Building Network Automation Solutions - February 2018 session

In the Network Infrastructure as Code presentation Mark Prior described how he automated a private cloud infrastructure, and how he uses infrastructure-as-code principles to build reliable data center networking infrastructure.

Another very important aspect when designing and building a network automation solution is its security and reliability. The security aspects are not much different than what you'd usually have to deal with when installing a network management system, and the reliability aspects should be familiar to any software developer. However, it's still worth spelling them out.

After automating device configurations and service provisioning you might start tackling the holy grail of network automation: changing your 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.

Chef is not a most commonly-used network automation tool, but you might still encounter it in environments where it's already used for system management. In this section you'll learn what Chef is, how to set it up, and how to configure Nexus OS switches using on-device Chef agent.

Once you start working on real-life automation challenges, the single-directory-per-project approach quickly turns into a morass - it's time to organize your code and data into an easy-to-understand hierarchical structure. This section describes several approaches that you might apply to small proof-of-concept solutions or large production-grade projects.

This section contains the original GitOps videos from the network automation course. Edited videos are now part of Network Automation Concepts webinar.