I've posted a few times in the past about Cisco's NX-API and realized I hadn't provided any guidance on how to get started using the API itself.  In this post, I share two videos that are meant to serve as a quick start to those who don't have a development background and are looking to test NX-API.

The first video looks at the NX-API sandbox and how you map the data represented in the sandbox back into objects that you can use while working in Python.

Facebook recently wrote about the network architecture they are using in their new Altoona data center facility.  If you haven't read through their article yet, it's definitely worth the read.

They have a few diagrams that outline the architecture.  One of them is in 3-D.  3-D diagrams are always more difficult for my brain to conceptualize (maybe it's just me), so I re-drew it in a more typical 2-D fashion.

I gave a presentation at Interop last month and tried to make two major points about network automation.  One, network automation is so much more than just “pushing configs” and two, network automation is still relevant in Software Defined Network environments that have a controller deployed as part of the overall solution.  And I’m referring to controllers from ANY vendor including, but definitely not limited to Cisco’s APIC, NSX Controllers, Nuage Controller/Director, Juniper Contrail, Plexxi Control, OpenDaylight, and Big Switch’s Big Cloud Fabric.  

Over the past few months I’ve written about Ansible and the intersection of DevOps and Networking quite a few times.  As network vendors continue to develop better APIs on network devices (switches, routers, FWs, etc.) there is no doubt going to be an emergence of new tools for the network industry.  One of these emerging tools is Schprokits.  Schprokits (company name and product name), still in stealth, was founded by Jeremy Schulman, who previously worked at Juniper and did the initial work for integrating Junos with Puppet, Chef, and Ansible, and on top of that developed the Juniper PyEZ Python framework.  Schprokits seems to be the outcome of Schulman’s experiences working with existing DevOps automation platforms and building one now purpose built for networking.  Over the past few weeks, I've been fortunate to be able to be part of the first Schprokits user-test group.  

In this article, I’m going to explore not only working with Schprokits, but also working with AutoNetkit.  AutoNetkit, part of the PhD thesis work of Simon Knight, is an application and framework for modeling network devices, both from a configuration and visualization/diagramming standpoint.  Some of you may also realize AutoNetkit is used in the Cisco VIRL and Juniper Junosphere products too.