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APNIC workshop

1. Network Automation

Instructor: Dave Phelan, Mircea Ulinic, Terry Sweetser, Sheryl Hermoso

Synopsis

The objective of this tutorial is to introduce Network Automation using a combination of theory and hands-on-labs. At the conclusion, the participants should have a good understanding of what Network Automation is, and how it can be applied in their environments.

Target audience

Engineers, Network Managers and Operators, who are interested in Network Automation and want to gain an understanding of how to utilise various tools to improve network consistancy.

Prerequisites

It is assumed that participants have a basic understanding of:

  • Network operations, Internet technologies, OSI reference model and TCP/IP.
  • Basic command line (CLI) skills (Linux and at least 1 Router Operating System).

We recommend the following Academy courses be completed before the start of the tutorial:

Course outline
  • Introduction to Automation
  • The 3 W’s of Automation
  • Introduction to Salt
  • Introduction to YAML and Jinja
  • Configuration Management using Salt
  • Salt States: Advanced Configuration Management
  • Parsing Output Using TextFSM
  • The Salt Event Bus
  • Napalm Logs
  • The Salt Reactor
  • Salt Rest API
  • Building a Device inventory
  • Extending Salt in your own environment
Other requirements
  • Participants are advised to bring their own laptop computers with high-speed Wi-Fi (802.11a/g/n/ac) and administrative access to system. It is also recommended that laptops have Intel i5 or i7 processor, >=8GB of RAM and 30GB of free hard disk space.
  • Software: SSH Client, Telnet Client, VirtualBox/VMware
  • Please confirm that you have outbound Secure Shell (SSH) from your office or home network. This is required to access the lab infrastructure.
  • To access the RouteViews route collectors, use addresses in the routeviews.org domain, e.g. ssh rviews@route-views.routeviews.org. Users who don’t have telnet can access the RouteViews route collectors using netcat, giving the telnet tcp port 23 as an argument, e.g. nc (or ncat) route-views.routeviews.org 23.
Maximum number of attendees

20 participants per workshop.

Please note

Certificate of participation is provided upon successful completion of the course.