Network to Code Presents at Networking Field Day 27

Network to Code Nautobot App Platform Overview

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Network to Code introduced Nautobot last year in 2021, and it has gained significant traction as a Source of Truth. However, going beyond Source of Truth, Nautobot is a low-code network automation development platform that enables “apps” to be built on top of Nautobot to compliment any network automation journey. This session focuses on Nautobot as an App Platform, why the concept of a platform is important, and finally introduces some existing open source Nautobot Apps.

Personnel: John Anderson

Network to Code Automates Circuit Maintenances

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Managing circuit maintenances and notifications is a well-known problem by network operators. The problem is best seen at the intersection of Source of Truth, circuit management, and network automation. Envision how circuit maintenances are scheduled by Network Service Providers (NSPs), which temporarily affects the actual state of a circuit, and what must be done to ensure network operators and automation tools know the state of a circuit that is ultimately dictated by carriers. This session explains how you can forget about reading notifications and updating your SoT for each circuit maintenance you receive (and there are a lot!) and let Nautobot automatically take care of fetching notifications, normalizing their data (the most common case is that every NSP has its own notification template) and finally updating the SoT, keeping track of past, present and future changes related to circuit maintenances.

Personnel: Tim Fiola

Network to Code NetDevOps-Driven Configuration Compliance

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Network Automation is a journey, and there are still growing trends around NetDevOps learning skills and tools such as JSON, YAML, Jinja2 templating, Python, and Ansible. Many engineers make the potentially risky decision of getting started with automating configuration changes. This session walks through how you can take a gradual path to learning and how you can apply those skills to achieve NetDevOps-Driven Configuration Compliance.

Personnel: Tim Schreyack

Network to Code Demos Using ChatOps to Talk to Your Network

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With network automation, you must consider how not only your network team interacts with the network but also your INTERNAL CUSTOMERS. Who opens every network request you work on? How often are you fielding requests to get data and relay it to another team? Wouldn’t it be great to have a bot respond to requests to bounce a port, check an interface’s VLANs, check a rack elevation diagram, view inventory, view dashboards in tools like Grafana, and a whole lot more? This session showcases network-centric ChatOps demos that combine Microsoft Teams, Webex Teams, Slack, and Mattermost chatting with Arista CloudVision, Cisco ACI, Cisco Meraki, Grafana, Nautobot, IP Fabric, Kentik, Ansible, and more!

Personnel: Tim Schreyack

Network to Code Examines Synchronizing Data to Create a Single Source of Truth

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It is extremely important that a Source of Truth (SoT) be the intended state of the network when the SoT is used to power network automation. However, it is near impossible to store the authoritative data required to manage network configurations in any single application. This is why it is critical to have a framework that synchronizes data from IPAM/DDI platforms, CMDBs, circuit databases, or any other tool that is the authoritative source for that specific dataset into a Single Source of Truth like Nautobot. This allows users to use existing tools while getting the data into a Single Source of Truth that then has a unified view into ALL data and can be used to power network automation.

Personnel: John Anderson