Karim Okasha - Network Automation Cookbook: Proven and actionable recipes to automate and manage network devices using Ansible

Copyright 2020 Packt Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews.

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing or its dealers and distributors, will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to have been caused directly or indirectly by this book.

Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information.

Commissioning Editor: Vijin Boricha
Acquisition Editor: Rohit Rajkumar
Content Development Editor: Ronn Kurien
Senior Editor: Richard Brookes-Bland
Technical Editor: Dinesh Pawar
Copy Editor: Safis Editing
Project Coordinator: Neil Dmello
Proofreader: Safis Editing
Indexer: Tejal Daruwale Soni
Production Designer: Nilesh Mohite

First published: April 2020

Production reference: 1170420

Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
Livery Place
35 Livery Street
Birmingham
B3 2PB, UK.

ISBN 978-1-78995-648-1

www.packt.com

Packt.com

Subscribe to our online digital library for full access to over 7,000 books and videos, as well as industry leading tools to help you plan your personal development and advance your career. For more information, please visit our website.

• Spend less time learning and more time coding with practical eBooks and Videos from over 4,000 industry professionals

• Improve your learning with Skill Plans built especially for you

• Get a free eBook or video every month

• Fully searchable for easy access to vital information

• Copy and paste, print, and bookmark content

Did you know that Packt offers eBook versions of every book published, with PDF and ePub files available? You can upgrade to the eBook version at www.packt.com and as a print book customer, you are entitled to a discount on the eBook copy. Get in touch with us at customercare@packtpub.com for more details.

At www.packt.com , you can also read a collection of free technical articles, sign up for a range of free newsletters, and receive exclusive discounts and offers on Packt books and eBooks.

Karim Okasha is a network consultant with over 15 years of experience in the ICT industry. He is specialized in the design and operation of large telecom and service provider networks and has lots of experience in network automation. Karim has a bachelor's degree in telecommunications and holds several expert-level certifications, such as CCIE, JNCIE, and RHCE. He is currently working in Red Hat as a network automation consultant, helping large telecom and service providers to design and implement innovative network automation solutions. Prior to joining Red Hat, he worked for Saudi Telecom Company as well as Cisco and Orange S.A.

Mohamed Radwan is a senior network architect with 20 years of experience in designing solutions for telecommunications, global service providers, data centers, the cloud, governments, and Fortune 500 companies in Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific. He is the author of CCDE: The Practical Guide, he is an award-winning network designer, and he holds bachelor's degree in engineering computers and systems, in addition to many expert-level certificates. He currently lives in Sydney, Australia, working within the Cisco Advanced Services team. Before that, he worked with Orange S.A, Saudi Telecom Company, Qatar Foundation, and Vodafone.

Bassem Aly is a senior SDN/NFV solution consultant at Juniper Networks and has been working in the telecom industry for the last 10 years. He is focused on designing and implementing next-generation networks by leveraging different automation and DevOps frameworks. Also, he has extensive experience in architecting and deploying telecom applications over OpenStack. Bassem also conducts corporate training on network automation and network programmability using Python and Ansible. Finally, he's an active blogger on different technology areas and is the author of Hands-On Enterprise Automation with Python, published by Packt.

If you're interested in becoming an author for Packt, please visit authors.packtpub.com and apply today. We have worked with thousands of developers and tech professionals, just like you, to help them share their insight with the global tech community. You can make a general application, apply for a specific hot topic that we are recruiting an author for, or submit your own idea.

Network Automation Cookbook provides an overview of the various topics of network automation and how to use software development practices in order to design and operate different networking solutions. We use Ansible as our framework to introduce the topic of network automation and how to manage different vendor equipment using Ansible. In the first section, we outline how to install and configure Ansible specifically for the purpose of network automation. We will explore how we can use Ansible to manage traditional network solutions from various vendors such as Cisco, Juniper, Arista, and F5. Next, we continue to explore how to utilize Ansible to build and scale network solutions from major cloud providers such as AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Finally, we outline different supporting open source projects in network automation, such as NetBox, Batfish, and AWX. We outline how to integrate all these tools with Ansible in order to build a complete framework for network automation.

By the end of this book, you will have a solid foundation on how to integrate Ansible with different vendor equipment and how to build a network automation solution based on Ansible. Further, you will understand how to use various open source projects and how to integrate all these solutions with Ansible to build a robust and scalable network automation framework .