Title & contents

Table of Contents Preface ..................................................................................................................................................... 1

Part I ......................................................................................................................................................... 9

Chapter 1 What is Network Automation? .............................................................................................. 11

Traditional Legacy Network Management ........................................................................................ 11

Operational Challenges ...................................................................................................................... 12

Software-Defined Networking ........................................................................................................... 14

Introduction to Network Automation................................................................................................. 15

Impact on IT ...................................................................................................................................... 17

NetDevOps .................................................................................................................................... 18

Skills .............................................................................................................................................. 18

Tools .............................................................................................................................................. 18

Converting Configurations to Code ................................................................................................... 19

Data Models ................................................................................................................................... 20

Templates ....................................................................................................................................... 22

Methodology .................................................................................................................................. 22

Network Development Lifecycle (NDLC) .................................................................................... 22

Ansible ............................................................................................................................................... 23

Framework ..................................................................................................................................... 24

Python ............................................................................................................................................ 24

YAML ............................................................................................................................................ 24

Jinja2 .............................................................................................................................................. 25

Playbooks ....................................................................................................................................... 25

Idempotency .................................................................................................................................. 25

Check Mode ................................................................................................................................... 25

Differentials ................................................................................................................................... 26

Verbosity ........................................................................................................................................ 26

Tags ................................................................................................................................................ 26

Ansible Tower.................................................................................................................................... 27

Source Control ................................................................................................................................... 27

Git .................................................................................................................................................. 27

Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) .................................................................................... 28

Work .............................................................................................................................................. 28

Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) ................................................................ 28