Building Network Automation Solutions - February 2019 session

This section introduces the speakers in the Spring 2019 course and the topics of their presentations... but there's more: we spent most of the time discussing the best way to navigate through the enormous amount of course materials.

Building a virtual lab was one of the largest hurdles faced by many course attendees, so we asked Matt Oswalt (the author of NRE Labs) to explain his approach to building virtual labs and the tools he uses to build them.

In the first half of his presentation David Gee focused on an extremely important topic: workflow mapping and sequence diagrams.

The second part of his talk covered a plethora of topics, from test-driven automation and imperative versus declarative programming to handling errors, removing magic and creating your own standards.

Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) is an obvious candidate for an network automation, as the impact of incorrectly-provisioned new devices is usually minimal. However, even though every vendor claims to have a ZTP solution, building an end-to-end system integrated with your workflow remains a hard problem.

In his presentation Patrick Ogenstad explained the basics of ZTP, described typical ZTP components, presented a solution you can use to build dynamic device configuration files, and answered tons of attendee questions.

Kristian Larsson described a testing methodology based on the approach his team is using to test the network automation system they're building for Deutsche Telekom Terastream project.

He started with unit and system tests, described various approaches to device mocking, explained how to do end-to-end system tests, and shown how you can use vrnetlab (an open source virtual network lab environment focused on testing use cases) in Continuous Integration pipeline.

In the second part of his presentation he described how you could test correctness of BGP configurations with docker-based BGP feeds, and concluded with a discussion of robustness and feature flags.

Mitja Robas and a team of software developers created a fully-automated disaster recovery solution for a customer who wanted to migrate from an existing stretched VLAN architecture to a truly redundant multi-data-center design.

In his presentation Mitja described the underlying network architecture, automation workflows, and the overall architecture of the automation solution.