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

ansibleFinal1.tar.gz

gitjob

CIPhosts

CIPhosts-copy

gather_info

gather_important_facts

facts_to_md

facts_to_csv_html

tools

frr01

frr02

first_gather_important_facts

​​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

# Risks and challenges
There is always risk associated with making changes to the network. Despite the best designs and architectures, some changes are disruptive. Hence, outages cannot be avoided. Networks also have the largest blast radius in the enterprise. The closer to the network core changes are made, the higher the scope of the change impact. For example, an entire building can be isolated from the network if changes cause an outage at the distribution layer. If the network is down, almost every other aspect of the organization is impacted in some way. Uptime is of the utmost importance to an organization because  network downtime can have a huge impact on business. These factors can lead to an extremely risk-averse view of network operations. Hence, the lesser the change, the better. 

The biggest challenge in network automation is an organization’s willingness to adopt it. Despite obvious benefits, which become clear throughout this course, there can be a lot of resistance to this type of change. This is particularly regarding changes to the network. This mindset is also at odds with the modern pressures and business demands of the network to be, ironically, constantly changing. Network automation is in fact a safer and more reliable approach, partly because it simply eliminates the manual error. 

 


Let's learn about the risks that are involved in the process of making changes to the network.

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

The Risks of Automation

Risks and challenges