Summary

In this chapter, we introduced network automation, along with its benefits and the challenges it provides for telecom service providers. We also discussed the key use cases of network automation. After this introduction, we discussed the transport protocols that are available for network automation to interact with network devices. Network automation can be adopted in many ways. We started by looking at how to directly interact with network devices using the SSH protocol in Python. We used the Paramiko, Netmiko, and NAPALM Python libraries to fetch configuration from a device and we elaborated on how to push this configuration to a network device. Next, we discussed how to use NETCONF with Python to interact with a network device. We provided code examples for working with NETCONF and used the ncclient library to fetch an IP interface configuration. We also used the same library to update an IP interface on a network device.

In the last part of this chapter, we explored...