Summary

Configuration generation, deployment, reporting, and compliance remain the most popular network automation operations. This is where the immediate benefits of introducing automation are greatest and most visible, making it the first logical step into the world of automation and DevOps. Configuration management is one of those repetitive tasks network engineers spend most of their time on, so it’s a natural fit for automation. But sending a new configuration to a device is just part of a broader process that should consider failure handling, from syntax errors in the configuration to how to recover properly if the connection to a remote device drops. In this context, you can abstract some repetitive tasks with reusable code that offers generic functionality to reduce the time and effort to automate your use cases. This is what automation frameworks offer, which we will discuss in the next chapter.