Automation and Orchestration

This webinar describes what network automation is, why should we use it, and what tools are available if you want to get started.

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In this introductory section we tried to answer common automation questions like:

• Why should I automate my infrastructure?
• What should I automate?
• Should I build or buy an automation solution?
• What criteria should I consider when selecting an automation tool or product?
• What criteria should I consider when buying automation-friendly hardware?
• How can I make my automation solution more reliable?
• How can I gain the trust of my peers and managers?

Elisa Jasinska started her presentation with a brief description of typical microservices-based network automation architecture.

Next she listed the services and components you might need in your automation/orchestration solution, including single-source-of-truth database, templating system, device access, telemetry data collection systems and monitoring systems.

In the final part of the presentation you'll find a few guidelines on automation/orchestration system design.

This webinar describes when and how to use typical open-source network automation tools: Ansible, Git, Vagrant, NetBox, pmacct, ELK stack... and many more.

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UBS (one of the largest global banks) managed an amazing feat: they rolled out 24 new data centers in 30 months. In his presentation Thomas Wacker described how UBS solved that challenge by fully embracing automation for all phases of data center network rebuild, including validation and documentation.

He started with prerequisites and key objectives, laid out the architecture, showcased the toolchain UBS was using at that time, and explained the phases of build, test, documentation and ongoing operations.

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.

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".

Most of the intent-based systems are nothing more than a fancy orchestration system with an abstraction layer. This section describes the many levels of abstraction you can implement in such a system.

This webinar discusses fundamental concepts and ideas that network engineers can use today to start "ramping up" the software-defined path. Matt Oswalt addresses some of the biggest questions on many network professionals' minds - questions like "Do I need to be a programmer to keep my job?", or "There is so much to learn - where do I start?"

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This webinar describes real-life SDN use cases, ranging from data center fabrics, network monitoring and traffic tapping, scale-out network services and DDoS mitigation to service insertion, forwarding optimization, and traffic engineering.

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This webinar answers some fundamental questions anyone should ask prior to a production SDN deployment.

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These Software Gone Wild podcasts focus on data center automation topics

These Software Gone Wild podcasts cover various open-source tools.

You might find these automation topics interesting.

Even though SDN is not the focus of this section, you might still want to listen to these podcast episodes.

These ipSpace.net webinars describe topics related to this module. Some of them have been included in the recommended or optional self-study materials; you might want to watch all of them.