Network Automation Use Cases

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This webinar describes several real-life network automation use cases including:

• Simple reports and network diagrams;
• Configuration consistency checks;
• Device- and service configuration solutions;
• Abstracting network state and using abstracted state in checking network correctness;
• Automating IPv6 deployments
• Automatic deployment of data center fabrics
• Automating network services
• Intent-based networking and data models
• Managing secrets

Contents

Real-Life Automation Wins

While vendor marketers keep confusing customer engineers with buzzwords like “software-defined” and “intent-driven”, an increasing number of network- and security engineers decided to go another way and solve their problems the way system administrators did years ago: by combining simple tools into a system that delivers real-life solutions to real-life problems. This section focuses on several simple use cases including:

• Simple report;
• Creating network diagrams and graphs from operational data;
• Configuration consistency checks;
• Simple network device configurations;
• Automated equipment staging;
• Automating site hardware refresh;
• Large-scale firewall deployments;
• Full-blown MPLS/VPN service provisioning.

Abstracting Network State

David Barroso described how building abstractions can help you get to your goals faster, improve your daily operations and reliability and how it can help your organization work together.

Automating IPv6 Deployments

Deploying IPv6 on all servers, switches, routers, firewalls and load balancers is absolutely boring (once you figure out what needs to be done) and error-prone, resulting in potentially awesome troubleshooting experiences.

However, every well-defined repeatable process can be automated, and IPv6 deployment is no exception. This section will help you get started on your journey to automated IPv6 network deployment.

Automating Data Center Fabric Deployments

In this section of the webinar Dinesh Dutt (Cumulus Networks) described a data center fabric automation use case:

• Simplifying the fabric design and corresponding device configuration;
• Generating device configurations with Jinja2 templates;
• Deploying configurations and managing devices with Ansible.

Automating Network Services

Why can the big public cloud provider offer automated firewalling and load balancing services but you can't replicate that feat in your enterprise environment? This section will give you several guidelines you can use to modernize the network services deployment including:

• Reduce the blast radius;
• Decompose complex security policies into their simple elements;
• Integrate network services deployment into application development process.

Intent-Based Networking and Data Models

This section starts with a debunking of the $vendor-driven intent-based hype and explores numerous levels of intent you could encounter in an automated network:

• Actual device configurations and desired configurations;
• Infrastructure and services definition;
• Feedback loop and unit tests based on infrastructure and services definitions.

We'll also touch on unicorns like machine-learning-driven intent and automated remediation, and try to figure out what could go wrong in an intent-based orchestration system.

Managing and Using Secrets

Secrets are an important part of our jobs; they allow us to authenticate users and systems, to keep communications confidential and to verify the integrity of the information. Leaking secrets can have catastrophic consequences as it can allow an attacker to infiltrate our network and steal information, or even to perform denial of service attacks.

In this section we are going to look at two things:

• How to manage and consume secrets safely in our automation platform; from traditional methods like encrypted files to modern systems like Hashicorp Vault
• How to leverage modern platforms to dynamically provision certificates and SSH keys so we can keep communications with our devices secure.

Using Arista EOS Ansible Collections

In this section, Fred, Carl, and Thomas will describe how you can leverage Ansible to manage the configuration of Arista network devices directly or through the use of Ansible collections for Arista CloudVision. This presentation focuses on two Ansible collections (sets of Ansible roles and modules):

• arista.avd automates the deployment of an EVPN based network with Arista best practices;
• arista.cvp provides integration to the Arista CloudVision management platform respectively.

You’ll also learn how to leverage these roles and how you can customize and extend them to your needs!

About the Authors

Happy Campers