Building Network Automation Solutions - November 2020 session

Sander Steffann built a complete network automation solution including integration with NetBox, BGP Peering Manager, and full-blown CI/CD pipeline.

In his presentation he described the tool selection, business processes he had to support, and the evolution of his solution from simple configuration templating to full-blown GitLab-based CI/CD pipeline with automated configuration deployment.

Kurt Wauters and Wim de Hul described a typical automation journey in a large organization:

• From early enthusiasm to disappointments;
• Finding a challenge that is simple enough to solve while resulting in immediate wins;
• Slowly growing the solution, and moving from read-only queries to service deployment automation and orchestration

In 2019, David Gee embarked on a journey to build an auto-remediation, self-healing, and self-driving network. In November 2020 he told us about the copious hype and the hard problems he encountered, concluding with a more realistic understanding of what's feasible and possible.

Damien Garros' presentation focused on network monitoring landscape, hype surrounding this industry segment (example: streaming telemetry), open-source tools you can use to build modern monitoring solutions, and back-end storage including time-series databases.

David Barroso explained how to design and write an application focusing on three aspects; scalability, maintainability, and reliability.

He described design principles, tools, and patterns you can use to grow your applications without compromising long-term quality, and increase confidence and speed when developing new features or changing existing ones.

In the second half of the presentation, David illustrated these principles with a simple application that generates interface- and BGP configuration from a network data model.

Dinesh Dutt described Suzieq, an open-source network monitoring/observability framework and tool, and demonstrated its capabilities in monitoring, troubleshooting, and validating complex networks

Salt Super-Proxy is an extension of Salt architecture that enables large-scale network automation without running a dedicated minion process of every managed device.

In this presentation, Mircea Ulinic, the author of Salt Super-Proxy, described its architecture and demonstrated how to use it to manage multi-vendor environment.