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

# What is a template?
Ansible uses Jinja2 templates to enable dynamic expressions and access variables in the `group_vars`
and `host_vars` data dictionaries. All templates are compiled on the local Linux host at runtime, and then
deployed to the target host. This is done to minimize the amount of information passed to the target device, allowing only what is required to execute the playbook.

# Create templates
The next step is to build dynamic templates. Now that a data dictionary comprising key-value pairs
along with structured lists exists, templates can be created. The Jinja2 templates substitute portions of
configuration commands with dynamic data from the dictionary for a device or group of devices. 

Exact Cisco configuration commands, including syntax, nesting, and spacing, are required to develop
idempotent configurations. If the spacing is off, the playbook will still execute and make the changes.
However, during check mode or future executions of the playbook, the incorrectly spaced lines of
configuration will always show up as a change, even if the commands are already present on the device. 

# Static/explicit statements
With network device configurations, there are a lot of static configuration commands without any real
valuable information that can be abstracted into a data model. Often, it is desired to explicitly execute
commands and not require any dynamic data from the dictionary. Many global configurations follow this
pattern. Consider the `01_ios_global.j2` template, which covers
all devices, regardless of platform, and the global configuration commands we will explicitly run on each
device: 



Let's learn what templates are and how to create them using Jinja2.

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

Templates

What is a template?