Ratan - Practical Network Automation

BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI

Copyright 2017 Packt Publishing

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First published: November 2017

Production reference: 1141117

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78829-946-6

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Abhishek Ratan has around 15 years of technical experience in networking, automation, and various ITIL processes, and has worked in various roles in different organizations. As a network engineer, security engineer, automation engineer, TAC engineer, tech lead, and content writer, he has gained a wealth of experience during the 15 years of his career. Abhishek also has a deep interest in strategy game playing, and if he is not working on technical stuff, he is busy spending time on his strategy games.

He is currently working as a Sr Automation Engineer at ServiceNow, learning, and expanding his automation skills in the ServiceNow platform. His earlier experience includes working for companies such as Microsoft, Symantec, and Navisite,which has given him exposure to various environments.

Pradeeban Kathiravelu is an open source evangelist. He is a PhD researcher at INESC-ID Lisboa/Instituto Superior Tcnico, Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal, and Universit Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He is a fellow of Erasmus Mundus Joint Degree in distributed computing (EMJD-DC), researching a software-defined approach to quality of service and data quality in multi-tenant clouds.
He holds a masters of science degree, Erasmus Mundus European Master in Distributed Computing (EMDC) from Instituto Superior Tcnico, Portugal, and KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. He also holds a first class bachelor of science of engineering (Hons) degree, majoring in computer science and engineering from the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.
His research interests include software-defined networking (SDN), distributed systems, cloud computing, web services, big data in biomedical informatics, and data mining.
He is very interested in free and open source software development and has been an active participant of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program since 2009, as a student and mentor.
He has authored Python Network Programming Cookbook - Second Edition and has also reviewed two Packt books on OpenDaylight.

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Network automation is the use of IT controls to supervise and carry out everyday network management functions. It plays a key role in network virtualization technologies and network functions.

This book starts by providing an introduction to network automation, SDN, and various applications of network automation, which include integrating DevOps tools to automate the network efficiently. It then guides you through different network automation tasks and covers various data digging and reporting methodologies, such as IPv6 migration, DC relocations, and interface parsing, all the while retaining security and improving data center robustness. The book then moves on to the use of Python and the management of SSH keys for machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, all followed by practical use cases. It also covers the importance of Ansible for network automation, including best practices in automation, ways to test automated networks using different tools, and other important techniques.