Building Network Automation Solutions - September 2018 session

The introduction to Autumn 2018 course describes:

• Course goals and course structure;
• Hands-on exercises and building your own lab;
• Detailed course contents

If you missed the live session, I'd highly recommend you start here.

In this presentation Dirk Feldhaus described an Ansible-based solution to Cisco ACI tenant provisioning he developed as a student of this course. The solution is used for production deployments within his company.

The structure of Dirk's presentation mirrors the approach you should take when developing any network automation solution:

• Figure out the problem and create a pilot solution;
• Define the service you plan to automate;
• Describe the service with a data model;
• Develop automation scripts that provision the target service;
• Develop support scripts to monitor and operate the service.

The videos from this section have been moved into Nornir webinar (part of the Network Automation course), and extended with a deep dive session on June 18th 2020. You can find the updated videos in Reference: Network Automation Tools module.

Network Infrastructure as Code (NIAC) is another overhyped buzzword. In this section we'll try to define what NIAC is, why you might care about it, and how to implement simple NIAC in networks that use decent devices with configuration replace functionality.

The second half of the presentation introduces advanced challenges like abstraction layers, dealing with numerous devices and byzantine failures, and using software development methodologies in network automation.

When you automate, you want to make sure that you are not automating bugs and mistakes, thereby making them spread across your environment. That is why you want to have a proper testing pipeline in place!

In his presentation, Gabriele Gerbino gives some practical examples building a simple testing pipeline by using Travis-CI and VMs/containers to make sure that you can sleep better once you hit the DEPLOY red button.

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.

JP Senior used Apstra AOS EVPN-with-VXLAN application to describe:

• How Apstra AOS uses graph databases to describe network topology and your intent;
• How the graph database information is translated into device data models and final device configuration;
• How Apstra AOS combines the intent you specified with device telemetry to detect anomalies in your network.

During the Q&A part of the live sessions we addressed these questions:

• Managing test and production environments;
• Integrating Ansible with external systems like IPAMs, NMS, or CMDBs;
• Executing Ansible plays on dynamically-created hosts
• Inputting data;
• Writing your own Ansible module