A few weeks ago, I had an interesting video chat with David Bombal in which we covered a wide variety of topics including

• What would you do if you started networking today?
• How do you increase the value of your knowledge?
• Networking hasn’t changed in the last 40 years and whatever you learn about networking will still be valid 20 years from now;
• Why should I learn and implement network automation?
• When should I start learning about network automation?

Note: David posted the whole list of topics with timestamps in the pinned comment under the video.

An attendee of our Building Network Automation Solutions online course decided to automate his NSX-T environment and sent me this question:

I will be working on NSX-T quite a lot these days and I was wondering how could I automate my workflow (lab + production) to produce a certain consistency in my work.

I’ve seen that VMware relies a lot on PowerShell and I’ve haven’t invested a lot in that yet … and I would like to get more skills and become more proficient using Python right now.

Always select the most convenient tool for the job, and regardless of personal preferences PowerShell seems to be the one to use in this case.

If you’ve been in networking long enough you’d probably noticed an interesting pattern:

• Some topic is hotly debated;
• No agreement is ever reached even though the issue is an important one;
• The debate dies after participants diverge enough to stop caring about the other group.

I was reminded of this pattern when I was explaining the traffic filtering measures available in private and public clouds during the Designing Infrastructure for Private Clouds workshop.

Chris Crook decided to work on a pretty typical problem for his second hands-on assignment in the Building Network Automation Solutions online course: create a network diagram from adjacency data.

He decided to rely on BGP adjacencies (I would usually use LLDP) and added an interesting twist: instead of Ansible he used Nornir with NAPALM.

If you’re a BGP newbie, you’ll love this BGP Show and Tell series from Denise Fishburne. Enjoy!

I mentioned Multipath TCP (MP-TCP) numerous times in the past but I never managed to get beyond “this is the thing that might solve some TCP multihoming challenges” We fixed this omission in Episode 100 of Software Gone Wild with Christoph Paasch (software engineer @ Apple) and Mat Martineau from Open Source Technology Center @ Intel.

Remember the previous blog post in this sequence in which I explained the need for single source-of-truth used in your network automation solution? No? Please read it first ;)

Ready for the next step? Assuming your sole source-of-truth is the actual device configuration, is there a magic mechanism we can use to transform it into something we could use in network automation?

TL&DR: No.

This blog post was initially sent to subscribers of my SDN and Network Automation mailing list. Subscribe here.

I made a statement along these lines in an SD-WAN blog post and related email sent to our SDN and Network Automation mailing list:

The architecture of most SD-WAN products is thus much cleaner and easier to configure than traditional hybrid networks. However, do keep in mind that most of them use proprietary protocols, resulting in a perfect lock-in.

While reading that one of my readers sent me a nice email with an interesting question:

This is a guest blog post by Dave Crown, Lead Data Center Engineer at the State of Delaware. He can be found automating things when he's not in meetings or fighting technical debt.

Over the course of the last year or so, I’ve been working on building a solution to deploy and manage Cisco’s ACI using Ansible and Git, with Python to spackle in cracks. The goal I started with was to take the plain-text description of our network from a Git server, pull in any requirements, and use the solution to configure the fabric, and lastly, update our IPAM, Netbox. All this without using the GUI or CLI to make changes. Most importantly, I want to run it with a simple invocation so that others can run it and it could be moved into Ansible Tower when ready.

TL&DR: We ran two workshops in Zurich last week – a quick peek into using Ansible for network automation and updated Building Private Cloud Infrastructure. You can access workshop materials with any paid ipSpace.net subscription.

Now for the fun part…