Today I'm going to dive into my getting started with network automation, and perhaps my first successful automation. There are definitely some things that I would re-do and complete differently, and some things that I consider a success.
I'm working on a new series within my blog, about how I would look to have done things differently than I had done before, with the tooling and knowledge that I now have, years later. This is the first in the series.
One of my favorite features of Nautobot that may not be well known is the capability to put a button on pages that take you to other locations. This can be helpful when lining up the source of truth as that first place that you go, the idea of adding custom links will just help to enforce that as the first place to go. When you look at the idea of a source of truth to help feed other systems, you start to see the topology like below.
Just recently released at the beginning of 2024 is a project that I am super excited to see in the open source by Network to Code. This is the Nautobot App cookiecutter template. This may already be the biggest thing to become available for Network Automation in 2024. I know, its fresh at this point in the year, but this is something that is going to make getting started with your own Nautobot Application so much quicker.
The year of 2023 I think may have had some of the biggest leaps in the Network Automation capabilities that are being delivered by some of the best in the business. With Nautobot's Golden Config App adding the ability to complete configuration remediation and Ansible release Event Driven Ansible, there are a couple of powerful tools to help you with your Network Automation. And all with a great new conference addition specific to Network Automation.
Recently Slack started introducing a new UI that is bringing back the importance of knowing keyboard shortcuts. Keyboard shortcuts within Slack are immensely helpful in my day to day, and it is essential for me being able to keep up with what is going on within my organization and some of the other 20 Slack organizations that I have joined. So much so, I don't believe that once I am in the Slack UI on my machines, I am ever touching the mouse to get from one place to another. About the only time I may need to use the mouse is to scroll back in the thread, so I'm not even clicking when using the mouse.
In my home environment I am leveraging Nautobot as my source of truth. This is for the network, which is probably not all that interesting in my home environment, and my virtual machines. Why am I tracking my virtual machines in Nautobot? Simple, to help automate them. I think that this is a clever methodology to help use tags and to get automation working within the environment. This same type of thing may be applicable to your network environment as well.
One of my hot topics in my past that I haven't seen written about often is the calculation of WAN availability and what the design is built for. There is often the number of 9's whether that is 5 9s or 3 9s or otherwise, where do you start? Well, in the past the post by EventHelix.com outlines system reliability. It talks about designing systems in parallel and in serial. What does that mean. Well, I am going to take the system availability and bring it into the Wide Area Network, which really could be brought to any environment that has a system uptime requirement as a way to calculate and validate the dollars that you are requesting. I am hoping that this will help you to be able to answer questions such as "What if we added another service provider?" or "What if we changed out hardware for a smaller/larger hardware choice?".
As part of my journey of using my Debian based Dev Workstation, as well as my studies towards completion of the DevNet Expert, I wanted to get up and running with the DevNet Workstation example that would help to become familiar with the environment that would be found at the live exam. There were a few small quirks along the way, so I thought I would go ahead and create a post about how to get started.