Event-driven Network Automation and Orchestration
Mircea Ulinic
One of the major challenges in networking is the diversity of data representation, often vendor specific. Vendors APIs are inconsistent and incomplete, some mainstream platforms areclosed and custom software is not allowed on your device.
By combining Salt proxy minions with third-party libraries such as NAPALM, which presents the data in a vendor-agnostic shape, we are able to leverage the DevOps methodologies in networking.
NAPALM support is now integrated in the official Salt releases, beginning with Carbon and improved in Nitrogen. Beyond cross-vendor configuration management, reaction to internal and external network events becomes easy and there are no orchestration boundaries.
In this tutorial, we will learn how we can leverage Salt for event-driven automation, reacting with configuration changes, alerts, or different types of notifications (email, SMS, web hooks, etc.) in response to network state changes. While Salt is flexible enough to be extended for any business logic and ingest the events from any resource, in this session we will focus on exploiting the syslog messages received from the network devices via a third-party, open source daemon, napalm-logs which provides the platform abstractisation for the syslog messages.
Where: Main Room | |
