Introduction
From the moment networks appeared, they steadily grew bigger and became increasingly complex. Engineers have sought to automate any possible activity since then. Network automation is the process of automating the configuration, management, testing, deployment, and operation of physical and virtual devices in a network. By eliminating tedious and manual processes, it is possible to reduce operational expenses, reduce human error, and achieve better time to market.
Network automation is not a new topic, but in recent years, it has exponentially increased in importance due to external factors such as the need for agility in responding to growth. Although it’s still in its infancy, network automation is already a critical pillar on an organization’s strategy. Companies are redesigning and rethinking their network strategies, and some are even being pushed toward automation without clear processes or goals.
This book approaches the topic from the point of view of an IT professional who is well versed in networking and related topics—including cloud, compute, and other components in today’s networks—and is trying to take both physical and virtual infrastructure to a semi- or fully automated state. The book explains the fundamentals of network automation, including a variety of tools and their use cases and data and how to extract value from it. This book also takes a deep dive into a specific tool, Ansible, showing how to use it to solve a number of common use cases in networking.
A key aspect of the book is its practical approach to the topic. It is filled with code snippets you can reuse for your own use cases, as well as real case studies that show practical applications of all this knowledge.
Although this is a Cisco Press book, it takes a vendor-neutral approach to automation tools and techniques. It will give you the knowledge you need to make informed decisions when automating your own use cases.
Last but not least, the book explains how to produce a network automation strategy, which is a key piece that is notoriously missing in many enterprises today. It helps a reader focus automation efforts on a fruitful network automation journey rather than a journey without a clear purpose.
Goals and Methods
IT professionals are now more than ever before challenged by their businesses to meet a level of network agility and elasticity that only automation can solve. Furthermore, as networks have expanded to the cloud, they have become increasingly dynamic and complex. To address this, vendors introduce new tools every other day, many of them overlapping in the problems they address. This makes it very challenging for the IT professionals to choose the correct tool for their use case.
The goal of this book is to help you understand what can and should be automated in your network environment, what benefits automation would bring, and how you can achieve it. Furthermore, it compares and contrasts some of the available tools to help you understand where to use each of them and why. This knowledge will allow you to make informed network automation decisions in your company.
Who Should Read This Book?
Network automation typically touches several network components, such as routers, switches, firewalls, virtual machines, and cloud infrastructure. In general, IT professionals are divided in their areas of expertise. Individuals are spread into focus areas such as the following, which in some cases overlap:
• Servers and virtualization
• Storage
• Switching and routing
• Security
• Software applications
• Cloud
As the focus of this book is network automation, the audience is the sum of all system administrators, storage administrators, networking engineers, software virtualization engineers, and network management engineers. Because this book also approaches real case studies and network automation strategy, IT managers will also benefit from reading it as it will help them understand how automation can greatly improve their ecosystem and how to plan for the journey.
How This Book Is Organized
This book is set up to help you understand and replicate the use cases on your own. It is recommended that you read through the chapters in order to get the full benefit of the book.
Networking, storage, compute, virtualization, and cloud are complex topics and are getting more complex every day. System administrators, networking engineers, cloud engineers, and virtualization engineers are asked to master their field and also to automate the solutions on their field. This book helps you understand the fundamentals of network automation and apply it to your job needs, using state-of-the-art tools and techniques. This book offers a number of advantages:
• An easy reading style with no marketing
• Comprehensive coverage of the topic, from fundamentals to advanced techniques
• Real case studies, instead of hypothetical situations, of projects the author led.
• Coverage of the latest network automation trends, such as NetDevOps
• Reusable code snippets
• Explanations of tools and their applications with neutrality
This book is beneficial to IT professionals trying to understand how to implement network automation solutions as well as to IT management trying to understand the benefits of network automation and where to apply it.
Book Structure
The book is organized into seven chapters:
• Chapter 1, “Types of Network Automation”: This chapter describes the different network automation types and the use cases they address. This chapter also compares and contrasts some of the common automation tools used by modern enterprises, including their advantages and shortcomings, in a vendor-neutral way.
• Chapter 2, “Data for Network Automation”: This chapter provides fundamental background on data and the role it plays in network automation. The chapter describes commonly seen data formats, such as JSON, XML, and YAML, in detail. Finally, it consolidates the topic by describing methods and techniques to gather data from your network.
• Chapter 3, “Using Data from Your Network”: This chapter provides an overview of what you can do with the data that you gather from your network. The chapter starts by defining common data preparation techniques, such as parsing and aggregation, followed by data visualization techniques. Finally, it describes possible insights you can derive from your gathered data. The chapter also describes three case studies about enterprises that have created notable value from network data.
• Chapter 4, “Ansible Basics”: This chapter examines Ansible, which is the most commonly used automation tool in enterprises. It describes all the fundamental buildings blocks of Ansible, including the tool’s installation as well as its architecture and components, such as plays, tasks, modules, variables, conditionals, loops, and roles.
• Chapter 5, “Using Ansible for Network Automation”: This chapter examines Ansible as a network automation tool. It illustrates how to achieve common networking tasks with Ansible playbooks across a variety of components, such as files, networking devices, virtual machines, cloud constructs, and APIs. Furthermore, the chapter describes three use cases where Ansible was used to automate global-scale network architectures.
• Chapter 6, “Network DevOps”: This chapter introduces NetDevOps and how it is changing the automation paradigm in networking. It covers the fundamentals of what NetDevOps is, why you would use it, and where you would use it. The chapter also guides you through the step-by-step process of creating your own NetDevOps pipeline. The chapter finishes with three case studies that give you a feel for the benefits NetDevOps has brought to some large enterprises.
• Chapter 7, “Automation Strategies”: This chapter defines network automation strategy and delves into its functionality. It provides a detailed description of what an automation strategy is and its components. This chapter also includes a methodology to build an automation strategy from scratch, along with tips and lessons learned from applying automation in large enterprises. It finishes with an overview of how to plan the execution of a newly created strategy.