The most important part of writing quality software is testing. Writing unit tests provide assurance the changes you’re making aren’t going to break anything in your software application. Sounds pretty great, right? Why is it that in networking operations we’re still mainly using ping, traceroute, and human verification for network validation and testing? The Network is the Application I’ve written in the past that deploying configurations faster, or more generally, configuration management, is just one small piece of what network automation is. A major component much less talked about is auto ..read more

Arista is largely known for its operating system, best known as EOS. Arista has been known to deploy new features at a more rapid pace than other vendors and to have a more open OS–since EOS was the first production-grade network network operating system to expose any form of Linux to end users. Because of this, I believe it’s perceived Arista has a better programmability strategy than other vendors. From what I can tell, it is not the case. However, given a few features Arista has in EOS, it makes programming EOS a bit easier than other platforms. Let’s take a look. At Network Field Day 16, A ..read more

The latest in all the networking buzz these days is Intent-Based Networking (IBN). There are varying definitions of what IBN is and is not. Does IBN mean you need to deploy networking solely from business policy, does IBN mean you must be streaming telemetry from every network device in real-time, is it a combination of both? Is it automation? This article isn’t meant to define IBN, rather, it’s meant to provide a broader, yet more practical perspective on automation and intent. Intent isn’t New One could argue that intent-based systems have been around for years, especially when managing serv ..read more

I get asked often on how to perform specific network automation tasks with Ansible. There were a few questions recently pertaining to the ios_config module within Ansible core, so I decided to record a video to show different options you have when using it to deploy global configuration commands on IOS devices. Here is a summary of the four (4) options covered: Embed commands in your playbook and reference them using the commands (or lines) parameter. Use the src parameter and reference a configuration file with one or more commands in it. Use the src parameter and reference a Jinja2 template ..read more

Last year at Interop, there was a great mini-conference dedicated to the DevOps for Networking community. In that session, I kicked off the day with a general view of where the industry was with respect to the intersection of DevOps and networking with a focus on network automation. One of the analogies I made was comparing network automation to self-driving cars posing the question, “Are they real?”…“Are they real for us (the consumer)?” No, they are not, but I continued to make the analogy. Is complete network automation real today? While, the answer is yes, it’s not really a reality for mo ..read more

For the past several years, the open source [network] community has been rallying around Ansible as a platform for network automation. Just over a year ago, Ansible recognized the importance of embracing the network community and since then, has made significant additions to offer network automation out of the box. In this post, we’ll look at two distinct models you can use when automating network devices with Ansible, specifically focusing on Cisco Nexus switches. I’ll refer to these models as CLI-Driven and Abstraction-Driven Automation. Note: We’ll see in later posts how we can use these m ..read more

Network Automation is just getting started and it’s odd to say that as IT professionals from other technology disciplines are always surprised to see how much manual interaction there still is between the networking engineering/operations teams and the actual devices they manage. I’ll never forget the days in 2012-2013 performing my best Google searches to find ways to program or to automate network routers and switches. I didn’t care what programming language was being used or even what tool, but I found nothing. Every time I heard someone say they were using a network script, I’d say “email ..read more

There is a lot of buzz around network APIs such as NETCONF and RESTCONF. Here we’ll take a quick a look at these APIs on Cisco IOS XE. On the surface, it seems Cisco IOS XE is the first network device platform that supports NETCONF and RESTCONF both driven from YANG models. Technically, RESTCONF isn’t officially supported or even seen in the CLI to enable it, but more on that later. YANG When APIs are model driven, the model is the source of truth. If done right, all API documentation and configuration validation could occur using tooling built directly from the models. YANG is the leading d ..read more

I changed things up this week and wrote an article on LinkedIn about the launch of the Network to Code On Demand Labs platform. It is a cloud based service that allows you to launch any number of network topologies in minutes for simulations, labs, demos, and testing. Check it out if you want 22 hours free of on-demand network access to devices of your choice! Thanks, Jason @jedelman8 ..read more

Last week I was in Dublin for business which just so happened to overlap with iNOG9, which was last Wednesday. As luck would have it, I had the opportunity to speak at iNOG9 about network automation. You can watch the video if you want to see the presentation, but the three mini demos I gave were: Cable verification on Juniper vMX devices using Ansible Automating BGP on IOS-XR using OpenConfig BGP models using Ansible Using Postman to explore and demo the new RESTCONF/YANG interface on IOS XE. Few words about each. Cable verification Usually when the topic of network automation comes up, con ..read more