So you want to automate all the things in your network? Great! more and more enterprises are realizing the benefits of automating the network and are demanding more from their engineering staff. You’re also probably thinking about your career as well and how these automation skills will really come in handy to progress your career. Like I said, Network Automation skills are in high demand now.
So now what?
If you’re like me, you’ll jump straight into it and quickly realize that automating what can be considered the “life and blood” of an enterprise can be a daunting task. Rest assured though, there are things you can do today to begin your automation journey without needing to jump right into the deep end.
Standardize and Document
It would be remiss if I start off by saying that JC in his book “Automate Your Network” recommends starting your Automation Journey off by documenting and standardizing anything and everything in your network. For me, a big benefit of doing this before I dove into python and scripting was that I was able to bring my environment into a standard that makes building automation a very simple task.
I admit that it took me a bit of time and investment to bring my network into a working standard but once things were aligned it made the code I wrote that much more reusable.
Template all the Things!
If your like me, than you probably have a bunch of standard configuration commands stowed away in an Excel Document. You may not know it but one simple thing you can do as your start the automation journey is to convert those Excel Documents into clean (and reusable) code using the JINJA2 python library.
By templating your commands with JINJA2 you’ll immediately see the sky is the limit when it comes to where those commands can be run from. Whether you push those templates to another Python Library like pyATS / netmiko or simply document them for other team members, you’ll quickly see the benefits of “codifying” those CLI commands at an early stage.
Create Tooling for your Team
As a Senior Engineer, whenever I see a team member create a little tool or even a dashboard I get all jittery and excited. In my opinion, enabling your team is a selfless task that is often forgotten about. This is something I recommend you do (regardless of where you are along your automation journey) as it will get you working with other frameworks and you’ll be one step closer to a more automated and programmatic environment.