Building Network Automation Solutions - January 2017 session

The introductory section of the January 2017 course covered the logistics, how to get started challenges, and lab questions.

This section focuses on larger systems and components you need to build them. You might think you don’t need it, but you’ll find it very handy when trying to move from small spot fixes that address the most-immediate pains to bigger solutions.

In the second session of the January 2017 course we explored various ways of creating summary- and compliance reports with Ansible. After watching the videos describing the underlying principles and numerous examples you’ll be ready to solve the Easy Wins hands-on exercises.

The guest presentation by Marcel Wiget (Juniper) describes YANG data models, briefly introduces NETCONF, and shows how you can use OpenConfig or your custom data model (described in YANG) to configure Junos devices.

What is YANG? Why is it useful? Where can I store my data? When should I start using a database instead of text files? What about Excel spreadsheets? What’s the difference between relational and NoSQL databases? You’ll get answers to all these questions in this section.

You’ll also learn how to build a data model describing your network and how you can transform a network- or services-focused data model into a device-focused data model (and when that would be useful).

In this tutorial David Barroso explains the basics of network device configurations based on abstracted data models, including data derived from a back-end database.

The VLAN Service Provisioning case study starts with simple configuration changes based on service data model, and slowly introduces more complex topics like data model transformation, service decomissioning, and post-deployment validation.

In his Network Continuous Integration presentation Pete Lumbis explained the basics of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) concepts and demonstrated how you can use GitLab and virtual labs to test network device configurations prior to production deployment.

In this section you’ll learn how to:

• Write fail-safe playbooks
• Recover from Ansible module failures and report them
• Use Ansible logging and debugging tools
• Debug individual components of your Ansible playbooks (tasks, plays or modules/plugins)
• Build and automate unit tests
• Validate input data and device state

Ryan Heffernan and Mat Wood described how Facebook uses network automation concepts in their enterprise network.

The final presentation in the January 2017 course focused on Ansible extensions (plugins, modules, callbacks) and integration with external databases, and concluded with the final part of the VLAN case study: integration with a transactional databases system.