A summary of automation tools for Cisco (and non Cisco) devices

A few months ago I prepared a short introduction to automation for a small group of colleagues. Now I would like to summarize in a few posts what I explained to them just to share an overview.

Nowadays automation is one of the coolest words. Vendors are telling us stories about how easy is to automate everything we need.

But how is the real world?

In the real world, we have the following we have so many ways to automatically interact with devices. I would categorize them as follows:

Zero Touch Provisioning (ZTP): in other words the method to bring a brand new device into a configured state without login to it.
Screen Scraping: the set of tools that connect to a terminal line, giving commands and interpreting the output. I included in this category Web Scraping too.
NetConf and RESTConf: the “standard” solutions that will fix everything (maybe).
Native Web API: HTTP/HTTPS services available to configure devices. Sometimes APIs are complete, sometimes not. I’m including in this category any API that can be consumed via HTTP/HTTPS, like REST, SOAP…
Automation tools like Ansible, Salt Stack, Puppet…
Software Development Kit (SDK): libraries for many programming languages (usually Python and Java).
Embedded interpreters (like Python or even Cisco EEM)

It’s very important to understand the pro, cons, and, above all, limits of each possibility before starting. Because what vendors say, sometimes, does not correspond to reality.

Those topics were discussed in the 40 hours training I prepared for network engineers. You can find a brief introduction in the link I provide below.