How to manage and consume secrets safely in our automation platform; from traditional methods like encrypted files to modern systems like Hashicorp Vault
• How to leverage modern platforms to dynamically provision certificates and SSH keys so we can keep communications with our devices secure.

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.

In this section Fred Hsu, Carl Buchmann, and Thomas Grimonet describe how you can use Arista's Ansible modules and roles to automate an Arista EOS-based fabric network with Ansible, and how you can leverage CloudVision to jumpstart or simplify the automation processes.