Gain insights into automating network reconnaissance, orchestrating repetitive changes, and transforming network configuration management. Discover CI/CD pipeline migration for full network automation.

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​​Network automation begins with automating network reconnaissance. This is accomplished by gathering important information from network devices while building a library of dynamic on-demand utilities and generating living documentation. Starting small, the course exhibits the simplicity and elegance of network automation.

Next, you will learn how to automate larger changes that require a high number of repetitive steps. These changes will be executed serially in a specific orchestrated order, making them perfect for an automated solution. After gaining comfort with the new tools, you can fully transform network configuration management to an automated, intent-based, self-documenting system.

The final step is learning how to migrate to a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, thereby fully automating the network.

Automate Your Network

# The difficulty of maintaining standards
Corporate standards are very hard to maintain as networks
evolve and transform. Often, the pressures of projects and deliverables
of day-to-day work demands lead to standards being overlooked, put off,
or ignored. Natural configuration drift can occur over time as network
devices and IP addresses come and go. If network devices continue to
operate, misconfigurations or poor standards may go unnoticed. When
identified, these cosmetic corrections may be deemed a low priority.

# Standards using Ansible
Ansible's dynamic templating guarantees a standardized configuration for
every device. Complete configuration coverage is achievable, and every line of code in the running-configuration can be derived from a
template. Accomplishing full idempotency between the source of
truth and the device configuration guarantees the uniform application of intent-based. Neither scale is a problem with this approach, nor is the human error factor.

When new standards arise, or changes to existing
standards are required, only the centralized templates and data models
are updated. These changes are pushed through the automation engine
delivering the new standards to the network.

# Golden configuration
Sometimes referred to as a
"desired state configuration" in Windows operating system administration, a golden configuration has many names.
Using Jinja2 templates and YAML data models, a golden configuration for
each device in the network is achieved using software development
methodologies. Logic within the templates is used to intelligently
generate device configuration commands. These configurations are applied
at scale to all devices included in the Ansible `hosts.ini` inventory
file.

The master branch represents the golden configuration for the network.
Automated builds package the various artifacts from the master branch
and provide a version number for that iteration of the network. When
changes are required, however minor, working branches are created for
code to be developed and tested. Frequent Git commits during development
are used to check changes into the working branch. A pull request is
used to merge these accumulated changes into the master branch. This is
then deployed into production to update the standardized, golden
configuration at scale.

Let's learn about the difficulties of maintaining standards in network configurations and how automation helps achieve uniformity.

Introduction

What Is Network Automation?

Why Automate the Network?

How to Automate the Network

Where to Start with Network Automation

Repository Structure

Network Reconnaissance

Tactical Playbooks

Data Models and Dynamic Templates

Dynamic Intent-Based Documentation

Configuration Management

Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery

Conclusion

Standards

The difficulty of maintaining standards