John Capobianco has a dynamic and multifaceted career in IT and networking, marked by significant contributions to both the public and private sectors. Beginning his journey in the field as an aluminum factory worker, Capobiancos resilience and dedication propelled him through college, earning a diploma as a Computer Programmer Analyst from St. Lawrence College. This initial phase set the foundation for a career underpinned by continuous learning and achievement, evident from his array of certifications, including multiple Cisco certifications as well as Microsoft certification.

Transitioning from his early educational accomplishments, Capobiancos professional life has spanned over two decades, featuring roles that showcased his technical prowess and strategic vision. His work has significantly impacted both the public and private sectors, including notable positions at the Parliament of Canada, where he served as a Senior IT Planner and Integrator, and at Cisco, where he began as a Developer Advocate. These roles have been instrumental in shaping his perspective on network management and security, leading to his recent advancement into a Technical Leader role in Artificial Intelligence for Cisco Secure, reflecting his commitment to integrating AI technologies for enhancing network security solutions.

In addition to his professional and technical achievements, Capobianco is also an accomplished author. His book Automate Your Network: Introducing the Modern Approach to Enterprise Network Management, published in March 2019, encapsulates his philosophy toward leveraging automation for efficient and effective network management. He is dedicated to lifelong learning and professional development, supported by a solid foundation in education and a broad spectrum of certifications, and now aims to share his knowledge with others through this book, YouTube videos, and blogs. John can be found on X using [...]

Dan Wade is a Network and Infrastructure Automation Practice Lead at BlueAlly. As part of the Solutions Strategy team at BlueAlly, he is responsible for developing network and infrastructure automation solutions and enabling the sales and consulting teams on delivery of the developed solutions. Solutions may include infrastructure provisioning, configuration management, network source of truth, network observability, and, of course, automated testing and validation. Previous to this role, Dan worked as a consulting engineer with a focus on network automation.

Dan has more than seven years of experience in network automation, having worked with automation tooling and frameworks such as Ansible and Terraform, and Python libraries, including Nornir, Netmiko, NAPALM, Scrapli, and Python SDKs. Dan has been working with pyATS and the pyATS library (Genie) for the past four to five years, which has inspired him to embrace automated network testing. In 2021, Dan contributed to the genieparser library with a new IOS XE parser. He also enjoys creating his own open-source projects focused on network automation. Dan holds two professional-level certifications from Cisco: Cisco DevNet Professional and CCNP Enterprise. He is also a member of the Cisco DevNet 500 and Cisco Champions program.

Dan enjoys sharing knowledge and experience on social media with blog posts and YouTube videos as well as participating in podcast episodes. Hes passionate about helping others explore network automation and advocating how network automation can empower, not replace, network engineers. You can find him on social media [...]

Introduction xxx

Chapter 1 Foundations of NetDevOps 1

Traditional Network Operations 2

Software Development Methodologies 11

NetDevOps 14

Comparing Network Automation Tools 21

The Modern Network Engineer Toolkit 22

CI/CD 32

Summary 35

References 36

Chapter 2 Installing and Upgrading pyATS 37

Installing pyATS 37

Upgrading pyATS 42

Troubleshooting pyATS 45

Summary 47

Chapter 3 Testbeds 49

What Is YAML? 49

What Is a Testbed? 51

Device Connection Abstractions 60

Testbed Validation 63

Dynamic Testbeds 66

Intent-based Networking with Extended Testbeds 68

Summary 70

Chapter 4 AEtest Test Infrastructure 73

Getting Started with AEtest 74

Testscript Structure 75

AEtest Object Model 82

Runtime Behavior 85

Test Results 88

Processors 91

Data-Driven Testing 94

Running Testscripts 108

Testscript Flow Control 117

Reporting 126

Debugging 133

Summary 134

Chapter 5 pyATS Parsers 137

Vendor-Agnostic Automation 138

pyATS learn 139

pyATS Parsers 146

Parsing at the CLI 148

Parsing with Python 159

Dictionary Query 160

Differentials 162

Summary 167

Chapter 6 Test-Driven Development 169

Introduction to Test-Driven Development 170

Applying Test-Driven Development to Network Automation 172

Introduction to pyATS 174

The pyATS Framework 175

Summary 187

Endnotes 188

Chapter 7 Automated Network Documentation 189

Introduction to pyATS Jobs 190

Running pyATS Jobs from the CLI 196

pyATS Job CLI Logs 199

pyATS Logs HTML Viewer 203

Jinja2 Templating 205

Business-Ready Documents 206

Summary 232

References 232

Chapter 8 Automated Network Testing 233

An Approach to Network Testing 234

Software Version Testing 235

Interface Testing 243

Neighbor Testing 259

Reachability Testing 262

Intent Validation Testing 267

Feature Testing 271

Summary 276

Chapter 9 pyATS Triggers and Verifications 279

Genie Objects 279

Genie Harness 282

Verifications 286

Triggers 290

Trigger and Verification Example 296

Summary 301

Chapter 10 Automated Configuration Management 303

Intent-Based Network Configuration 303

Generating Configurations with pyATS 304

Configuring Devices with pyATS 309

Summary 320

Chapter 11 Network Snapshots 321

Network Profiling 321

Comparing Network State 324

Polling Expected State 332

Robot Framework with Genie 333

Summary 335

References 335

Chapter 12 Recordings, Playbacks, and Mock Devices 337

Recording pyATS jobs 337

Playback Recordings 341

Mock Devices 342

Mock Device CLI 344

Summary 345

Chapter 13 Working with Application Programming Interfaces (API) 347

pyATS APIs 347

REST Connector 353

YANG Connector 385

gNMI 389

Summary 395

Chapter 14 Parallel Call (pcall) 397

Scaling Performance 397

Parallel Call (pcall) 400

Performance Comparison 406

Summary 409

Chapter 15 pyATS Clean 411

Getting Started 411

Clean YAML 423

Clean Execution 436

Developing Clean Stages 443

Summary 456

Chapter 16 pyATS Blitz 459

Blitz YAML 459

Blitz Usage 481

Blitz Development 481

Custom Blitz Actions 481

Custom Blitz Sections 482

Useful Tips 483

Summary 484

Chapter 17 Chatbots with Webex 485

Integrating pyATS with Webex 486

pyATS Job Integration 487

pyATS Health Check Integration 489

Adaptive Cards 490

Customized Job Notifications 492

Summary 502

Chapter 18 Running pyATS as a Container 503

Introduction to Containers 504

pyATS Official Docker Container 506

pyATS Image Builder 507

Building a pyATS Image from Scratch 510

Summary 513

Chapter 19 pyATS Health Check 515

Health Checks 515

Custom Health Checks 517

Health Check Usage 523

Summary 525

Chapter 20 XPRESSO 527

Installing XPRESSO 529

Getting Started with XPRESSO 536

Transforming a pyATS Job into XPRESSO 538

Summary 556

Chapter 21 CI/CD with pyATS 557

What Is CI/CD? 557

CI/CD In NetDevOps 560

NetDevOps Scenario 562

NetDevOps in Action 565

Whats Next? 572

Summary 573

Chapter 22 Robot Framework 575

What Is the Robot Framework? 575

Getting Started with Robot Framework 576

Robot Integration with pyATS 582

Summary 590

Chapter 23 Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in pyATS 591

OpenAI API 597

Retrieval Augmented Generation with LangChain 612

Rapid Prototyping with Streamlit 621

Summary 631

Appendix A Writing Your Own Parser 633

Appendix B Secret Strings 651

9780138031671, TOC, 6/5/2024