My journey with Network & Cloud Automation
I have been using a multi-threaded version of the synchronous codes that we usually see to interact with devices and for over a year now and I have a network of nearly 28k devices (routers / switches / WLCs / FWs ) that I need to manage. With that multithreaded version, I was able to…
Scrapli stands for scrape cli very cleverly joined together in one word. Althought he source documentation of this network devices interaction library is really wonderful and can be found here, this is my journal on my path to learning various libraries for device interactions and understand how they differ from each other and which one…
In the previous articles, we have seen how to leverage pandas and csv modules for reading and writing csv and excel files. This post will talk about how to read write excel using python openpyxl. Although pandas is a much more robust package to deal with excel files or tabular data, it has its own…
As network engineers are bombarded with more and more terms like NETCONF, RESTCONF, YANG, REST APIs every day, it’s becoming increasingly important to understand the basics of these terms if not in-depth for all network engineers. To begin this series of uncovering the meaning and relevance of these terms for network engineers, let’s start by…
TextFsm is available as a plugin to various device interaction libraries like Netmiko but what if we need to use TEXTFSM as a standalone python package, it is also available. Conditions where you don’t have access to the devices but have outputs from the device in a text file. We have already seen how to…
Jinja2 is a templating framework that is extremely versatile and its usage is not limited to any particular field like networking or web development. In this post, we will see the power of Jinja2 for network engineers. This flow chart gives the overall concept of jinja2 Let’s take an example to make this more clear….
As more and more of the infrastructure becomes virtualized and the gradual shift from conventional methods to CI/CD and DevOps mindset in the field of network engineering and automation is adopted, it is going to become an absolute necessity to have digital twins of the live networks. What is Digital Twin for Network Automation? Digital…
Excel is one of the primary data sources that we network engineers have to deal with. While you will find a lot of people with very proficient skills with excel when it comes to manipulating data and making sense of it but now there is a need to be able to programmatically access the data…
We have seen how we can leverage python’s Netmiko module to interact with devices programmatically. In this blog post, we will see how we can achieve similar results with the NAPALM library for network automation. The main advantage of using NAPALM over netmiko is that there is a lot of stuff and heavy lifting that…
We have covered how to use csv modules in the previous two posts. In this post, we will try to make the job easier using the python pandas library to read write csv with python for Network Automation. In my opinion, pandas is the one-stop-shop for all needs when you are dealing with tabular data…